Since 9/11 and the onset of the "war on terror," the principal challenge confronting liberal democracies has been to balance freedom with security and individual with collective rights. This book sheds new light on the evolution of human rights norms in liberal democracies by charting the activism of four Canadian NGOs on issues of refugee rights, hate speech, and the death penalty, including their use of difficult, often controversial legal cases as platforms to assert human rights principles and shape judicial policy-making. The struggles of these NGOs reveal not only the fragility but also the resilience of ideas about rights in liberal democracies.

Religion has become a charged token in a politics of division. In disputes about faith-based social services, public money for religious schools, the Pledge of Allegiance, Ten Commandments monuments, the theory of evolution, and many other topics, angry contestation threatens to displace America's historic commitment to religious freedom. Part of the problem, the authors argue, is that constitutional analysis of religious freedom has been hobbled by the idea of "a wall of separation" between church and state. That metaphor has been understood to demand that religion be treated far better than other concerns in some contexts, and far worse in others. Sometimes it seems to insist on both contrary forms of treatment simultaneously. Missing has been concern for the fair and equal treatment of religion. In response, the authors offer an understanding of religious freedom called Equal Liberty.

Equal Liberty is guided by two principles. First, no one within the reach of the Constitution ought to be devalued on account of the spiritual foundation of their commitments. Second, all persons should enjoy broad rights of free speech, personal autonomy, associative freedom, and private property. Together, these principles are generous and fair to a wide range of religious beliefs and practices.

With Equal Liberty as their guide, the authors offer practical, moderate, and appealing terms for the settlement of many hot-button issues that have plunged religious freedom into controversy. Their book calls Americans back to the project of finding fair terms of cooperation for a religiously diverse people, and it offers a valuable set of tools for working toward that end.

Is it really true that martial arts, in spite of their popularity in this day and age of ours, have, at their deepest level, the promised land of "self-knowledge," "the expression of beauty," or something highly spiritual to be pursued for the human soul? Or, to put it in a different way, what exactly makes martial arts so amazing that, somehow, they will eventually lead the practitioners to the spiritual realm of self-cultivation in its highest depth? Contrary to the conventional wisdom about martial arts as held by many over the ages, this popular view about martial arts has become so legendary that their dark sides have yet to be systematically explored and that the lofty aims of martial arts are neither possible nor desirable to the extent that their proponents would like us to believe.Of course, this is not to say that the very tradition of martial arts is absolutely useless, or that the literature on martial arts hitherto existing in history is spiritually unworthy to be appreciated. Instead, this book constructively offers an alternative (better) way to understand the nature of martial arts, in special relation to the body and spirit of warriors-while learning from different views in the literature, without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, as they are not necessarily compatible with each other), and, in the end, transcending them towards a new horizon not conceived before. This seminal view, if proven valid, will fundamentally change the legendary way that people have thought about martial arts-from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its "post-human" fate._____________________