Spiritual assistance to people in an institute, was of old a task of churches and religious or philosophical communities. In the intramural health care more and more health care chaplains are working, the position of which is based only on an appointment of the management and not at the same time on a mission of a church or comparable community. This is experienced as a problem, because there is no supervision on the qualities of these health care chaplains. Therefore a committee recently proposed to establish a Council for Independent Spirituality, who tests the qualification and the competence of unattached health care chaplains and take care of their work.

The battle over the school system is one of the liveliest chapters in Dutch constitutional history. It resulted, in 1848, in the constitutional acknowledgement of a dual system of education: education provided by public authority (‘public education’) and private education (practically synonymous with confessional education); and, in 1917, in the constitutional guarantee of public funding for the latter on the same footing as the former.
The battle over the school system is usually described as a battle for freedom of private, confessional education from the start. This article shows that prior to this, in the first stage of this battle, the concept of ‘private education’ itself had to be invented and that the concept of ‘public education’ had to develop a different meaning. Public education, the notion used in the Constitutions of 1814 and 1815, originally meant education in schools in contrast to house education. It was this broad concept of education that was entrusted to the care of government and, therefore, not free. This article focuses on the first half of the 19th century. On the basis of original sources it traces the fascinating process of the birth of these new categories, that determine the Dutch education system up to now.

To what extent does liberal democracy still manage to realize the principle of expressive liberty? This article argues that, just as by the ethically monistic character of certain theoretizations of Confucian democracy, expressive liberty is threatened by a Western ‘civic totalism’ that insists that ‘politics enjoys general authority over subordinate activities and institutions because it aims at the highest and most comprehensive good for human beings’ (Galston). The ideal of liberal democracy will remain fundamentally flawed, as long as the sovereignty of the people on which its political legitimacy is more and more exclusively based hinders instead of advances a true sort of value pluralism.

In this article, the Roman perspective on the relations between the Roman imperial cult and monotheistic movements in the same period will be investigated. In modern scholarship, this Roman point of view has been underrepresented. This article will aim to create a better understanding of the religious conflicts that arose between ca. 44 B.C.E. and 313 C.E and serve as an example for attempting to understand the ‘alien’ side in religious conflict. This article will conclude that Roman religion has to be seen in the context of imperial politics to explain not only the conflicts between the Roman state, Jews and Christians, but also the rise of the imperial cult.

Dutch profit tax does not formally exclude religious organisations. Therefore, these organisations may have to pay tax over their income. The way this tax is determined is dictated by the law on corporate taxation: Wet op de vennootschapsbelasting 1969. In practice however, religious organisations are seldom taxed. In this article I investigate whether there is a formal reason to exclude this type of organisations from taxation, leading to the conclusion that there is no such reason.

The article discusses the implications of the Refah Partisi vs. Turkey case. The Court has made onerous assumptions about the notion sharia by declaring it a ‘violation of [European Human Rights] Convention values’. The Court should not have ventured into an interpretation of a highly technical and controversial term like ‘sharia’, especially when done so in connection with the inciting use of that term by Refat Partisi members. Moreover, given the fact that sharia also encompasses religious rituals like prayer, fasting and burial, calling sharia a violation of human rights is a misnomer. The Court should not have allowed itself to get lured into a domain it is not knowledgeable about but should have stuck to strict legal reasoning.