Religion and the Public Sphere: What are the Obligations of Democratic Citizenship?

In this lecture, Cristina Lafont will address the question of how citizens with conflicting religious and secular views can justify the imposition of coercive policies to others with reasons that they can also accept.

After discussing the difficulties of proposals that either exclude religious views from public debate or include them without any restrictions, Lafont will defend a policy of mutual accountability that imposes

the same deliberative rights and obligations on all democratic citizens. Focusing on current debates such as the ban on same-sex marriage or on the Islamic headscarf, she will illustrate how democratic citizens

can adopt their own cognitive stance (whether religious or secular) in political debates without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons that are acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply.

Cristina Lafont, Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg 2012/13 and Wender-Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, received her Ph.D. 1992 from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt.

Lafont specializes in hermeneutic philosophy and critical theory. Her current research focuses on issues in contemporary political philosophy such as deliberative democracy, religion and politics, human rights and global governance.

She is the author of The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy (MIT Press, 1999), Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Global Governance and Human Rights (Spinoza Lecture Series, van Gorcum, 2012).