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Kühne, “Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945”

This August, Yale University Press published Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945 by Thomas Kühne (Clark University).  The publisher’s Belonging and Genocidedescription follows.

No one has ever posed a satisfactory explanation for the extreme inhumanity of the Holocaust. What enabled millions of Germans to perpetrate or condone the murder of the Jews? In this illuminating book, Thomas Kühne offers a provocative answer. In addition to the hatred of Jews or coercion that created a genocidal society, he contends, the desire for a united “people’s community” made Germans conform and join together in mass crime.

Exploring private letters, diaries, memoirs, secret reports, trial records, and other documents, the author shows how the Nazis used such common human needs as community, belonging, and solidarity to forge a nation conducting the worst crime in history.

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Furtado, “Quakers”

This September, Random House will publish Quakers by Peter Furtado.  The Quakerspublisher’s description follows.

A small sect of fewer than 20,000 in the UK, and approximately 100,000 in the USA, Quakers have produced a disproportionate number of eminent thinkers, scientists, businessmen, and their teachings have been widely influential and become mainstream. Best known as pacifists, Quakers have always been at the forefront of social justice and conflict resolution, once being leaders in the abolitionist movement on three continents and, more recently, key players in international peacemaking and fighting global poverty. This book is a fascinating in-depth look at the Quaker religion, philosophy, distinctive culture and its place in history. With roots in the 17th century and the insights of George Fox, Quakers have a core belief in a direct experience of God by simply listening in silence with no need for priests, hierarchies, sacraments or other rituals, an absolute commitment to work for peace and have earned a reputation for being honest and plain speaking which helped them build successful enterprises in the 18th and 19th century. Like many religious sects, the Quakers also endured religious persecution and in the aftermath of the English Civil War fled to America for religious freedom, eventually establishing the Pennsylvania colony in 1681 as a haven for Quakers. Today, Quakers walk an intriguing line between their solemn and deeply held religious beliefs and the challenge of actively engaging in the modern world as they seek to better circumstances and in their founder’s words, “walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone.”

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Podcast Featuring Delahunty on Tocqueville and Religion

Our guest, Professor Robert Delahunty, has conducted an informative podcast with the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion involving Alexis de Tocqueville and religion. Readers familiar with his excellent posts at CLR Forum over the past month (which will continue this week) will be further edified by Robert’s deep learning on the subject. The podcast is moderated by Baylor University’s Anthony Gill.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

ICLARS Panel: Is Religion Special?

Along with my St. John’s colleague, Marc DeGirolami, and other law and religion scholars from around the world, I spent part of last week at the biannual ICLARS Conference, hosted this year at William and Mary and the University of Virginia. Kudos and thanks to the indefatigable Cole Durham and other conference organizers for an exceptionally helpful  and fun event!

I spoke at Friday’s afternoon session, on a panel, “Is Religion Special?”, moderated by Edward Gaffney of Valparaiso. My co-panelists were Barry Bussey of the Canadian Council of Christian Charities and Micah Schwartzman of the University of Virginia. Bussey presented a paper titled, “Does Religion Merit Special Protection in the Law? (Within the Canadian Legal Context).” Early Canadian Supreme Court cases stressed the country’s Christian heritage, he explained. Over time, however, the Court moved to a concern with religion in general. Now, equality often trumps freedom of religion in the Canadian case law–religious freedom is often the “loser.” I presented my working project on the rise of the Nones–the group of people who claim no religious affiliation–and what it might mean for the definition of religion in American law. As an example, I used the recent “Psychic Sophie” case, in which the Fourth Circuit held that “following one’s inner flow” does not qualify as a religion meriting constitutional and statutory protection. Schwartzman closed the panel with his draft, “Religion as a Legal Proxy.” He addressed the argument that, even if religion as such doesn’t merit special legal protection, religion is a proxy for other comprehensive values that do. Schwartzman is skeptical of this argument. For one thing, he said, interests besides religion–conscience, for example–might also serve as effective proxies for other comprehensive values, without raising religion’s particular concerns.

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The Top Five New Law & Religion Papers on SSRN

From SSRN’s list of most frequently downloaded law and religion papers posted in the last 60 days, here are the current top five.  Since last week, Douglas Laycock has moved up to #1, Perry Dane has moved down to #2, Dwight Newman remains at #3, Elizabeth Sepper remains at #4, and Richard Garnett remains at #5.

1. Religious Liberty and the Culture Wars  by Douglas Laycock (U. of Virginia, School of Law) [224 downloads]

2. Doctrine and Deep Structure in the Contraception Mandate Debate by Perry Dane (Rutgers, School of Law) [219 downloads]

3. On the Trinity Western University Controversy: An Argument for a Christian Law School in Canada by Dwight G. Newman (U. of Saskatchewan, College of Law) [171 downloads]

4. Contraception and the Birth of Corporate Conscience  by Elizabeth Sepper (Washington U., School of Law [135 downloads]

5. ‘The Freedom of the Church’: (Towards) an Exposition, Translation, and Defense by Richard W. Garnett (Notre Dame Law School)  [116 downloads]

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Hart, “And Then We Work For God”

0804786607Last month, Stanford University Press published And Then We Work For God: Rural Sunni Islam in Western Turkey by Kimberly Hart (State University of New York College at Buffalo). The publisher’s description follows.

Turkey’s contemporary struggles with Islam are often interpreted as a conflict between religion and secularism played out most obviously in the split between rural and urban populations. The reality, of course, is more complicated than the assumptions. Exploring religious expression in two villages, this book considers rural spiritual practices and describes a living, evolving Sunni Islam, influenced and transformed by local and national sources of religious orthodoxy.

Drawing on a decade of research, Kimberly Hart shows how religion is not an abstract set of principles, but a complex set of practices. Sunni Islam structures individual lives through rituals—birth, circumcision, marriage, military service, death—and the expression of these traditions varies between villages. Hart delves into the question of why some choose to keep alive the past, while others want to face a future unburdened by local cultural practices. Her answer speaks to global transformations in Islam, to the push and pull between those who maintain a link to the past, even when these practices challenge orthodoxy, and those who want a purified global religion.

Posted on by JCPW

Jivraj, “The Religion of Law”

ShowJacketNext month, Palgrave Macmillan will publish The Religion of Law: Race, Citizenship and Children’s Belonging by Suhraiya Jivraj (Kent Law School, University of Kent). The publisher’s description follows.

A timely and original examination into the ways in which religion is conceptualized in two areas of law relating to children – child welfare cases and education law and policy. The book focuses on the relationship between race, religion and culture, bringing critical race and religion perspectives from other disciplines to bear on law.

Posted on by JCPW

Around the Web This Week

Some interesting law & religion stories from around the web this week:

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Lynn, “Between Court and Confessional: The Politics of Spanish Inquisitors”

Last month, Cambridge published Between Court and Confessional: The Politics of9781107031166 Spanish Inquisitors by Kimberly Lynn (Western Washington University). The publisher’s description follows.

Between Court and Confessional explores the lives of Spanish inquisitors, closely examining the careers and writings of five sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inquisitors. Kimberly Lynn considers what shaped particular inquisitors, what kinds of official experience each accumulated, and to what ends each directed his acquired knowledge and experience. The case studies examine the complex interplay of careerism and ideological commitments evident in inquisitorial activities. Whereas many studies of the Spanish Inquisition tend to depict inquisitors as faceless and interchangeable, Lynn probes the lives of individual inquisitors to show how inquisitors’ operations in their social, political, religious, and intellectual worlds set the Inquisition in motion. By focusing on specific individuals, this study explains how the theory and regulations of the Inquisition were rooted in local conditions, particular disputes, and individual experiences.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Panel on Religious Symbols, Public Reason, the State, et alia

I was fortunate to participate in an excellent panel at William & Mary ICLARS Panelyesterday, as part of the wonderfully massive and variegated International Consortium for Law and Religion Studies conference in Virginia. The overall theme of the conference organized by the marvelously active Cole Durham and Brett Scharffs was “Religion, Democracy, and Equality.”

Our panel, moderated by Professor Mark Movsesian, was called, “Religious Symbols, Public Reason, and the State,” and my co-panelists were Professor Perry Dane (Rutgers) and Professor Javier-Martinez Torrón (Complutense, Spain).

Perry’s talk, entitled “Endorsement, Legal Reason, and the Misguided Quest for Reasonableness,” was a penetrating and highly persuasive critique of the endorsement test. Perry sharply criticized approaches to law (not only in this context) that highlight feelings and sensibilities, and that ask judges to take on what he (channeling Philip Rieff) called “therapeutic” inquiries by reference to “reasonable” beliefs. He talked about endorsement in part in the context of the upcoming legislative prayer decision that the Court will hear in the new term. As a separationist–and, as I was very interested to learn, as Justice Brennan’s law clerk during the term that Brennan dissented in Marsh v. Chambers–Perry was skeptical that he would approve of either the reasons for changes to endorsement that the current Supreme Court might make or the new direction that it might choose (he was specifically critical of the possibility that the Court will apply an originalist methodology).

I was second and presented my co-authored paper (with Kevin Walsh), “Judging Theory.” The paper does not address law and religion head on, but it does so at an angle. The core claim of the paper is the comparative thesis that a judge’s institutional and role-based self-understanding is more important in constitutional adjudication that the collection of ideas that commonly travel under the banner “constitutional theory.” Kevin and I examine the extra-judicial (articles and books) and judicial writing (opinions) of two prominent judges–Judge Richard Posner and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III in several controversial and hot-button contexts (Second Amendment, partial-birth abortion, and the Establishment Clause (there’s the law and religion!)) to make the claim stick.

Finally, Javier discussed religious symbols proper with a particular focus on Lautsi v. Italy. Javier argued that in the European context, where there is no mandated establishment provision that applies to all nations in the Convention on Human Rights, it is wrong to superimpose that mandate through other provisions (provisions guaranteeing equality, for example). Javier further argued–similarly to Perry–that legal claims cannot and should not consist in feelings of “difference” from the majority. As he put it, “What’s wrong with being different?”