Religious Freedom as if Religion Matters: A Tribute to Justice Brennan

On April 22, 1998, Professor of Law, Stephen L. Carter of Yale Law School, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s eighteenth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: Religion-Centered Free Exercise: A Tribute to Justice Brennan. Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, where he has taught since 1982. Among his courses are law and religion, the ethics of war, contracts, evidence, and professional responsibility. His most recent book is The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama (2011). Among his other books on law and politics are God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics; Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy; The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty; The Confirmation Mess: Cleaning up the Federal Appointments Process; and The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and PoliticsTrivialize Religious Devotion. Professor Carter writes a column for Bloomberg View and is a regular contributor to Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He blogs about professional football for the Washington Post. Professor Carter also writes fiction. His novel The Emperor of Ocean Park spent eleven weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. His next novel, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, will be published in 2012. His novella “The Hereditary Thurifer” recently appeared in the crime anthology, The Dark End of the Street. Professor Carter was formerly a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, as well as for Judge Spottswood W. Robinson, III, of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School, and has received eight honorary degrees

Afro-American Sociologists and Nepali Ethnography

Occasional Papers in Sociology and Anthropology - Volume 3, 199

Anomalies to All Orders

I give an account of my involvement with the chiral anomaly, and with the nonrenormalization theorem for the chiral anomaly and the all orders calculation of the trace anomaly, as well as related work by others. I then briefly discuss implications of these results for more recent developments in anomalies in supersymmetric theories.Comment: 35 pages, latex; To appear in Fifty Years of Yang-Mills Theory, G. 't Hooft editor, to be published by World Scientific. Final version; references adde

SU(n)SU(n) symmetry breaking by rank three and rank two antisymmetric tensor scalars

We study $SU(n)$ symmetry breaking by rank three and rank two antisymmetric tensor fields. Using tensor analysis, we derive branching rules for the adjoint and antisymmetric tensor representations, and explain why for general $SU(n)$ one finds the same $U(1)$ generator mismatch that we noted earlier in special cases. We then compute the masses of the various scalar fields in the branching expansion, in terms of parameters of the general renormalizable potential for the antisymmetric tensor fields.Comment: Latex, 11 pages; v2 has a minor revision above Eq. (30

Evolutionism, Creationism, and Treating Religion As a Hobby

Contemporary liberalism faces no greater dilemma than deciding how to deal with the resurgence of religious belief. On the one hand, liberals cherish religion, as they cherish all matters of private conscience, and liberal theory holds that the state should do nothing to discourage free religious choice. At the same time, contemporary liberals are coming to view any religious element in public moral discourse as a tool of the radical right for the reshaping of American society, and that reshaping is something liberals want very much to discourage. In truth, liberal politics has always been uncomfortable with religious fervor. If liberals cheered the clerics who marched against segregation and the Vietnam War, it was only because the causes were considered just—not because the clerics were devout. Nowadays, people who bring religion into the making of public policy come more frequently from the right, and the liberal response all too often is to dismiss them as fanatics. Even the religious left is sometimes offended by the mainstream liberal tendency to mock religious belief. Not long ago, the magazine Sojourners—published by politically liberal Christian evangelicals—found itself in the unaccustomed position of defending the evangelist Pat Robertson against secular liberals who, the magazine sighed, see[m] to consider Robertson a dangerous Neanderthal because he happens to believe that God can heal diseases. \u27 The point is that the editors of Sojourners, who are no great admirers of the Reverend Robertson, also believe that God can cure disease. So do tens of millions of Americans. Conservativism, with its deep emphasis on the immutability of certain traditional values, is relatively comfortable with the idea that the values it preserves may have a source beyond the arbitrary moral judgments of fallible humanity. Liberalism, steeped as it is in skepticism, rationalism and tolerance, unfortunately has little idea of how to cope with the millions of people who embrace so absurd a notion. The answer up to now has been to repeat, like a catechism, the language of the Supreme Court in School District of Abington Township v. Schempp: the command of the First Amendment [is] that the Government maintain strict neutrality, neither aiding nor opposing religion