Posted on by Perry Dane · 2 Comments

“The Son You Love”

Yesterday, during Shabbat services, Jews read Vayera (Genesis 18:1 – 22:24), the portion of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) whose narrative includes the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham’s expulsion of Hagar and Ishamel, and then as its climax, the Akedah — the binding of Isaac.

During yesterday’s service at the Havurah in my synagogue, I gave a d’var Torah (homily) on Vayera.  Here’s a lightly edited version:

*   *   *

The typical question we’re moved to ask about the Akedah is whether, in Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command, he passed God’s test of faith, or spectacularly failed it. That is a big question, but it is too big for me this morning. It might also not be the right question. Because, actually, Abraham failed his test long before the Akedah, long before God called him to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah. Read more

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Around the Web This Week

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

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Tarabey, “Family Law in Lebanon”

9781780765624Next month, Macmillan will publish Family Law in Lebanon: Marriage and Divorce Among the Druze by Lubna Tarabey (American University of Beirut). The publisher’s description follows.

Much of the life and ritual of the Druze in Lebanon appears mysterious to outsiders, as this esoteric sect remains closed to non-members. Lubna Tarabey, herself a member of this secretive community, is ideally-placed to offer insight into the family life, tradition and religious practices of the Druze. She reaches back to the 1970s, and the start of a civil war that shattered Lebanon along confessional lines, to explore how the substantial social and political changes that have shaken the country have affected marriage and divorce practices. Through extensive research, she approaches a complex web of change and continuity, of traditional values competing with enhanced individualism and personal freedoms. In Lebanon, family law falls under the authority of its religious courts, and Tarabey traces the ways in which social and legal developments have impacted family law and the internal cohesion of the Druze.

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“Prohibition, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights” (Labate & Cavnar, eds.)

bookNext month, Springer will publish Prohibition, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use edited by Beatriz Caluby Labate (Center for Economic Research and Education, Mexico) and Clancy Cavnar (John F. Kennedy University). The publisher’s description follows.

This book addresses the use and regulation of traditional drugs such as peyote, ayahuasca, coca leaf, cannabis, khat and Salvia divinorum. The uses of these substances can often be found at the intersection of diverse areas of life, including politics, medicine, shamanism, religion, aesthetics, knowledge transmission, socialization, and celebration. The collection analyzes how some of these psychoactive plants have been progressively incorporated and regulated in developed Western societies by both national legislation and by the United Nations Drug Conventions. It focuses mainly, but not only, on the debates in court cases around the world involving the claim of religious use and the legal definitions of “religion.” It further touches upon issues of human rights and cognitive liberty as they relate to the consumption of drugs. While this collection emphasizes certain uses of psychoactive substances in different cultures and historical periods, it is also useful for thinking about the consumption of drugs in general in contemporary societies. The cultural and informal controls discussed here represent alternatives to the current merely prohibitionist policies, which are linked to the spread of illicit and violent markets. By addressing the disputes involved in the regulation of traditional drug use, this volume reflects on notions such as origin, place, authenticity, and tradition, thereby relating drug policy to broader social science debates.

Posted on by Perry Dane

Religious Division and Identity – Richard III and the Rest of Us – Part IV

I’ve been writing about theological and historical perspectives on religious identity, continuity, and division.  See here and here and here.  But what about the law? The problem of competing claims to what I’ve called the “religious DNA” of a faith tradition typically comes up during battles over church property arising out of divisions and schisms of one sort or another, within congregations or between congregations and larger church bodies.  (I’m not going to talk here about the “personnel” issues that have given risen to the “ministerial exception” doctrine

These sorts of conflicts arise frequently in a country such as ours where religious life and ecclesiastical identities have often been in flux, and have always raised fascinating and difficult questions.  An important recent example has been the effort to adjudicate the property of several Episcopal parish churches in Virginia whose congregations voted to break away from the Diocese of Virginia, and affiliate with the new “Anglican Church in North America” in reaction to the national Episcopal Church’s policies regarding homosexuality.  Nobody, of course, disputes the right of a group of persons to worship as they please and affiliate with whatever religious group they please.  The real question, put bluntly, is who gets to keep the church building, the bank accounts, the chalices and crosses and books and all the other material stuff of religious life.  This past April, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled largely in favor of the Diocese and the national Episcopal Church and against the breakaway congregations.

The issues raised by these and similar cases are much too involved and messy for one blog post.  But here are a few thoughts, connecting the legal questions to the other perspectives I’ve written about in this little series of posts.

Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Panel: Freedom of Religion or Belief and Gender Equality (Oct. 30)

In New York on October 30, the NGO Committee on Freedom of Religion or Belief, together with BYU’s International Center for Law and Religion Studies, will host a luncheon and panel discussion on Freedom of Religion or Belief and Gender Equality. Featured speakers include:

  • Heiner Bielefeldt, UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Religion or Belief, and author of a new report, “Freedom of Religion or Belief and  Equality Between Men and Women”;
  • Lakshmi Puri, deputy executive director of UN Women;
  • Gulalai Ismail, founder and chairperson of  Aware Girls;
  • Margareta Grape, representative to the UN, World Council of Churches;
  • Tina Ramirez, president, Hardwired.

Details are here.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Touro Announces Law and Religion Moot Court Competition

Our friend San Levine emails to let us know that Touro Law School will host an annual national moot court competition in law and religion. The first competition will take place in April 2014. Details are available here.

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Stamatov, “The Origins of Global Humanitarianism: Religion, Empires, and Advocacy”

This month, Cambridge will publish The Origins of Global Humanitarianism:9781107021730 Religion, Empires, and Advocacy, by Peter Stamatov (Yale University). The publisher’s description follows.

Whether lauded and encouraged or criticized and maligned, action in solidarity with culturally and geographically distant strangers has been an integral part of European modernity. Traversing the complex political landscape of early modern European empires, this book locates the historical origins of modern global humanitarianism in the recurrent conflict over the ethical treatment of non-Europeans that pitted religious reformers against secular imperial networks. Since the sixteenth-century beginnings of European expansion overseas and in marked opposition to the exploitative logic of predatory imperialism, these reformers – members of Catholic orders and, later, Quakers and other reformist Protestants – developed an ideology and a political practice in defense of the rights and interests of distant “others.” They also increasingly made the question of imperial injustice relevant to growing “domestic” publics in Europe. A distinctive institutional model of long-distance advocacy crystallized out of these persistent struggles, becoming the standard weapon of transnational activists.

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Janson, “Islam, Youth, and Modernity in the Gambia: The Tablighi Jama’at”

Next month, Cambridge will publish Islam, Youth, and Modernity in the Gambia: 9781107040571The Tablighi Jama’at, by Marloes Janson (University of London). The publisher’s description follows.

This monograph deals with the sweeping emergence of the Tablighi Jama’at – a transnational Islamic missionary movement that has its origins in the reformist tradition that emerged in India in the mid-nineteenth century – in the Gambia in the past decade. It explores how a movement that originated in South Asia could appeal to the local Muslim population – youth and women in particular – in a West African setting. By recording the biographical narratives of five Gambian Tablighis, the book provides an understanding of the ambiguities and contradictions young people are confronted with in their (re)negotiation of Muslim identity. Together these narratives form a picture of how Gambian youth go about their lives within the framework of neo-liberal reforms and renegotiated parameters informed by the Tablighi model of how to be a “true” Muslim, which is interpreted as a believer who is able to reconcile his or her faith with a modern lifestyle.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 1 Comment

Religion Without God (bien avant Dworkin)

I am in Evanston for a conference and thought to pay a visit to a favorite old usedBookman's Alley bookstore that I had enjoyed several years ago, “Bookman’s Alley.” The store is truly a treasure, full of surprises, and complete with a wonderfully surly owner. I took a shot of the old storefront (which is tucked away down the alley) and here’s a shot of part of a lovely collection of the complete works of Thackeray–some thirty odd volumes of his writing, all in disorder.

To my great regret, I discovered upon entering that Bookman’s is closing down Thackerayafter more than three decades. I see from this story last year that plans for Bookman’s closing have been in the works for some time. But it seemed from the melancholy mood of the store (and from the 70% discount) that the end is nigh.

I wanted to honor the store by buying a few things, even though I never relish the thought of carrying back books on a plane (with difficulty I resisted the Thackeray feast). Instead, I found a few smaller things, including an old edition of Carl Becker’s skeptical classic, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, delivered as the Storrs Lecture in 1931 and still remarkable in several respects (one of which, I think, is the informality and easiness of the writing).

Becker’s short tract is a masterpiece of critical commentary on what we would Beckertoday call the relationship of “secularism” and “civil religion.” Here’s something from the fourth and final lecture, “The Uses of Posterity,” which will perhaps be of interest to those who are now reading Ronald Dworkin’s recently published, posthumous volume, “Religion Without God”:

Nearly a century ago De Tocqueville noted the fact that the French Revolution was a “political revolution which functioned in the manner and which took on in some sense the aspect of a religious revolution.” Like Islamism or the Protestant revolt, it overflowed the frontiers of countries and nations and was extended by “preaching and propaganda.” It functioned,

in relation to this world, in precisely the same manner that religious revolutions function in respect to the other: it considered the citizen in an abstract fashion, apart from particular societies, in the same way that religions consider man in general, independently of time and place. It sought not merely the particular rights of French citizens, but the general political rights and duties of all men. [Accordingly] since it appeared to be more concerned with the regeneration of the human race than with the reformation of France, it generated a passion which, until then, the most violent political revolutions had never exhibited. It inspired proselytism and gave birth to propaganda. It could therefore assume that appearance of a religious revolution which so astonished contemporaries; or rather it became itself a kind of new religion, an imperfect religion it is true, a religion without God, without a form of worship, and without a future life, but one which nevertheless, like Islamism, inundated the earth with soldiers, apostles, and martyrs.

L’ancien régime et la Révolution, Bk I, ch.3 [emphasis mine]. De Tocqueville’s contemporaries were too much preoccupied with political issues and the validity of traditional religious doctrines to grasp the significance of his pregnant observations. Not until our own time have historians been sufficiently detached from religions to understand that the Revolution, in its later stages especially, took on the character of a crusade. But it is now well understood…not only that the Revolution attempted to substitute the eighteenth-century religion of humanity for the traditional faiths, but also that, contrary to the belief of De Tocqueville, the new religion was not without God, forms of worship, or a future life. On the contrary, the new religion had its dogmas, the sacred principles of the Revolution–Liberté et sainte égalité. It had its form of worship, an adaptation of Catholic ceremonial, which was elaborated in connection with its civic fêtes. It had its saints, the heroes and martyrs of liberty. It was sustained by an emotional impulse, a mystical faith in humanity, in the ultimate regeneration of the human race.