The New York Times reported last week, in response to the Episcopal convention in Anaheim earlier this month, and in light of “profound rifts over sexual issues within Anglicanism,” that Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, has released a statement addressing the issues of gay clergy and same-sex unions.

The Archbishop here signals support for the human dignity and civil liberties of LGBT people. While suggesting that the Anglican Communion recognize “two styles of being Anglican,” however, he also argues that “a certain choice of lifestyle has certain consequences.” The Church, he writes, will only change its stance on the blessing of same-sex unions after they have been justified by “painstaking biblical exegesis” and subsequently widely accepted within the Communion. Until that point, a member of a homosexual couple will continue to be treated just as “a heterosexual person living in a sexual relationship outside the marriage bond.”

In light of both the ongoing conflict within the Anglican Communion and the Archbishop’s latest missive, The Immanent Frame has posed the following question to a handful of leading thinkers and asked for a brief response: why has homosexuality persisted as a divisive issue for religious traditions and communities, within the Anglican Communion and beyond? And what are the likely effects of the Archbishop’s recent intervention?

Visit The Immanent Frame for responses from Mary Anne Case, Eric Fassin, Siobhán Garrigan, Jimmy Casas Klausen, Mary-Jane Rubenstein and Emilie M. Townes.

Today at The Immanent Frame, Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini argue that one of the few beliefs shared by opponents and supporters of gay rights is the notion that religious and sexual freedoms are opposed, and that this has significant policy implications. An excerpt from their piece is below:

In our 2003 book, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Freedom, we offer an extensive argument that religious freedom and sexual freedom are actually interdependent rather than oppositional. Unfortunately, the impact of “religious exemptions” like those included in the New Hampshire law is to codify a narrow version of religious freedom in which religious liberty and sexual freedom can only be seen as mutually exclusive. This is not just a loss for sexual freedom; it also significantly narrows the parameters of religious freedom offered by the US Constitution.

If there is a “religion problem” posed by gay marriage, it is not that some religious organizations might be “forced” to provide secular benefits to same-sex couples, such as healthcare or equal access to residential housing; it is rather the entanglement of the state with the business of any couple’s religious marriage. The problem here is that the state legitimates religious marriages, performed by members of the clergy, rather than only civil unions performed by representatives of the state, thus entangling, rather than separating, state and religious practice. When such entanglements are maintained in law, religious practice is not “protected” from the state any more than citizens are “protected” from the imposition of religious convictions they do not share. New Hampshire and other states could actually “protect” both religious practice and those who are not religious (or who are differently religious) by providing civil unions on the basis of equality and letting religious bodies provide for religious marriages. No secular benefits would then flow from religious marriage, and the secular benefits that follow on civil unions would be separated from religious debates over homosexuality.

Read the full piece at The Immanent Frame.

At The Immanent Frame, Nikhil Pal Singh reflects on racism and violence, their past and their presence, noting that “the 2008 election season at times appeared to turn on exorcising the ghosts and demons of a still unfinished civil war.” An excerpt from the piece is below:

Exorcism and reparation: but at what price? As unmistakable as these subtexts are, in my view, Obama’s winning strategy was to accentuate the value of his campaign’s egalitarian racial appeal through disciplined and calculated non-reference. Invisible protective glass in this sense may be a suitable metaphor for the reigning orthodoxy of color-blindness cum post-racialism, whose architecture in politics and law becomes more durable and less assailable with every U.S. Supreme Court decision: a state sanctioned enclosure increasingly hard to perceive or identify between those who are protected from racially differentiated vulnerability and those who continue to bear its marks and suffer its consequences.

“Aesthetic education… is a necessary part of civic development,” writes Doris Sommer today at The Immanent Frame. Drawing on lessons from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s WPA program to Bogotá, Colombia, she makes a case for how culture ought to be conceived as a powerful vehicle for social change and for how humanists can play a leading role as “cultural agents”:

Without art, Victor Shklovsky writes in “Art as Technique,” “life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war….And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life.”

In this spirit of freedom from anaesthetizing habit we can, and urgently should, take up the torn threads that tie humanism up with civic education. We humanists can join artists as cultural agents who promote creativity and interpretation as resources for social development. The objective is not a partisan victory but the formation of “thick” civic subjects who are alive to the world and exercise the free judgment that we learn, as Kant taught us, through developing a disinterested enjoyment of beauty. Democracy depends on sturdy and resourceful citizens able to engage more than one point of view and to wrest rights and resources from limited assets. In other words, non-authoritarian government counts on creativity to loosen conventional thought and free up the space where conflicts are negotiated, before they reach a brink of either despair or aggression.

Read the full piece at The Immanent Frame.

At The Immanent Frame, Romand Coles asks of President Obama’s rhetoric, “What are the implications of framing the virtues for progress as a ‘quiet force’? What is gained and lost by imagining progress singularly as upward movement?” In the following excerpt from Coles’ essay, he proposes a change in our understanding of progress:

I am delighted to introduce The Immanent Frame and its diverse lineup of contributors to the readers of the Tikkun Daily Blog. As a collective blog publishing interdisciplinary perspectives on secularism, religion, and the public sphere, we serve as a forum for ongoing exchanges among leading scholars across the social sciences and humanities, and feature original essays about controversial issues, major new books, and world events. As managing editor of The Immanent Frame, I will be posting regularly in this space, and on behalf of our entire editorial team and our many contributors, I sincerely hope you will follow and participate in our conversations, both here and at The Immanent Frame.

Most recently, contributors to The Immanent Frame have been engaged in an extended discussion about President Barack Obama, civic virtues, and the common good, called “These things are old.” Drawing on Obama’s complex and powerful political rhetoric – including the Inaugural Address from which this series title was drawn – our contributors have sought to trace his values back to the historical and philosophical traditions from which they are drawn.