Daniel Mark, chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, will speak on “The End of Religious Freedom? Challenges from the Right, the Left, and Around the Globe” at 4 p.m. Thursday (Feb. 1) at Nanovic Hall (Room 1050) at the University of Notre Dame. The event is free and open to the public.
Mark’s lecture will be hosted by Notre Dame’s Tocqueville Program in Religion and Public Life in partnership with the 2017-18 Notre Dame Forum: Going Global, which explores the challenges and opportunities of globalization.
Mark was elected chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2016. He has been a member of the commission since his appointment in 2014 by then-Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH).
A Visiting Fellow at Notre Dame’s Tocqueville Program for the 2017-18 academic year, Mark’s regular appointment is as an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, where he has taught since 2013. He teaches political theory, philosophy of law, American political thought, and politics and religion.
At Notre Dame, Mark is completing a manuscript on the nature of legal obligation. The project addresses the age-old question: Is there is a moral obligation to obey the law because it is the law or does the obligation to obey the law depends upon the reasons behind the law? Mark argues that we recover and combine older ways of thinking about the nature of law and legal obligation to create a coherent theory of law.
His residence at Notre Dame is sponsored by the Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and Public Life as well as the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study; the Program on Church, State, and Society; and the Center for Ethics and Culture. Through public lectures, debates, conferences and fellowships, the Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and Public Life at the University of Notre Dame seeks to nurture informed conversation, learning and scholarship about the fundamental principles of a decent and just political regime with a particular focus on religious liberty.
Since its establishment in 2005, the Notre Dame Forum has featured major talks by leading authorities on complex issues, including immigration, sustainability, global health, the global marketplace, K-12 education and the role of faith in a pluralistic society.
Contact: Phillip Muñoz, director of the Tocqueville Program at the University of Notre Dame, 574-631-0489, vmunoz@nd.edu