The Social Equality of Religion or Belief

This edited collection originated from a set of conference presentations on the theme of “equality of religion or belief” (p. xiii). It is therefore a very diverse collection of papers, covering the status of a variety of religious minorities in the United Kingdom as well as issues from several other countries. The editor’s chapter is quite lengthy but the contributed chapters are quite short, each being about fifteen pages. Several of these chapters are shortened versions of papers published elsewhere. Editor Alan Carling establishes a framework for achieving social equality of religion or belief (“serob”), which he believes will go a long way to resolving issues involving religious discrimination. The basic principles are non-discrimination, equal advantage (or state neutrality), and strand equality (equal advantage as that enjoyed by other indicia of social identity such as gender, age, and sexual identity). In his introductory chapter, he shows how this framework can be used in a variety of countries and situations and indicates how the subsequent chapters fit into this framework.

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Identity (music) · Neutrality · Political science · Set (abstract data type) · Sexual orientation · Sociology · State (computer science) · Theme (computing) · Variety (cybernetics) · Computer Science · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious Education and Schools