ETHICS, PUBLIC POLICY, AND FAITH-BASED INITIATIVES

A UNF Symposium

On April 4, 2002 the UNF Center for Ethics, Public Policy, and the Professions will sponsor a public symposium on the topic of faith-based initiatives. The symposium will take place 7-9:30 p.m. in the small auditorium of UNF's new Fine Arts Building. The symposium is occasioned by President Bush's recent proposals to expand government support for religiously based social services. In keeping with the Center's focus, the symposium will be concerned with the normative dimension of faith-based initiatives, inquiring as to whether such proposals are or are not desirable as matters of public policy. It also seeks to address broader questions concerning the relationship of religion and politics in American society today.

Featured speaker is Dr. Mary S. Segers, Professor, Department Chair, and Graduate Program Director, Department of Political Science, Rutgers University-Newark. Information on her background and accomplishments is provided below. To facilitate audience participation, brief commentaries will be provided by members of the UNF Faculty: Dr. Michael Hallet, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, and Dr, Henry Thomas, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science and Public Administration. The event will be moderated by Dr. Andrew Buchwalter, Director of the Center and Associate Professor of Philosophy.

Among the questions to be asked in the symposium:

Should government support for faith-based social services take the form of direct public financing or should it rather take the form of efforts the stimulate private support of charities?

Should religious charities that receive government financing be allowed to make hiring decisions along religious lines and thus be exempted from anti-discrimination laws?

Should tax dollars be used for social service programs where religion is a fundamental element? Does the denial of support to religiously based social service groups (while similar secular groups receive funding) constitute a discrimination against religion?

Can a legitimate secular end be achieved through transparently religious means? If not, is it possible to separate out the exclusively secular activities of religious organizations? Does formal interaction between government and religious organizations in the social service area necessarily involve a violation of Constitutional strictures on the state establishment of religion?

Are such efforts a cynical abdication of the government responsibility for social services or might they not provide a healthy alternative to a pervasively state-centered view of social services? Might they be an antidote to the much decried general decline of civic involvement in our country?

Might not such initiatives provide a means to accommodate legitimate forms of publicly manifested religious conviction? Is governmental support for faith-based social services harmful to religion or may it not be a means for religious bodies to exhibit a social calling and to demonstrate the degree to which social commitment is integral to religion itself?

What might these initiatives as well as related developments--school voucher programs that seek to employ public funds to subsidize tuition at religious schools--indicate about the current state of American public culture?

Dr. Mary Segers earned her B.A. in History at the College of Mount St. Vincent and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University. She teaches courses in Political Theory, Ethics in Public Policy and Administration, Religion and Politics, Ethics and Global Politics, and Women and Politics. She is a faculty member of the Liberal Studies Graduate Program and a faculty associate of the Center for Global Change and Governance. She is a member of the Women's Studies Council at Rutgers-Newark and served as Director of the Women's Studies Program from 1982-1985.

Professor Segers has written widely about religious and ethical values underlying public policy. Her books include A WALL OF SEPARATION? DEBATING THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE (1998); ABORTION POLITICS IN AMERICAN STATES (1995, co-edited with Timothy Byrnes); THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND ABORTION POLITICS: A VIEW FROM THE STATES (1992, co-edited with Timothy Byrnes); CHURCH POLITY AND AMERICAN POLITICS: ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY CATHOLICISM (1990); AND ELUSIVE EQUALITY: LIBERALISM, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN AMERICA (1983).

In 1999 Professor Segers served as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Warsaw. In 1998 she received the Charles Pine Award for Excellence in Teaching at Rutgers-Newark. She held a Henry Luce Fellowship in Theology at Harvard Divinity School form 1987 to 1989. In addition, she served as Visiting Lecturer in the Women's Studies Program at Harvard Divinity School in the l985-86 academic year.