None of these widely varying fields alone has provided decision makers or the public with the full perspective that they need to make coherent policy choices. The hope of the conference organizers was to begin correcting that deficiency by bringing together experts in the various disciplines affected by the prospect of global governance. On the first day of the conference, speakers discussed why we should take global governance seriously, the boundaries of international law, and whether EU policy is eroding sovereignty for nonmember states. On the second day, the topics were trade agreements, international human rights law, UN military action and American war powers, and advances toward world government. In addition, the newly formed Chicago Journal of International Law will publish them in November as its second issue.
Edited excerpts follow.
The United States sustains remarkably high levels of traditional religious belief and affiliation, even as it careens merrily down the whitewater rapids of modernity. This was not supposed to happen. Sociologists from Max Weber to Peter Berger were convinced that secularization was one facet of the monolith called modernization and trusted that secularization would come along with urbanization, rationalization, professionalization, functional differentiation, bureaucratization, and so on. If by secularism we mean a perspective that dismisses the possibility of a transcendent realm of being, or treats that possibility as an irrelevancy, then we should have expected religious beliefs and practices to wither away by now. Needless to say, that expectation has not been realized.