Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Weekly Five

The Weekly Five showcases articles about commercial dealings among co-religionists, the reach of anti-discrimination laws, European cases and contexts involving the wearing of religious clothing and the registration of religious groups, and the free speech implications of regulating “spiritual advisors.”

1. Michael A. Helfand (Pepperdine) & Barak D. Richman (Duke), The Challenge of Co-Religionist Commerce: Two former CLR Forum guests argue for a contextualist (as against a formalist) approach to the adjudication of contracts and commercial dealings among members of religious communities. The article also amplifies on Professor Helfand’s previous work on “Establishment Clause creep,” arguing for a more engaged role for courts in this context.

2. Sahar F. Aziz (Texas Tech), Veiled Discrimination: Professor Aziz argues that while Title VII prohibits cover bias, it does a bad job in protecting against “implicit bias arising from negative stereotypes of protected classes”; and “disparate treatment of subgroups of protected classes who do not conform to coercive assimilationist pressures.” This failing is a particular problem for individuals who fall into several categories of protected classes–for example, women with religious commitments.

3. Michelle Biddulph & Dwight G. Newman (both of Saskatchewan), Eweida v. United Kingdom: This is a short and useful piece discussing four recent controversies at the European Court of Human Rights, two of which involve the wearing of religious clothing by Christians and two of which concern the provision of services by religious objectors to gay people.

4. Jeroen Temperman (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Recognition, Registration, and Autonomy of Religious Groups: European Approaches and Their Human Rights Implications: In the context of surveying various categories of demands imposed on religions in Europe for official recognition (including numerical and durational requirements), Professor Temperman argues that these demands are illegitimate. He also reviews the conflict between European states’ egalitarian interests and various religious autonomy interests, reaching a more intermediate conclusion.

5. Nicole Jones, Did Fortune-Tellers See This Coming? Spiritual Counseling, Professional Speech, and the First Amendment: An interesting comment about the ways in which “spiritual counseling” are more similar to religious speech than to professional speech for purposes of the First Amendment and state regulation. The piece discusses the free speech implications of the “Psychic Sophie” case also studied from another angle by my colleague, Mark, in his new piece.

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Confino, “A World Without Jews”

Next month, Yale University Press will publish A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide by Alon Confino (University of A World Without JewsVirginia).  The publisher’s description follows.

Why exactly did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible everywhere in Germany on November 9, 1938? The perplexing event has not been adequately accounted for by historians in their large-scale assessments of how and why the Holocaust occurred. In this gripping new analysis, Alon Confino draws on an array of archives across three continents to propose a penetrating new assessment of one of the central moral problems of the twentieth century. To a surprising extent, Confino demonstrates, the mass murder of Jews during the war years was powerfully anticipated in the culture of the prewar years.

The author shifts his focus away from the debates over what the Germans did or did not know about the Holocaust and explores instead how Germans came to conceive of the idea of a Germany without Jews. He traces the stories the Nazis told themselves—where they came from and where they were heading—and how those stories led to the conclusion that Jews must be eradicated in order for the new Nazi civilization to arise. The creation of this new empire required that Jews and Judaism be erased from Christian history, and this was the inspiration—and justification—for Kristallnacht. As Germans imagined a future world without Jews, persecution and extermination became imaginable, and even justifiable.

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Subramanian, “Nation and Family”

Next month, Stanford University Press will publish Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India by Narendra Nation and FamilySubramanian (McGill University).  The publisher’s description follows.

The distinct personal laws that govern the major religious groups are a major aspect of Indian multiculturalism and secularism, and support specific gendered rights in family life. Nation and Family is the most comprehensive study to date of the public discourses, processes of social mobilization, legislation and case law that formed India’s three major personal law systems, which govern Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. It for the first time systematically compares Indian experiences to those in a wide range of other countries that inherited personal laws specific to religious group, sect, or ethnic group. The book shows why India’s postcolonial policy-makers changed the personal laws they inherited less than the rulers of Turkey and Tunisia, but far more than those of Algeria, Syria and Lebanon, and increased women’s rights for the most part, contrary to the trend in Pakistan, Iran, Sudan and Nigeria since the 1970s.

Subramanian demonstrates that discourses of community and features of state-society relations shape the course of personal law. Ruling elites’ discourses about the nation, its cultural groups and its traditions interact with the state-society relations that regimes inherit and the projects of regimes to change their relations with society. These interactions influence the pattern of multiculturalism, the place of religion in public policy and public life, and the forms of regulation of family life. The book shows how the greater engagement of political elites with initiatives among the Hindu majority and the predominant place they gave Hindu motifs in discourses about the nation shaped Indian multiculturalism and secularism, contrary to current understandings. In exploring the significant role of communitarian discourses in shaping state-society relations and public policy, it takes “state-in-society” approaches to comparative politics, political sociology, and legal studies in new directions.

Posted on by JCPW

Werth, “The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths”

9780199591770_450This May, Oxford University Press will publish The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia by Paul W. Werth (University of Nevada). The publisher’s description follows.

The Russian Empire presented itself to its subjects and the world as an Orthodox state, a patron and defender of Eastern Christianity. Yet the tsarist regime also lauded itself for granting religious freedoms to its many heterodox subjects, making ‘religious toleration’ a core attribute of the state’s identity. The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths shows that the resulting tensions between the autocracy’s commitments to Orthodoxy and its claims to toleration became a defining feature of the empire’s religious order.

In this panoramic account, Paul W. Werth explores the scope and character of religious freedom for Russia’s diverse non-Orthodox religions, from Lutheranism and Catholicism to Islam and Buddhism. Considering both rhetoric and practice, he examines discourses of religious toleration and the role of confessional institutions in the empire’s governance. He reveals the paradoxical status of Russia’s heterodox faiths as both established and ‘foreign’, and explains the dynamics that shaped the fate of newer conceptions of religious liberty after the mid-nineteenth century. If intellectual change and the shifting character of religious life in Russia gradually pushed the regime towards the acceptance of freedom of conscience, then statesmen’s nationalist sentiments and their fears of ‘politicized’ religion impeded this development. Russia’s religious order thus remained beset by contradiction on the eve of the Great War. Based on archival research in five countries and a vast scholarly literature, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths represents a major contribution to the history of empire and religion in Russia, and to the study of toleration and religious diversity in Europe.

Posted on by JCPW

Ferrari & Benzo (eds.), “Between Cultural Diversity and Common Heritage”

This April, Ashgate Publishing will publish Between Cultural Diversity and Common Heritage: Legal and Religious Perspectives on the Sacred Places of the Mediterranean edited by Silvio Ferrari (University of Milan, University of Leuven) and Andrea Benzo (Italian Embassy in Riyadh). The publisher’s description follows.

Going beyond the more usual focus on Jerusalem as a sacred place, this book presents legal perspectives on the most important sacred places of the Mediterranean. The first part of the book discusses the notion of sacred places in anthropological, sociological and legal studies and provides an overview of existing legal approaches to the protection of sacred places in order to develop and define a new legal framework. The second part introduces the meaning of sacred places in Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought and focuses on the significance and role that sacred places have in the three major monotheistic religions and how best to preserve their religious nature whilst designing a new international statute. The final part of the book is a detailed analysis of the legal status of key sacred places and holy cities in the Mediterranean area and identifies a set of legal principles to support a general framework within which specific legal measures can be implemented. The book concludes with a useful appendix for the protection of sacred places in the Mediterranean region.

Including contributions from leading law and religion scholars, this interesting book will be valuable to those in the fields of international law, as well as religion and heritage studies.