Monday 3 December 2012

Three Theos Reports




Hats off to the ever-prodigious folk at Theos who are releasing three new reports before the year is out. The above two are already available, and the arrival of the third is imminent.

Religion and Law is ‘a collection of essays written by sixteen leading legal experts exploring the complex and often controversial relationship between religion and the law in Britain today’. According to the blurb, ‘it explores the often contested relationship between religious commitment and British law, seeking to challenge the ultimately oppressive reduction of religion to the private realm, and questioning, among other contentious matters, whether human rights and religious commitment are fully compatible’.

Post-Religious Britain? The Faith of the Faithless ‘examines the shape of unbelief in Britain today’. The report ‘llustrates the mistakes of the secularisation thesis, rejecting the common understanding that as we become less institutionally religious, we necessarily become more secular or atheist. It paints a different picture of modern society – one in which the lines between the religious and non-religious are becoming increasingly blurred’.

The third report, From Goodness to God: Why Religion Makes Sense of our Moral Commitments, to be published later this week, ‘argues that religious belief provides a better foundation for moral reasoning than atheism’.

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