Whether buried underfoot or strung overhead, electrical lines are omnipresent. Not only are most societies dependent on electrical infrastructure, but this infrastructure actively shapes electrified society. From the wires, poles, and generators themselves to the entrepreneurs, engineers, politicians, and advisors who determine the process of electrification, our electrical grids can create power—and politics—just as they transmit it.
Current Flow examines the history of electrification of British-ruled Palestine in the 1920s, as it marked, affirmed, and produced social, political, and economic difference between Arabs and Jews. Considering the interplay of British colonial interests, the Jewish-Zionist leanings of a commissioned electric company, and Arab opposition within the case of the Jaffa Power House, Ronen Shamir reveals how electrification was central in assembling a material infrastructure of ethno-national separation in Palestine long before “political partition plans” had ever been envisioned. Ultimately, Current Flow sheds new light on the history of Jewish-Arab relations and offers broader sociological insights into what happens when people are transformed from users into elements of networks.
More from an unpublished talk I presented at the 19th Annual Journal of Law and Religion Symposium at Hamline Law School in 2009.
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In Part I, I talked about the importance of “authenticity” and the risk of succumbing to “cheap prooftexting” when Jews bring their religious values to bear in public debate. While the general notion of “authenticity” is obviously also relevant to Christian interventions in public debate, it might seem at first glance that Christians need not worry about the more specific challenges facing Jews — especially the need to distinguish between religious law and religious exhortation and also between intra-group and universal norms. After all, most Christians, unlike Jews, do not treat law, with its rigor and limitations, as central to religious life. Nor do Christians, at first glance, seem to be caught up as Jews are in a tense polarity between particularism and universalism.
But I want to sketch an argument that, to the contrary, there is a lot of resonance between the two cases. Read more
I want, in three posts adapted from an unpublished talk I presented at the 19th Annual Journal of Law and Religion Symposium at Hamline Law School in 2009, to add a bit to the possibly already-stale conversation over the role of religious voices in the public square. If I can add anything, it will be to focus on the distinctive challenges, both internal and external, that confront those religious voices as they try to translate theology into policy.
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Years ago, I attended a panel discussion on Jewish views of the American welfare state. My memory of the event is hazy, but I do recall that several speakers discussed strands in Jewish law that might support income redistribution, national healthcare reform, or the like. Finally, the last panelist got up and argued that Judaism actually had little to say about the American welfare state, and that most of the textual sources from which the other speakers drew conclusions about contested matters of American policy were, as a matter of Jewish law, only relevant to the internal life of Jewish communities or to a Jewish polity.
What should we make of this critique? This isn’t the place to review the legal analysis. So I will, on the one hand, just assume, for the sake of argument, that it was correct. But there’s another hand: Though law is at the heart of Judaism, not all Jewish religious discourse is legal. There are other registers through which Jewish tradition speaks, including Biblical narrative and poetry, rabbinic homiletics, systematic moral philosophy, mysticism, and more. And even the law has a vision – attitudes and aspirations and ideals – beyond its strict four corners.
There is also a third hand, however. For if religious arguments do get made in different registers, it is important to get the discourse right. Read more
I am delighted to announce a call for papers for the Religious Legal Theory Conference, now in its fifth year. Mark and I were pleased to host the conference in its second incarnation, where the theme was Religion in Law, Law in Religion.
This year’s conference is being put together by the superb Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory Law School, which is directed by the éminence grise of law and religion, John Witte. The theme this year is A Global Conversation: Exploring Interfaith and International Models for the Interaction of Religion andState. The conference will be held on February 24-25, 2014. Paper proposals are due November 30, 2013, with notification shortly thereafter. Please contact Dr. Mark Goldfeder of Emory Law School with your proposal.
Below the fold, the conference description and details of the call for papers. Read more
The U.S. Air Force Academy may drop a religious reference from an oath cadets take to swear allegiance to the school’s honor code after a challenge by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The story reports that one option under consideration is “dumping the entire honor oath.” UPDATE: This story reports that today the Air Force decided that “So Help Me God” will be “optional”
A United Nations Report published on Wednesday details widespread human rights abuses in Iran, including torture, arbitrary arrest, and discrimination against members of minority religious groups in employment and education. The report is here. Iran condemned the report, calling it unfair and politically motivated
Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge was christened this past week by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. Prince George will eventually hold the official titles of “Defender of the Faith” and “Supreme Governor of the Church of England”
Cross and Kremlin uniquely surveys both the history and the contemporary situation of the Russian Orthodox Church. The first chapter gives a concise chronology from the tenth century through the present day. The following chapters highlight several important issues and aspects of Russian Orthodoxy — church-state relations, theology, ecclesiastical structure, monasticism, spirituality, the relation of Russian Orthodoxy to the West, dissidence as a frequent phenomenon in Russian church history, and more.
How was it possible that Greeks often wrote their laws on the walls of their temples, but — in contrast to other ancient societies — never transformed these written civic laws into a religious law? Did it matter whether laws were inscribed in stone, clay, or on a scroll? And above all, how did written law shape a society in which the majority population was illiterate?
This volume addresses the similarities and differences in the role played by law and religion in various societies across the Eastern Mediterranean. Bringing together a collection of 14 essays from scholars of the Hebrew Bible, Ancient Greece, the Ancient Near East, Qumran, Elephantine, the Nabateans, and the early Arab world, it also approaches these subjects in an all-encompassing manner, looking in detail at the notion of law and religion in the Eastern Mediterranean as a whole in both the geographical as well as the historical space.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the FBI’s arrest of two rabbis who allegedly orchestrated the kidnapping and torture of dozens of men in New Jersey. The rabbis allegedly did this in order to force the men to consent to their wives’ requests for divorce under Jewish law. Under Jewish law, a woman cannot unilaterally divorce her husband; the husband must give permission, or a get. If he refuses, the wife becomes a chained woman, or agunah, who cannot remarry.
The women in these cases were apparently desperate for Jewish divorces and took extreme measures to obtain them. They allegedly paid the rabbis tens of thousands of dollars to convene Jewish law tribunals and issue decrees allowing violence against the recalcitrant husbands. The rabbis then allegedly arranged for thugs to torture the husbands until the husbands granted the gets. This conduct would obviously be criminal under US law and the rabbis will not be able to escape punishment by arguing that their religion authorized what they did.
I expressed doubt in my post that ordering violence against a recalcitrant husband would be consistent with Jewish law. It turns out that I may have spoken too soon. My friend Michael Helfand at Pepperdine University, an expert in Jewish law and occasional guest here at CLR Forum, explains in the The Forward that “the use of violent sanction in these circumstances has been a feature of Jewish family law for millennia.” Under traditional Jewish law, he writes, if a husband refused to comply with a tribunal’s judgment and give his wife a get,
the rabbinical court could authorize the use of violent force against the husband. While divorces [could not] be executed under duress, it was simply unimaginable that a husband would so cruelly leave his wife trapped in a nonfunctional marriage. Thus, force simply served as a vehicle to free the husband’s inner desire to do the right thing and grant his wife a divorce.
Michael doesn’t advocate this practice, I hasten to add, and he notes that the strong implication of bribery would likely invalidate the religious decrees in the New Jersey cases. In fact, Michael advocates a very American fix for the problem of agunot–a prenuptial agreement. (Michael wrote about the topic here at CLR Forum back in March). The Beth Din of America, a major Jewish law tribunal in the US, has adopted a model prenup “that requires a husband to provide his wife with a daily support payment, typically $150, for each day the two no longer live together and the husband still refuses to grant his wife a religious divorce.”
The prenup is not a panacea. A wealthy husband could make the payments and refuse to give a get, and a wife without such a prenup wouldn’t benefit at all. But the prenup might help some agunot, and wouldn’t require kidnapping one’s husband and torturing him. It’s like they used to tell us in law school: In America, when the going gets tough, the tough contract out.
Here’s a curious little story about a gigantic statue of Jesus (standing a gargantuan 128 feet tall, and weighing in at several tons) cast in Armenia that has been installed on top of a mountain near the Monastery of the Cherubim in the Syrian city of Saidnaya (which is itself apparently already 2,100 meters above sea level). This story reports that the project was supported by the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church. The statue is reportedly visible from Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel.
Until the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the stance of the Roman Catholic Church toward the social, cultural, economic, and political developments of the twentieth century was largely antagonistic. Naturally opposed to secularization, skeptical of capitalist markets indifferent to questions of justice, confused and appalled by new forms of high and low culture, and resistant to the social and economic freedom of women—in all of these ways the Catholic Church set itself up as a thoroughly anti-modern institution. Yet, in and through the period from World War I to Vatican II, the Church did engage with, react to, and even accommodate various aspects of modernity. In All Good Books Are Catholic Books, Una M. Cadegan shows how the Church’s official position on literary culture developed over this crucial period.
The Catholic Church in the United States maintained an Index of Prohibited Books and the National Legion of Decency (founded in 1933) lobbied Hollywood to edit or ban movies, pulp magazines, and comic books that were morally suspect. These regulations posed an obstacle for the self-understanding of Catholic American readers, writers, and scholars. But as Cadegan finds, Catholics developed a rationale by which they could both respect the laws of the Church as it sought to protect the integrity of doctrine and also engage the culture of artistic and commercial freedom in which they operated as Americans. Catholic literary figures including Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Merton are important to Cadegan’s argument, particularly as their careers and the reception of their work demonstrate shifts in the relationship between Catholicism and literary culture. Cadegan trains her attention on American critics, editors, and university professors and administrators who mediated the relationship among the Church, parishioners, and the culture at large.
Electrification of Palestine by Ronen Shamir (Tel-Aviv University). The publisher’s description follows.
Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America