Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s unspoken argument is essentially this: Religious freedom is bad.1 It is not bad in the way a practice is bad if it runs against a moral norm. It is bad because religious freedom names a way of talking about the world that helps some and hurts...
Prof. Hurd’s provocative book asks us to cast our eyes toward the international scene, but as she would likely agree, her analysis of religion as a technique of governance applies just as much to our lives in the United States. The discourse of religious freedom and...
In her new book, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd invites us to imagine a world “beyond religious freedom.” The book, Hurd explains, “is intended, in part, as a thought experiment that provides a glimpse of what the world would look like after religion is dethroned as a stable,...
Elizabeth Hurd opens her Beyond Religious Freedom with the conflict of interpretations that followed the torching of an old library owned by a Lebanese Greek Orthodox priest. She perspicaciously observes that while American religious advocates of freedom condemned the...
