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2014 Conference on Christian Legal Thought — Public Engagement With Law and Religion: A Conference in Honor of Jean Bethke Elshtain

I’m very pleased to announce the 2014 Conference on Christian Legal Thought, sponsored by the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago and the Law Professors Christian Fellowship. The conference occurs in conjunction with the annual AALS meeting, which is being held in Manhattan this year. This year’s conference celebrates the life and thought of Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain and explores the theme of public engagement with law and religion.

The schedule is below, and you can register here. I hope to see many Forum readers there.

Friday, January 3, 2014, 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm
The University Club
One West 54th Street, New York, NY 10019

Conference Topic: Public Engagement With Law and Religion: A Conference in Honor of Jean Bethke Elshtain

Noon: Registration, Luncheon, and Opening Remarks

1:15 pm – 2:45 pm: Session One. Public Engagement With Law and Religion: The Thought of Jean Bethke Elshtain

Chair: Zachary R. Calo (Valparaiso University School of Law)

Thomas C. Berg (University of St. Thomas School of Law)

Eric Gregory (Princeton University, Department of Religion)

Charles Mathewes (University of Virginia, Department of Religious Studies)

2:45 pm – 3:00 pm: Coffee Break

3:00 pm – 4:30 pm.  Session Two. Public Engagement With Law and Religion: Journalistic Perspectives 

Chair: Marc O. DeGirolami  (St. John’s University School of Law)

Matthew Boudway (Associate Editor, Commonweal)

Susannah Meadows (Columnist, New York Times)

Rusty R. Reno (Editor, First Things)

4:45 PM – 5:15 pm: Vespers

5:15 pm: Reception

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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,  Zoe Robinson remains at #1; Andrew Koppelman remains at #2; Michal Gilad joins the list at #3, replacing Ian Bartrum who drops to #5; and Patrick McKinley Brennan joins the list at #4.

1.What is a ‘Religious Institution’? by Zoe Robinson (Depaul University College of Law) [290 downloads]

2. ‘Freedom of the Church’ and the Authority of the State by Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern University School of Law) [181 downloads]

3. In God’s Shadow: Unveiling the Hidden World of Domestic Violence Victims in Religious Communities by Michal Gilad (University of Pennsylvania Law School) [163 downloads]

4. Resisting the Grand Coalition in Favor of the Status Quo by Giving Full Scope to the Libertas Ecclesiae by Patrick McKinley Brennan (Villanova University School of Law) [151 downloads]

5.Book Review: ‘The Tragedy of Religious Freedom’  by Ian C. Bartrum (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) [122 downloads]

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Shavit, “My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel”

This month, Random House will publish My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit.  The publisher’s description follows. My Promised Land

Not since Thomas L. Friedman’s groundbreaking From Beirut to Jerusalem has a book captured the essence and the beating heart of the Middle East as keenly and dynamically as My Promised Land. Facing unprecedented internal and external pressures, Israel today is at a moment of existential crisis. Ari Shavit draws on interviews, historical documents, private diaries, and letters, as well as his own family’s story, illuminating the pivotal moments of the Zionist century to tell a riveting narrative that is larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and national, both deeply human and of profound historical dimension.

We meet Shavit’s great-grandfather, a British Zionist who in 1897 visited the Holy Land on a Thomas Cook tour and understood that it was the way of the future for his people; the idealist young farmer who bought land from his Arab neighbor in the 1920s to grow the Jaffa oranges that would create Palestine’s booming economy; the visionary youth group leader who, in the 1940s, transformed Masada from the neglected ruins of an extremist sect into a powerful symbol for Zionism; the Palestinian who as a young man in 1948 was driven with his family from his home during the expulsion from Lydda; the immigrant orphans of Europe’s Holocaust, who took on menial work and focused on raising their children to become the leaders of the new state; the pragmatic engineer who was instrumental in developing Israel’s nuclear program in the 1960s, in the only interview he ever gave; the zealous religious Zionists who started the settler movement in the 1970s; the dot-com entrepreneurs and young men and women behind Tel-Aviv’s booming club scene; and today’s architects of Israel’s foreign policy with Iran, whose nuclear threat looms ominously over the tiny country.

As it examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, My Promised Land asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can Israel survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is currently facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. The result is a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.

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Sarat, “Fire in the Canyon: Religion, Migration, and the Mexican Dream”

This month, New York University Press will publish Fire in the Canyon: Religion, Migration, and the Mexican Dream by Leah Sarat (Arizona State Fire in the CanyonUniversity).  The publisher’s description follows.

The canyon in central Mexico was ablaze with torches as hundreds of people filed in. So palpable was their shared shock and grief, they later said, that neither pastor nor priest was needed. The event was a memorial service for one of their own who had died during an attempted border passage. Months later a survivor emerged from a coma to tell his story. The accident had provoked a near-death encounter with God that prompted his conversion to Pentecostalism.

Today, over half of the local residents of El Alberto, a town in central Mexico, are Pentecostal. Submitting themselves to the authority of a God for whom there are no borders, these Pentecostals today both embrace migration as their right while also praying that their “Mexican Dream”—the dream of a Mexican future with ample employment for all—will one day become a reality.

Fire in the Canyon provides one of the first in‑depth looks at the dynamic relationship between religion, migration, and ethnicity across the U.S.-Mexican border. Faced with the choice between life‑threatening danger at the border and life‑sapping poverty in Mexico, residents of El Alberto are drawing on both their religion and their indigenous heritage to demand not only the right to migrate, but also the right to stay home. If we wish to understand people’s migration decisions, Sarat argues, we must take religion seriously. It is through religion that people formulate their ideas about life, death, and the limits of government authority.

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Seventh Circuit Enjoins Enforcement of Contraception Mandate Against For-Profits

In an extensive decision, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has enjoined the enforcement of the HHS contraception mandate against several for-profit corporations as well as the individual owners of those corporations. The majority held that “the corporate plaintiffs are ‘persons’ under RFRA and may invoke the statute’s protection; the contraception mandate substantially burdens the religious-exercise rights of all the plaintiffs; and the government has not carried its burden under strict scrutiny.” Since RFRA does not itself define “person,” the majority reached the conclusion that corporations are “persons” under RFRA by consulting the Dictionary Act and finding that nothing in the text of RFRA indicates that the Dictionary Act definition would be a “poor fit” with the statutory scheme (this is the standard announced in a 1993 Supreme Court case).  In both O Centro and Lukumi Babalu, the Supreme Court enforced the free exercise rights of corporations, so the relevant context did not indicate that the Dictionary Act definition of “person” was inapposite here. The court proceeded through a very thorough analysis of the strict scrutiny inquiry. Judge Rovner dissented.

I’ll use the occasion to update my running tally of where we are now in the circuit courts of appeals with respect to this class of litigation:

  • Circuits that have rejected claims in which for-profit corporations are plaintiffs as to the corporations and the individual owners: Third Circuit, Sixth Circuit.
  • Circuits that have accepted claims in which for-profit corporations are plaintiffs as to the corporations and the individual owners: Seventh Circuit.
  • Circuits that have accepted claims in which for-profit corporations are plaintiffs as to the corporations but not the individual owners: Tenth Circuit.
  • Circuits that have accepted claims in which for-profit corporations are plaintiffs as to the individual owners but not the corporations: D.C. Circuit.
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Calo Reviews “The Tragedy of Religious Freedom”

Zachary Calo has posted a very generous review of The Tragedy of Religious Freedom. Zak’s penetrating criticisms of the book are well worth reading and thinking over. In particular, the interaction of theology and law is a theme that he himself has been developing over the years in superb writing. And I am coming to agree that it would have done the book some good to explore those issues more explicitly. But at any rate I am grateful to Zak for pressing these points in such a characteristically thoughtful and well-crafted way. Here is a bit from the review:

If the book does not fully diagnose the problem, it is also arguable that the logic animating the method of tragedy and history does not fully respond to the present situation. In particular, it might be that a full response needs illumina- tion from theology. Such an impulse seems at time present in the book. There are echoes of transcendence in DeGirolami’s account of tragedy and history, but the book contains unexploited resources for drawing a theological imaginary more fully into the jurisprudential task.

His account of tragedy…rests on the insight that we inhabit a moral universe in which it is not possible to fully instantiate moral goods. Yet in so proposing, DeGirolami is not simply commenting on the quandaries of practi- cal ethics, but describing what it means to act responsibly, to judge rightly and prudently, in a world defined by such limits. A jurisprudence grounded not in abstract principle, but in the lived experience of the world, cannot but confront the need to make tragic choices. “In law,” DeGirolami writes, “it is necessary that one side win and the other lose, yet the inevitability of loss does not preclude choice.” Law, DeGirolami adds, might even be “centrally about the sacrifices entailed by choice making” (p. 99). In encountering such language, one thinks of Augustine’s judge in Book 19 of City of God. Confronted by the “darkness” of making tragic choices, the judge yearns to escape the misery of the office. Yet, impelled by duty, the judge submits to unhappiness, executes the violent decisions of law, and cries out to God with the Psalmist “From my necessities deliver Thou me.” Tragedy finds a paradoxical if limited coherence only within this divine economy. Though DeGirolami never frames his account of tragedy on such express theological turns, an Augustinian impulse never seems far from the surface of his account.

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Around the Web This Week

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

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Worthen, “Apostles of Reason”

9780199896462_450This November, Oxford University Press will publish Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism by Molly Worthen (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). The publisher’s description follows.

In Apostles of Reason, Molly Worthen offers a sweeping intellectual history of modern American evangelicalism. Traditionally, evangelicalism has been seen as a cohesive—indeed almost monolithic—religious movement. Sometimes, religion drops out of the picture and evangelicalism is treated strictly as a political force. Worthen argues that these views are false. Evangelicalism is, rather, a community of believers preoccupied by shared anxieties. Evangelicals differ from one another on the details of their ideas about God and humankind, but three elemental concerns unite them: how to reconcile faith and reason; how to know Jesus; and how to act on faith in a secularized public square. In combination, under the pressures of modernity, and in the absence of a guiding authority capable of resolving uncertainties and disagreements, these anxieties have shaped evangelicals into a distinctive spiritual community.

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McCrudden (ed.), “Understanding Human Dignity”

This November, Oxford University Press will publish Understanding Human Dignity edited by Christopher McCrudden (Queen’s University Belfast). The publisher’s description follows.

Understanding Human Dignity aims to help the reader make sense of current debates about the meaning and implications of the idea of human dignity. The concept of human dignity has probably never been so omnipresent in everyday speech, or so deeply embedded in political and legal discourse. In debates on torture, abortion, same-sex marriage, and welfare reform, appeals to dignity are seldom hard to find. The concept of dignity is not only a prominent feature of political debate, but also, and increasingly, of legal argument. Indeed, courts tell us that human dignity is the foundation of all human rights. But the more important it is, the more contested it seems to have become. There has, as a result, been an extraordinary explosion of scholarly writing about the concept of human dignity in law, political philosophy, and theology. This book aims to reflect on these intra-disciplinary debates about dignity in law, philosophy, history, politics, and theology, through a series of edited essays from specialists in these fields, explored the contested concept in its full richness and complexity.