Religion and schools redux

In yesterday's NY Times magazine, Noah Feldman has a thoughtful piece about the perennial debate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/magazine/26wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

Feldman makes the crucial observation that the difference between the religious and secular is often not as simple or obvious as one might expect or like--or as Supreme Court decisions might suggest. His treatment of the establishment clause issues is generally balanced, though he is perhaps too immediately skeptical of the stated intentions of a pair of new, publicly funded, officially nonsectarian schools--named for Ben Gamla and Khalil Gibran--to focus their attention on the Hebrew and Arabic languages, respectively, and not on Judaism and Islam. He gets in a little over his head--or, at least, into a little too much depth for the piece's parameters--when he digresses into discussions of the interplay between faith and culture in each tradition.

Still, a good read.