The Religious Problem with Religious Freedom

In this book, Joustra considers what many people at first had thought to be a refreshing moral cause, confronts the cacophony of criticisms, conflicting meanings, political agendas, and fast moving global changes that have surrounded it, discovers an approach to managing this debate (principled pluralism), and, all the while, retains his conviction that religious freedom is a worthwhile end of foreign policy, one that, in the end, defends highly vulnerable people. The result is an exceedingly rare combination of brainy sophistication and unyielding moral conviction. - Daniel Philpott, Professor, University of Notre Dame, USA. Religious and secular actors compete in the political arena while at the same time religion and secularism are contested terms. In his book The Religious Problem with Religious Freedom, Robert Joustra examines how rival conceptions of the religious and secular compete to influence the foreign policies of the US and Canada in general and specifically with regard to their policies of promoting religious freedom. He then proposes the concept of principled pluralism as an alternative strategy for these foreign policies. This book makes sense of a complex set of debates on an issue of increasing importance worldwide, and provides significant insight into how religious freedom is perceived from a multitude of secular and religious perspectives. - Jonathan Fox, Professor of Religion and Politics, Bar Ilan University, Israel.