A response to Michael Moxter's account of the need for 'religious feeling' for social order, suggesting that togetherness is currently promoted in overtly non-religious ways, and that true piety may often be at odds with social - and especially with state - order.

This book explores different theories of law, religion, and tradition, from both a secular and a religious perspective. It reflects on how tradition and change can affect religious and secular legal reasoning, identifying the patterns of legal evolution within religious and secular traditions. It is often taken for granted that, even in law, change corresponds and correlates to progress – that things ought to be changed and they will necessarily get better. There is no doubt that legal changes over (...) the centuries have made it possible to enhance the protection of individual rights and to somewhat contain the possibility of tyranny and despotism. But progress is not everything in law: stability and certainty lie at the core of the rule of law. Similarly, religions and religious laws could not survive without traditions; and yet, they still evolve, and their evolution is often intermingled with secular law. The book asks the questions: What is the role of tradition within religions and religious laws? What is the impact of religious traditions on secular laws, and vice-versa? How are the elements of tradition to be identified? Are they the same within the secular and the religious realm? Do secular law and religious law follow comparable patterns of change? Do their levels of resilience differ significantly? How does the history of religion and law affect changes within religious traditions and legal systems? The overall focus of the book addresses the extent to which tradition plays a role in shaping and re-shaping secular and religious laws, as well as their mutual boundaries. (shrink)

In this article, the authors explore how technology has helped erode society’s conceptions of justice. Law, via juridification, has replaced the concept of justice with one of efficiency. The authors argue that this has been largely a result of the destruction of society’s common story or vision and the introduction of the computer and the Internet as tools enabling technique to replace that story. They offer a perspective on how justice operated in traditional societies, using the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Finally, (...) the authors ask what might be done to recover the best features of what has been lost and create a new common story to help guide society’s conception of justice. (shrink)

This article focuses on a religious structure that is intrinsic to the contemporary mechanisms that have enabled the global domination of economic power: faith in the market. Following Foucault’s transition from biopolitics to governmentality, this article articulates the mechanism that generates the ability for human beings to give shape and value to their lives. Through a reading of Schmitt and Hayek, as well as an updated reading of Weber’s thesis on the origin of capitalism, this article argues that we must (...) turn our attention to the Christian motifs that shape our contemporary understanding of the ‘economy’. (shrink)

Exploring the pre-political en pre-legal spiritual infrastructure from which modern, liberal democracies in the West live, but cannot guarantee, this book ...

The author discusses the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation as a human rights movement. The Reformation not only laid the groundwork for religious human rights but also created the platform for the more expansive conceptions of individual liberty that shaped the political development of the West. The continuing importance of the churches in the human rights movement is affirmed.

The Euthyphro problem and the natural law : an investigation of some aspects of the medieval debate on natural law -- Aristotle : natural law and man in the "metaxy" -- St. Thomas Aquinas : the "lex naturalis" -- Thomas Hobbes : The state of nature and natural rights -- John Locke : natural law, natural rights and God -- Concluding remarks and a heavenly dialogue.

Religion, law, and politics: historical contexts -- Religion and the limits of philosophy -- The prince and the church: the critique of Lutheran papalism -- Ecclesiastical history and the rise of clerical tyranny -- The history of Roman law -- Natural law (I): the institutes of divine jurisprudence -- Natural law (II): the transformation of Christian Thomasiuss natural jurisprudence -- The interpretation of nature -- Conclusion: reason and faith in the early German Enlightenment.

Equity and efficiency -- A society within a society -- Thomas Aquinas : the interplay of natural and positive law -- William of Ockham : repudiation of power and wealth -- Martin Luther's redistributive theology of the Lord's supper -- John Calvin and the challenge of inequality -- Triumph of the economy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Culture of Engagement: Law, Religion, and Morality by Cathleen KavenyAllen CalhounA Culture of Engagement: Law, Religion, and Morality Cathleen Kaveny WASHINGTON, DC: GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. 320 pp. $98.95 / $32.95It is encouraging to read a book on the intersection of religion and law from an author as conversant with both fields as is Cathleen Kaveny. Reworking a number of columns that she wrote (...) for Commonweal magazine, Kaveny offers her concept of a "culture of engagement" as an alternative to America's polarizing culture wars. She builds a vision of engagement—typified by Pope Francis's emphasis on the church's need to "encounter" all human beings—that welcomes the influence that religious traditions and the broader culture and its laws can have on each other.Kaveny notes two ways in which the Roman Catholic tradition is particularly well situated to engage American culture and law. First, both American common law and the Catholic moral tradition use forms of "casuistry" to connect general rules with particular situations. Second, Catholic reluctance "to draw sharp lines between the pure and the tainted" can supply a salutary alternative to the Puritan tendency toward "prophetic indictment" (16).In part 1, Kaveny argues that law has both pedagogical and pragmatic qualities. In part 2, she describes the nation's struggle to balance governmental interests and religious liberty in the context of the contraception mandate in the 2010 Affordable Care Act. She faults the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for elevating the law's pedagogical role over its pragmatic function in their attack on the mandate. She herself leans toward pragmatism; she assumes that exceptions to laws of general applicability should apply only "in the most extreme cases" (116) and that the government—not the religious claimant—should determine when exceptions apply.Kaveny also suggests that the bishops would do well to pay greater attention to the common good, as "it reflects the moral consensus of the community, which is accurately reflected in our democratic process of lawmaking" (90). Development of the grounds for this optimistic linking of a moral consensus and majority rule to the common good would have been an interesting addition to the book.Part 3 is the heart of the work, exploring ways for American society to "move beyond a culture war mentality" (120). Kaveny resists the assumption that public discourse in a society torn by culture wars is served by pitting secular and religious voices against each other. She hopes instead for persuasion based on natural law. One is left wondering, however, how persuasion based on natural law could happen in America's ideologically diverse culture. [End Page 201]Part 4 explores the effect of America's ideological pluralism on discussions among American Catholics. Kaveny describes how the church's sexual abuse scandal has fed the growing sense of disconnection between church teaching and the expectations of the Catholic laity.Part 5, a series of essays on difficult ethical controversies, hints at what interaction between the American and Catholic traditions might look like. Kaveny advocates "reframing the question" and hints at what reframing the contraception question might look like (221).Some of the book addresses specifically Catholic questions. It is valuable in that respect. Its scope extends beyond any one religious tradition, however, as it offers a picture of engagement between equals: the American legal tradition and Catholic moral teaching. Nevertheless, Kaveny makes it clear that this sort of engagement can succeed only if the American legal community understands its need to reflect changing social values and the Catholic hierarchy moves away from insisting that "error has no rights" and toward acknowledging that people do have rights even when they are in error (257).Allen CalhounPhD candidate, University of AberdeenCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

God vs. the Gavel challenges the pervasive assumption that all religious conduct deserves constitutional protection. While religious conduct provides many benefits to society, it is not always benign. The thesis of the book is that anyone who harms another person should be governed by the laws that govern everyone else - and truth be told, religion is capable of great harm. This may not sound like a radical proposition, but it has been under assault since the 1960s. The majority (...) of academics and many religious organizations would construct a fortress around religious conduct that would make it extremely difficult to prosecute child abuse by clergy, medical neglect of children by faith-healers, and other socially unacceptable behaviors. This book intends to change the course of the public debate over religion by bringing to the public's attention the tactics of religious entities to avoid the law and therefore harm others. (shrink)

British equality law protections for sex and gender reassignment have grown fraught as activists tussle over legal and social categories of gender, gender transitioning, and sex. This article considers the future of gender-related equality protections in relation to ‘decertification’—an imagined reform that would detach sex and gender from legal personhood. One criticism of decertification is that de-formalising gender membership would undermine equality law protections. This article explores how gender-based equality law could operate in conditions of decertification, drawing on legal thoughtways (...) developed for two other protected characteristics in equality law—religion and belief, and disability—to explore the legal responses and imaginaries that these two grounds make available. Religious equality law focuses on beliefs, communities, and practices, deemed to be stable, multivarious, and subject to deep personal commitment. Disability equality law focuses on embodied disadvantage, approached as social, relational, and fluctuating. While these two equality frameworks have considerable limitations, they offer legal thoughtways for gender oriented to both its hierarchies and its expression, including as disavowal. (shrink)

The essays in Religion and Public Reasons seek to argue for, and illustrate, a central element of John Finnis' theory of natural law: that the main tenets of ...

Leo Strauss's Philosophy and Law contains a groundbreaking study of the political philosophy of Maimonides and his Islamic predecessors, and it offers an argument on behalf of that philosophy which is also a profound critique of modern philosophy. Here is an entirely new and complete English translation of Strauss's work, which takes as its ideal the exacting standards of accuracy that Strauss himself emphasized in his own work. It includes a prefatory essay introducing the argument of each of the four (...) sections of Philosophy and Law. This is a fresh and challenging treatment of the perennial conflict between reason and revelation, or philosophy and religion. Strauss's key contention in this book is that the most influential modern approaches to this conflict have run aground in ways that reflect their loss of key insights developed by the medieval philosophers of Islam and their Jewish pupils, especially Maimonides. Strauss challenges the modern view that scientific enlightenment must ultimately amount to atheism, and that therefore there can be no such thing as enlightened religion. Through a careful, original, and detailed treatment of central works of the medieval Islamic-Jewish tradition, especially Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, Strauss aims to recover their key insights into this question. (shrink)

In contrast to classical natural law theory and traditional individualist liberalism, James Luther Adams develops a version of natural law doctrine grounded in liberal religion. In its ontological dimension, his natural law doctrine is derived from a communal understanding of the character of reality. In its institutional dimension, his natural law doctrine promotes a kind of democracy in which freedom of association is central. From this perspective, law is a practice intended to empower persons through their several associations in (...) the constant formation and transformation of community under the direction of divine power. (shrink)

This book offers a systematic examination of the place of religion within Kant's major writings. Kant is often thought to be highly reductionistic with regard to religion - as though religion simply provides the unsophisticated with colourful representations of moral lessons that reason alone could grasp. James DiCenso's rich and innovative discussion shows how Kant's theory of religion in fact emerges directly from his epistemology, ethics and political theory, and how it serves his larger political and (...) ethical projects of restructuring institutions and modifying political attitudes towards greater autonomy. It also illustrates the continuing relevance of Kant's ideas for addressing issues of religion and politics that remain pressing in the contemporary world, such as just laws, transparency in the public sphere and other ethical and political concerns. The book will be valuable for a wide range of readers who are interested in Kant's thought. (shrink)

This book addresses the 'legitimacy gap' created by the removal of religion as a source of legitimacy for the foundation of secular states, when many of the world's states are still profoundly religious but require procedural, rather than substantive, grounds for constitutional arrangements.

A collection of new papers by ten philosophers exploring relations between conceptions of natural law and theism, ranging from Plato to the early modern period. Rather than defending a a specific view of natural law, the papers explicate the complex texture of the relations between the diverse conceptions of natural law and diverse conceptions of theism and its significance for moral and political thought.

Religion is increasingly a social and political factor in post-modern societies nowadays and the question of the role of religion in the public sphere is more and more brought to the fore: a challenge to legal philosophers. Should religion be only a private affair, or should the public dimension of religion be more acknowledged? Do we have to interpret the freedom of religion and the separation of church and state in a strict (laicist) sense, or (...) do we have to allow for a more benevolent relation between religion and the state? This collection of essays explores these questions in various and new ways. (shrink)

This volume brings together a number of important studies by leading scholars on ritual and law, philosophy and religion, literature and entertainments in Qin and Han China. A few contributions deal with the Han legacy to later Chinese culture.

Religion and Community: Adam Smith on the Virtues of Liberty CHARLES L. GRISWOLD, JR. The good temper and moderation of con- tending factions seems to be the most es- gential circumstance in the publick morals of a free people. Adam Smith' THE ARCHITECTS of what one might call "classical" or "Enlightenment" liberal- ism saw themselves as committed to refuting the claims to political sovereignty by organized religion. ~ The arguments against the legitimacy of a state- supported religion, (...) and, in the extreme case, of a religious monopoly, are so integral a part of the Enlightenment's effort to put politics on a stable and just foundation as to constitute one of the controlling themes of the period. Lib- eral politics requires toleration, or better, liberty of religious belief. And this in turn requires that religious institutions be privatized, as it were, and that just politics be secularized in that legitimate rule is to lie in the consent of the ruled rather than in the laws of God as interpreted by his ministers on earth. Differ- ' Wealth of Nations V.i.f.4o. My references to The Wealth of Nations are to the two-volume R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner edition . 2 The list of thinkers in the "classical liberal" tradition simply reads as the list of key Enlighten- ment figures: Bayle, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Hume, Smith, Voltaire, and Kant, to name a few. Consider the role that religious freedom plays in Kant's. (shrink)

Interiority and Law presents a groundbreaking reassessment of a medieval Jewish classic, Baḥya ibn Paquda's Guide to the Duties of the Hearts. Michaelis reads this work anew as a revolutionary intervention in Jewish law, or halakha. Overturning perceptions of Baḥya as the shaper of an ethical-religious form of life that exceeds halakha, Michaelis offers a pioneering historical and conceptual analysis of the category of "inner commandments" developed by Baḥya. Interiority and Law reveals that Baḥya's main effort revolved around establishing a (...) new legal formation - namely, the "duties of the hearts" - which would deal entirely with human interiority. Michaelis takes up the implications of Baḥya's radical innovation, examining his unique mystical model of proximity to God, which he based on an increasingly growing fulfillment of the inner commandments. With an integrative approach that puts Baḥya in dialogue with other medieval Muslim and Jewish religious thinkers, this work offers a fresh perspective on our understanding of the interconnectedness of the dynamic, neighboring religious traditions of Judaism and Islam. Contributing to conversations in the history of religion, Jewish studies, and medieval studies on interiority and mysticism, this book reveals Baḥya as a revolutionary and demanding thinker of Jewish law. (shrink)

This essay on law and religion appears in the second edition of the Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, edited by Dennis Patterson. It is a revision of a similar entry in the book’s first edition. The essay opens by broadly discussing the complex relationships between law and religion writ large as movements in human history – social, cultural, intellectual, and institutional phenomena with distinct but often overlapping logics and concerns. It then hones in on (...) the efforts of secular law to make sense of religion and determine its place in the civil state. The essay argues that, while the questions raised by the American Bill of Rights’ religion clauses connect in some important respects to broader constitutional principles such as free expression and equality, the most interesting and theoretically excruciating conundrums involving religion need to be approached on their own unique terms. Two useful rubrics for such understanding are “separation” and “deference.” Any honest account must also admit, however, that there is an “intractable residue,” questions in the relation of religion and law to which there simply is no determinate or completely satisfactory answer. Finally, the essay emphasizes that the full texture of the legal imagination’s effort to grapple with religion only becomes apparent in the wider range of subconstitutional and nonconstitutional contexts beyond the standard litany of constitutional discourse. (shrink)

Man has to face the unknown future anytime and anywhere. For this reason, he needs to believe in the truth beyond himself. Otherwise, society will decline, decay, and never come back. Similarly, human beings are always faced with social conflicts everywhere. For this reason, he needs a legal system. Otherwise, society will disintegrate and fall apart. However, from the constitutional text, there is no uniform title and standard definition of freedom of religious belief in all countries. Countries in the west (...) are called religious freedom, while China adopts the concept of freedom of religious belief. This article will further analyze the different influences of Chinese and western religions on the law. It is worth pointing out that the living environment of law in the west is not as good as Chinese people think, and the authority of law and people's belief in law are gradually drifting away. Based on the basic theory of freedom of religious belief, this paper analyzes the different influences of Chinese and western religions on the law, analyzes the present situation and demands for legal protection of freedom of religious belief in contemporary China, and tries to put forward feasible solutions. (shrink)

The idea of public reason is central to political liberalism's aim to provide an account of the possibility of a just and stable democratic society comprised of free and equal citizens who nonetheless are deeply divided over fundamental values. This commitment to the idea of public reason reflects the normative core of political liberalism which is rooted in the principle of democratic legitimacy and the idea of reciprocity among citizens. Yet both critics and defenders of political liberalism disagree over whether (...) or not the idea of public reason permits citizens to appeal to their comprehensive conceptions of the good in public deliberation over matters of basic justice. Our aim in this paper is to provide a defense of an exclusive idea of public reason, and at the same time we aim to dispel the underlying concerns of two prominent criticisms of the idea of public reason—the concern of alienation from the political process, as expressed by religiously oriented critics, and the concern over women's equality, as expressed by feminist critics. We argue that inclusive accounts of the idea of public reason are not consistent with political liberalism's core commitments. Further, we claim, inclusive accounts of the idea of public reason deepen feminist concerns. We think that, properly understood, an exclusive account of the idea of public reason can address feminist concerns about political liberalism and avoid alienating (reasonable) religious persons in an unacceptable way. Thus, we conclude that an exclusive account of the idea of public reason is our best hope for reconciliation. (shrink)

Hegelian ethics, which gives pride of place to the roles and relations that give substance to our moral life, is seen as a rejection of Kant's a priori treatment of morality, moral law and moral agency. Analysis of the so-called religious writings from the late 1790s to the early 1800s, 'The Positivity of the Christian Religion', the 'Love' fragment, and the essay 'On the Scientific Treatment of Natural Law', shows Hegel engaging profoundly with recognizably Kantian problems of moral metaphysics (...) about moral agency, the moral law, nature and freedom. The almost experimental approach of these early pieces yields independently interesting results as well as offering an important insight into the development of Hegel's thought. (shrink)