Religion & Law

Last week, I was honored with the opportunity to present a lecture sponsored by the St. Anselm Institute for Catholic Thought, at the University of Virginia, on "Positive Secularism:  Understanding the Separation of Church and State."  Notwithstanding the Institute's mis-step with this particular invitation, they are doing great work; check them out, and consider supporting them.  An inspiration for my talk, for what it's worth, was Pope Benedict's recent and increasingly frequent calls for a "healthy secularity."  Check out, for example, this address, given in December: 

. . . In order to understand the authentic meaning of the lay state and to explain how it is understood in our day, it is essential to keep in mind the historical development of this concept.

In the Middle Ages, "secularity", a term coined to describe the condition of the ordinary lay Christian who belonged neither to the clerical nor to the religious state, inferred opposition between the civil powers and the ecclesiastical hierarchies; in modern times, it has come to mean the exclusion of religion and its symbols from public life by confining them to the private sphere and to the individual conscience.

So it is that an ideological understanding has come to be attributed to the term "secularity", which is the opposite of its original meaning. . . .