Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Muller on Capitalism and Judaism

Princeton University Press has released a paperback edition of Capitalism and the Jews (2010) by Catholic University historian Jerry Z. Muller. The publisher’s description follows.

The unique historical relationship between capitalism and the Jews is crucial to understanding modern European and Jewish history. But the subject has been addressed less often by mainstream historians than by anti-Semites or apologists. In this book Jerry Muller, a leading historian of capitalism, separates myth from reality to explain why the Jewish experience with capitalism has been so important and complex–and so ambivalent.

Drawing on economic, social, political, and intellectual history from medieval Europe through contemporary America and Israel, Capitalism and the Jews examines the ways in which thinking about capitalism and thinking about the Jews have gone hand in hand in European thought, and why anticapitalism and anti-Semitism have frequently been linked. The book explains why Jews have tended to be disproportionately successful in capitalist societies, but also why Jews have numbered among the fiercest anticapitalists and Communists. The book shows how the ancient idea that money was unproductive led from the stigmatization of usury and the Jews to the stigmatization of finance and, ultimately, in Marxism, the stigmatization of capitalism itself. Finally, the book traces how the traditional status of the Jews as a diasporic merchant minority both encouraged their economic success and made them particularly vulnerable to the ethnic nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Providing a fresh look at an important but frequently misunderstood subject, Capitalism and the Jews will interest anyone who wants to understand the Jewish role in the development of capitalism, the role of capitalism in the modern fate of the Jews, or the ways in which the story of capitalism and the Jews has affected the history of Europe and beyond, from the medieval period to our own.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Stanley Fish, Intentionalism, and Law Teaching

Stanley Fish has an interesting column about teaching law with specific reference to learning about constitutional law and the religion clauses.  He says much that I agree with and that picks up on at least some of the themes in his entertaining, Save the World on Your Own Time.

A small but, I think, important feature of the column is the emphasis on (his variety of) intentionalism or purposivism to understand legal doctrine.  He writes: 

Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Games of Chance and Neutral Laws of General Application

Or puoi, figliuol, veder la corta buffa

d’i ben che son commessi a la fortuna,

per che l’umana gente si rabuffa[.]

A story here about consternation in Santa Monica, where it seems that a 60-year old tradition in which various Christian congregations assembled a nativity scene in a public park during the Christmas season has been disrupted by the institution of a neutral, generally applicable municipal lottery system.  As it happened, Fortune favored the atheists.  (h/t Sam Bray)

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Rudin, “Cushing, Spellman, O’Connor”

This looks like an interesting book about American Catholicism in the 20th century, Cushing, Spellman, O’Connor: The Surprising Story of How Three American Cardinals Transformed Catholic-Jewish Relations (Eerdmans 2011), by Rabbi James Rudin.  The publisher’s description follows:

James Rudin, a rabbi who has made a career of writing about and participating in interreligious dialogue, demonstrates how Cardinals Richard Cushing and Francis Spellman influenced the Second Vatican Council to adopt Nostra Aetate – a statement against anti-Semitism – and how Cardinal John O’Connor transformed that document’s sentiments into practical results a generation later. Two introductory chapters trace Jewish-Catholic relations from the first century to the twentieth, explaining the extraordinary nature of these cardinals’ actions.

Pithy and accessible, this book will spark lively discussion among church and synagogue study groups. It will also add compelling case studies to seminary courses on ecumenism and interfaith dialogue — regardless of any given group’s position on the ideological spectrum.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Russian Church Supports Critics of Parliamentary Elections

The Russian Orthodox Church, which has been regaining influence in Russian society since the fall of the Soviet Union, has signaled it support for the tens of thousands who have been protesting the results of this month’s parliamentary elections. The elections, which returned Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party to power, are widely seen as fraudulent. This past weekend, a prominent Church spokesman, Fr. Vsevolod Chaplin, called on the government to address the allegations of fraud and said that the Church itself would be prepared to question those responsible. His comments, similar to those of another prominent priest who recently referred to government officials as “Pharisees” who tolerate lies and hypocrisy, are seen as significant because the Church has often supported Putin in the past. It is not clear that the criticism signals a break with Putin, though; some analysts believe Fr. Chaplin’s comments are meant to co-opt the protests before they get out of hand. Nor should one view the Church as a force for liberalism. Fr. Chaplin also recently criticized the Western Christian tradition for separating religion from public life.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Conference on Christian Legal Thought (Jan. 7)

The Lumen Christi Institute will host the annual Conference on Christian Legal Thought on January 7 in Washington. Panels include “Public Unions and the State of Organized Labor,” “Pedagogy,” “Law, Speech, and Morality,” and “The Vocation of the Christian Lawyer and the Future of Legal Education.” Speakers include St. John’s own David Gregory. Details are here.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Italy’s Catholic Church flexible on property tax

That’s the headline of an AP story over the weekend, here. Italian law has traditionally granted a tax exemption on real property owned by non-profits, including the Catholic Church. The exemption extends not only to property used for religious reasons, but more broadly to any property that is not “exclusively commercial” in nature — for example, guest houses for pilgrims and medical clinics. Critics argue that the exemption allows the Church (and other non-profits, presumably) to conduct commercial activities  without paying tax. Given Italy’s fiscal crisis, the new government is signaling that it will reconsider the breadth of the exemption, and the Church is signaling that it may go along:

One of Monti’s Cabinet ministers, Andrea Riccardi, is one of the most prominent lay Catholics in Italy, the founder of the Sant’Egidio Community with close ties to the Vatican.

He said this week that the church should pay the property tax if commercial activity is being carried out on the property. “I think that all the all the religious and cultural activities of the church are a richness for the country and the tax shouldn’t be paid,” he told RAI state television.

But if individual cases are discovered where commercial activity is being carried out, “necessary measures should be taken.”

 

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar…and Hugo

In this country, complaints are heard when municipalities put up nativity scenes on government property.  But thus far, I haven’t seen a case where politicians sneak themselves into the manger. 

Apparently in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez has instituted a different practice.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Classic Revisited: Eliade’s “The Sacred and the Profane”

Today’s classic revisited is one in the sociology and history of religion, Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, first published in 1957 (the first edition pictured at right).  The field of religious studies, unlike theology, is a comparatively new one — beginning in earnest in the 19th century and heating up only in the 20th.  One connection to law is the ‘definition-of-religion’ issue: how can we find an essence or core of what religion is — and so what the scope is of the constitutional commitments against its establishment and to its free exercise.  The issue appeared in some of the Supreme Court’s mid-twentieth century conscientious objection to military service opinions, which, while not strictly about the Constitution (they were statutory interpretation decisions), confronted the Court with the problems of how to distinguish a religious reason of conscience from a different sort of reason, and whether to do so at all.  But there are other less obvious and so far unexplored connections to law, particularly constitutional law. 

The eminent and supremely cultivated theorist and historian of religion Mircea Eliade, Romanian by birth, taught at the University of Chicago after a turbulent early life.  Together with Joachim Wach and others, Eliade made Chicago the heart of the academic study of religion in the mid-late-20th century, and to this day it retains some of the preeminent figures in religious studies (J.Z. Smith, Martin Riesebrodt, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, among many others).

Though Eliade never had any particular influence on the Court (a treatise of his was cited in the majority opinion in the Lukumi Babalu decision, as well as in a handful of 2d and 3d circuit decisions), his ideas about the nature of religious experience are extremely interesting and possibly deserve further study by legal scholars and courts — including by those  interested in the psychology of originalism.  One of Eliade’s crucial ideas was that the conceptions of “sacred” and “profane” time differ fundamentally.  In sacred time, every time that we engage in a ritual or a ceremony, it serves to reactualize the “mythic beginning” which is “indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable.”  (69)  Sacred time is therefore cyclical; while profane time is linear.  That “beginning” is not to be found in a historical moment because no time can precede “the appearance of the reality narrated in the myth.”  (72)  It is in this way that sacred time (and, we might say, sacred legal time) creates fissures or what Eliade called moments of “hierophany” in the humdrum linearity of profane time, in which a (legal) “beginning” is recalled and reactualized in (legal) ritual.

Eliade’s writing (laced in part with the writing of Freud and Jung) has not penetrated the constitutional discourse, but it has something worthwhile to offer.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Trademarking Churches’ Names and Logos

Further evidence for the free-market model in American religious life: churches increasingly trademark their names and logos to avoid consumer confusion. The practice is especially useful for megachurches, lawyers say. As one explains:

When a church registers its trademark, it’s a simple and low-cost way to protect against ‘identity theft’ by preventing others from misusing its good name and reputation while protecting its investment in branding and name recognition.  It makes all the sense in the world, and is good stewardship of a church’s assets. It allows the church to secure their marketing and secure the usage of that trademark, and to make it clear to the community who they are. It’s useful in the environment that we live in today with the Internet and the amount of resources that get dedicated to marketing.

There is some dispute whether churches can trademark names only, since so many church names incorporate common Biblical phrases. Trademarking both names and logos seems the way to go.