Isaac Weiner, assistant professor, comparative studies, presents, "What is Essentially Religious? A Critical Reappraisal of the 1963 Abington v. Schempp School Prayer Decision."
Abstract for the talk: The U.S. Supreme Court’s opinions in Abington v. Schempp (1963) are widely regarded as having authorized and legitimated the academic study of religion in American public universities. Fifty years later, these opinions warrant careful reconsideration for the kinds of assumptions they propagate about the category of religion itself. Perhaps most significantly, the Court’s opinions took for granted an essential distinction between the religious and the secular, a distinction that a generation of religious studies scholarship has since called into question. At the same time, the Court’s approach also has shifted in recent years, as it has increasingly come to treat religion as fundamentally similar to secular “viewpoints” rather than as essentially distinct from them. This paper considers what these complementary developments, each of which has unsettled the Schempp decision’s underlying rationale, might mean for the academic study of religion. At the very least, I argue that these shifts invite us to reframe the conversation, or to ask a different set of questions, focusing our attention on the proper ends of a religious studies curriculum, rather than on its constitutionality.
