The Rights of Religious Associations to External Relations: A Comparative Study of the OSCE and the Council of Europe

This paper argues that religious associations have a number of substantive rights when it comes to their external relations. It does so though comparing the position of the OSCE and the Council of Europe. This paper considers whether the emerging framework includes: (1) a right to legal entity status, (2) a right to establish and run charitable or educational institutions, (3) a right to privileges and substantive benefits and (4) a right to anything else. It concludes that the current developments are welcome because religious freedom has a collective aspect that is essential to the lives of many believers.

Journal article: Indoctrination, Secularism, Religious Liberty and the ECHR

This article examines the recent developments in religious freedom before the European Court of Human Rights Two major trends can be distinguished. On the one hand, the Court considers cases that are focused on individuals and it emphasises values such as the prevention of indoctrination, neutrality, secularism and laïcité. On the other hand, the Court deals with cases involving the compatibility of entire domestic regimes regulating religious affairs with the Convention. It will be shown that these two trends in the caselaw do not always sit happily together and have serious repercussions for religious liberty.

Religious Geographies in Ireland: Pre-Famine, Post-Famine, Pre-Partition

This paper examines changes in religious geographies for Ireland from 1834 to 1911. It shows that in a period of dramatic social and economic change religious geographies remained remarkably stable. In this it challenges the accepted historiography. It makes use of new data in new ways with the full exploitation of the 1834 Enumeration of Religion and, in so doing, is able to examine the impact of the Great Irish Famine on geographies of religion. These data are visualised both using traditional choropleth maps and, more innovatively in this subject area, cartograms.

Translational Contestation of Religious Concepts: A Case of Conversion Narratives

Drawing on a case study incorporating two opposing conversion narratives and their translations, thispaper explores the relationship between language, religion and translation. By examining linguistic,paralinguistic and paratextual framing techniques used by authors, translators and publishers, itdemonstrates that translation can be a powerful means of contesting fundamental concepts – such as “conversion”, “church” or “faith” – in the processes of safeguarding one’s own or challenging another’s religious identity, especially in the context of asymmetrical power relations.

Measuring workforce segregation: religious composition of private-sector employees at individual sites in Northern Ireland

In this paper I examine the scope of publicly available information on the religious composition of employees in private-sector companies in Northern Ireland. I highlight the unavailability of certain types of monitoring data and the impact of data aggregation at company as opposed to site level. Both oversights lead to underestimates of the extent of workplace segregation in Northern Ireland. The ability to provide more-coherent data on workplace segregation, by religion, in Northern Ireland is crucial in terms of advancing equality and other social-justice agendas. I argue that a more-accurate monitoring of religious composition of workplaces is part of an overall need to develop a spatial approach in which the importance of ethnically territorialised spaces in the reproduction of ethnosectarian disputation is understood.