Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Burnside on the Spirit of Biblical Law

Here’s a very interesting article just published by Jonathan Burnside (Bristol), The Spirit of Biblical Law.  The abstract follows:

The Bible—paradoxically—has been deeply influential on Western civilization, including law, yet our assumptions are deeply hostile to its having any influence in the modern world at all. This article subverts the view that there is nothing we can learn from biblical law. Instead, it suggests that it is possible to speak of ‘the spirit of biblical law’. This means seeing biblical law as more than just an object of textual critique. Biblical law can be caricatured in a number of ways; however, this is an inadequate way of reading the subject. We need to recover the spirit of biblical law by looking at a number of its substantive areas, including: property and money; economic organization; race relations and immigration; the role, nature and accountability of Government; family structure; our relationship with the environment and the pursuit of justice. As we do so, we discover that the spirit of biblical law has an ethos which is worth exploring as an imaginative and moral resource.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Fortress of Atheism

Here is an interesting story about the vision of the French writer, Alain de Botton, to capture some of what he sees as religion’s “consoling, subtle, or just charming rituals” by erecting gigantic atheist “temples.”  The story relates to Botton’s new book, Religion For Atheists: A Nonbelievers Guide to the Uses of Religion (Hamish Hamilton 2012).  Inside these collossal atheist edifices, it is not exactly clear what would occur, except that people obviously would not worship, but would instead “behave as they would in a museum.”  Proposed Fortress of Atheism at right.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

“Big Mountain Jesus” Stays for Now

An update on a story we covered last November. The Forest Service this week approved a permit for the continued display of a six-foot statute, known as “Big Mountain Jesus,” on federal land in Big Mountain, Montana. The statute has been there since 1954. Its sponsor, the Knights of Columbus, says that the statue, which replicates statues seen by American soldiers fighting in Europe in World War II, serves as a war memorial. The Forest Service had decided last August not to renew the permit, but reversed itself this week in response to public outcry. The Freedom from Religion Foundation, which argued that renewal of the permit would violate the Establishment Clause, has announced plans to file a federal lawsuit as early as this week.

Cases about public religious displays are notoriously unpredictable. The Supreme Court has indicated that such displays cannot violate the government’s duty of religious neutrality, but the Justices have defined that duty in various, and not completely consistent, ways. Categorical tests are not very helpful; cases turn on specific facts and historical context. With respect to Big Mountain Jesus, it will be interesting to see which interpretation of the statue prevails: is the statue really a war memorial whose religious associations are only incidental, or is it, as FFRF argues, an unconstitutional sectarian endorsement? Watch this space for further developments.

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Education and Belief: Telos

“Formal education…presents pictures or maps of reality that reflect, unavoidably, particular choices about what is certain and what in question, what is significant and what unworthy of notice.  No aspect of schooling can be truly neutral.” – Charles Glenn, The Myth of the Common School (1988).

If Glenn is correct that knowledge occurs within a map of reality, then we need to look at the map’s assumptions. This is the work of educational philosophy, which asks four key questions:

  1. What is the purpose of education?
  2. What is the nature of the child?
  3. What is the role of the teacher?
  4. Who has or should have educational authority?

Schooling addresses these questions, even if implicitly.  An insistence upon high academic standards, for instance, implies something about the purpose of education, our view of the child who is being educated, and the locus of authority.

What I’d like to do in the next few posts is to look at each question and some of the ways each has been answered in the United States. My intent is not to argue that any one answer is right or wrong (although I do have my personal preferences). Rather, I want to highlight the sheer variety of responses and then examine how America and other liberal democracies differ in managing them.

Read more

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Tagari on Human Rights and Personal Systems of Family Law

Hadas Tagari (student at Bar-Ilan University–Faculty of Law) has posted Personal Family Law Systems – A Comparative and International Human Rights Analysis.  The abstract follows.

This article analyzes the structures and substances of personal systems of family law based on religious affiliation within their social, political and historical contexts, explores the varied ways in which they infringe on the human rights of those governed by these systems – gender equality implicated by most – and the way international law and jurisprudence of human rights respond to these challenges. This analysis wishes to suggest that looking at the specific manifestations of personal family law systems in concrete contexts illuminates significant human rights implications which have not hither to received sufficient attention in mainstream human rights discourse, for various legal, cultural and political reasons. The contexts which this article will draw on are personal family law systems in Israel, India, Lebanon and Morocco, which comprise a varied sample of family law structures and legal, cultural, social and political contexts.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 2012

You read the date right. In response to the new HHS regs requiring all employers, including most religiously-affiliated employers, to cover contraceptives in employee health plans, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) yesterday introduced a bill, “the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 2012,” that would make the regs inoperative. The bill creates what it calls “conscience protections” that would exempt employers who oppose contraception “on the basis of religious belief.” Others have introduced similar legislation. The text of Senator Rubio’s bill is here.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Haupt, “Religion-State Relations in the United States and Germany”

Conceptions of neutrality in church-state relations are increasingly important these days.  But a very interesting feature of the neutrality debates has been the plural and oftentimes incompatible conceptions of neutrality that have emerged.  Formal neutrality, for example, is quite different from (and sometimes hostile to) what preeminent church-state scholar Douglas Laycock has called “substantive neutrality.”

Alongside the splintering of the concept of neutrality into plural conceptions in this country, there is now emerging very interesting scholarship on the comparative study of neutrality.  My colleague, Mark, is doing some excellent work in this regard.  And I just was made aware of this very interesting comparative study by Claudia E. Haupt (George Washington), Religion-State Relations in the United States and Germany: The Quest for Neutrality (Cambridge UP 2012).  The publisher’s description follows.

This comparative analysis of the constitutional law of religion-state relations in the United States and Germany focuses on the principle of state neutrality. A strong emphasis on state neutrality, a notoriously ambiguous concept, is a shared feature in the constitutional jurisprudence of the US Supreme Court and the German Federal Constitutional Court, but neutrality does not have the same meaning in both systems. In Germany neutrality tends to indicate more distance between church and state, whereas the opposite is the case in the United States. Neutrality also has other meanings in both systems, making straightforward comparison more difficult than it might seem. Although the underlying trajectory of neutrality is different in both countries, the discussion of neutrality breaks down into largely parallel themes. By examining those themes in a comparative perspective, the meaning of state neutrality in religion-state relations can be delineated.