Reconsidering Religion, Law, and Democracy ─ New Challenges for Society and Research

How are Western, mostly secular, societies handling religion in its increasingly pluralistic and complex forms? What different forms of interactions between and negotiations of religion and religious beliefs can we see in contemporary society? What are the primary contenders in these interactions and negotiations? The authors of Religion, Law and Democracy give ample examples of a variety of interaction processes between different expressions of religion and different spheres of society, such as the media, the judicial systems and state administration and policy. The authors primarily approach these questions from a North European but also to some extent a global perspective. A common denominator is a dynamic perspective on the relation between religious organizations, society and the individual actors – in other words how all of these levels are interconnected and transformed in these processes.

Anna-Sara Lind is Associate professor in Public law, University of Uppsala. Her research focuses on fundamental rights in a national as well as in a European constitutional context and how these fundamental rights are communicated between these levels, for example the constitutional dimension of how the national legal order is being tested and challenged by international law and/or EU law and how law-making is fragmentized between several constitutional actors. In her ongoing projects, these questions are analysed in the fields of data protection, welfare law and bio banking. Lind is the Deputy Director of the programme Impact of Religion – Challenges for Society, Law and Democracy.Mia Lovheim is Professor of History of Religions and The Social Sciences of Religion at Department of Theology, University of Uppsala. Her research mirrors how sociology of religion during the latest decades have developed from focusing primarily Christian denominations and secularization to new and multiple forms of relations between various religions and areas of society, such as welfare, media, school and politics. Lovheim specializes in media and religion in the form of discussions of religion in digital media and representation of religion in daily press; youth, religion and values, and religion and politics. Issues of religious identity and gender are of central concern.Ulf Zackariasson is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is the author ofForces by Which We Live: Religion and Religious Experience from the Perspective of a Pragmatic Philosophical Anthropologyas well as a number of journal articles and book chapters on pragmatic philosophy of religion. He is currently president of the European Society for Philosophy of Religion.