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Adams, “Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism”

Next month, the University of Michigan Press will publish Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism by Peter Adams (Montgomery Community College). The publisher’s description follows.

In 1862, in the only instance of a Jewish expulsion in America, General Ulysses S. Grant banished Jewish citizens from the region under his military command. Although the order was quickly revoked by President Lincoln, it represented growing anti-Semitism in America. Convinced that assimilation was their best defense, Jews sought to Americanize by shedding distinctive dress, occupations, and religious rituals.

American Jews recognized the benefit and urgency of bridging the divide between Reform and Orthodox Judaism to create a stronger alliance to face the challenges ahead. With Grant’s 1868 presidential campaign, they also realized they could no longer remain aloof from partisan politics. As they became a growing influence in American politics, both political parties courted the new Jewish vote.

Once in office, Grant took notice of the persecution of Jews in Romania and Russia, and he appointed more Jews to office than any president before him. Indeed, Simon Wolf, a Washington lawyer who became one of Grant’s closest advisers, was part of a new generation of Jewish leaders to emerge in the post–Civil War era—thoroughly Americanized, politically mature, and committed to the modernized Judaism of the Reform movement.

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Goodman, “Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere”

Next month, Cambridge University Press will publish Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere by Lenn Goodman (Vanderbilt University). The publisher’s description follows.Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere

How can we, as people and communities with different religions and cultures, live together with integrity? Does tolerance require us to deny our deep differences or give up all claims to truth, to trade our received traditions for skepticism or relativism? Cultural philosopher Lenn E. Goodman argues that we can respect one another and learn from one another’s ways without either sharing them or relinquishing our own. He argues that our commitments to our own ideals and norms need not mean dogmatism or intolerance. In this study, Goodman offers a trenchant critique of John Rawls’s pervasive claim that religious and metaphysical voices must be silenced in the core political deliberations of a democracy. Inquiry, dialogue, and open debate remain the safeguards of public and personal sanity, and any of us, Goodman illustrates, can learn from one another’s traditions and explorations without abandoning our own.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Panel: “Fault Lines of Faith” (Nov. 21)

On November 21, the Foreign Policy Association in New York City will host a panel, “Fault Lines of Faith: Reporting from Myanmar, Bosnia and Northern Ireland”:

For the past two years, the long-repressed country of Myanmar has been undergoing a fragile transition to more democratic practices. But with freer speech and assembly have come new tensions between the majority Buddhists in the country and minority Muslim populations. More than half the country’s provinces have seen violence, with hundreds of people dead; a Buddhist nationalist movement has been rising in popularity despite allegations that it is stirring anti-Muslim sentiment.

Kira Kay and Jason Maloney will screen and discuss their reporting from Myanmar, and also from two other locations profiled in the “Fault Lines of Faith” series, Northern Ireland and Bosnia. While they vary widely in geography and culture, the regions profiled in the “Fault Lines” series share multiple root causes to their sectarian tensions: questions of nationhood and self identity; marginalization from political power and resources; a climate of human rights abuse and lack of access to justice. The series title depicts these deep societal challenges as much as the more obvious tensions at the surface of these conflicts.

Details are here.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Call for Papers: Alternative Dispute Resolution and Jewish Law

The Aspen Center for Social Values and the Jewish Law Association have announced a call for papers for a conference, “Alternative Dispute Resolution: Is this the future of law?”:

The Conference seeks to engage scholars of Jewish studies, and Law & Religion, on the theme “Alternative Dispute Resolution: Is this the future of law?”, with a particular focus on religious courts of arbitration. Our approach is interdisciplinary, and we welcome proposals for papers from scholars of all fields, including history, law, cultural studies, and the social sciences. We envision panels on some of the following themes, and we welcome submissions that have a historical perspective as well as a contemporary one:

• Recent Developments in ADR

• Marriage, Divorce, & ADR

• Enforcing Religious Arbitration

• Islamic Law in America

• ADR: Are Jewish Courts a Good Model for Success?

Comparative perspectives are also welcome.

The deadline is November 30. Details are here.

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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, all of the authors have remained in the same spots on the list; Zoe Robinson remains at #1; Andrew Koppelman remainst at #2, Ian C. Bartrum remains at #3; Caroline Mala Corbin remains at #4; and Jeremy M. Christiansen remains at #5.

1.What is a ‘Religious Institution’? by Zoe Robinson (Depaul University College of Law) [286 downloads]

2. ‘Freedom of the Church’ and the Authority of the State by Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern University School of Law) [171 downloads]

3.Book Review: ‘The Tragedy of Religious Freedom’  by Ian C. Bartrum (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) [116 downloads]

4.Corporate Religious Liberty by Caroline Mala Corbin (University of Miami School of Law) [113 downloads]

5.‘The Word[ ] ‘Person’…Includes Corporations’: Why the Religious Freedom Restoration Act Protects Both For- and Nonprofit Corporations by Jeremy M. Christiansen  (University of Utah- S.J. Quinney College of Law) [98 downloads]

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Grewal, “Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority”

Next month, New York University Press will publish Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority by Zareena Grewal (Yale Islam is a Foreign CountryUniversity).  The publisher’s description follows.

 In Islam Is a Foreign Country, Zareena Grewal explores some of the most pressing debates about and among American Muslims: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? Who has the authority to speak for Islam and to lead the stunningly diverse population of American Muslims? Do their ties to the larger Muslim world undermine their efforts to make Islam an American religion?

Offering rich insights into these questions and more, Grewal follows the journeys of American Muslim youth who travel in global, underground Islamic networks. Devoutly religious and often politically disaffected, these young men and women are in search of a home for themselves and their tradition. Through their stories, Grewal captures the multiple directions of the global flows of people, practices, and ideas that connect U.S. mosques to the Muslim world. By examining the tension between American Muslims’ ambivalence toward the American mainstream and their desire to enter it, Grewal puts contemporary debates about Islam in the context of a long history of American racial and religious exclusions. Probing the competing obligations of American Muslims to the nation and to the umma (the global community of Muslim believers), Islam is a Foreign Country investigates the meaning of American citizenship and the place of Islam in a global age.

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Lyons, “The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Families and the French Warfare State During Decolonization”

This month, Stanford University Press will publish The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Families and the French Welfare State During Civilizing MissionDecolonization by Amelia H. Lyons (University of central Florida).  The publisher’s description follows.

France, which has the largest Muslim minority community in Europe, has been in the news in recent years because of perceptions that Muslims have not integrated into French society. The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole explores the roots of these debates through an examination of the history of social welfare programs for Algerian migrants from the end of World War II until Algeria gained independence in 1962.

After its colonization in 1830, Algeria fought a bloody war of decolonization against France, as France desperately fought to maintain control over its most prized imperial possession. In the midst of this violence, some 350,000 Algerians settled in France. This study examines the complex and often-contradictory goals of a welfare network that sought to provide services and monitor Algerian migrants’ activities. Lyons particularly highlights family settlement and the central place Algerian women held in French efforts to transform the settled community. Lyons questions myths about Algerian immigration history and exposes numerous paradoxes surrounding the fraught relationship between France and Algeria—many of which echo in French debates about Muslims today.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Downward Spiral of Legal Insult

Here’s a story about the banning of Halloween festivities in some public school districts in Pennsylvania. Many of the reasons are unremarkable–worries about security and the secreting of weapons under costumes, concerns about taking away from regular classroom instruction.

But at least some of the reasons stem from conceivable First Amendment violations. And these reasons relate directly to the issue of Halloween’s putative offensiveness to Christians. “Right now,” said Professor Charles Haynes, “school officials should be sensitive that for many people witches, ghosts, and demons have religious connotations, however much they may be sanitized in culture.”

The argument appears to track the sort of constitutionalized insult claim that I discussed and criticized in this post. There, I asked the question of who, precisely, could possibly be offended, or confused, by the state’s lighthearted celebration of a silly occasion like Halloween for the sake of schoolchildren. It might seem from this story, and from Professor Haynes’s comments, that, in fact, there are many people who take deep offense at Halloween as a “religious” celebration that is insulting to Christians.

But a close reading of the story reveals that it is not confusion or insult at Halloween per se that is driving at least some such complaints. It’s rather the memory of the government’s perceived marginalization of Christmas on prior occasions–again, ostensibly to adhere to the Supreme Court’s heckler’s veto jurisprudence of offensiveness in this area–that has inflamed a sense of hurt and offense. As Haynes puts it: “If you can’t have Jesus in December, why can we have witches in October?” (emphasis mine) Haynes says that he “understands that claim.” I understand it too but that claim has nothing to do with Halloween itself. That assertion of hurt feelings suggests that it isn’t anything about Halloween or ghosts or dress-up or whatever that is confusing or hurtful for religious reasons. Celebrations of Halloween have been occurring in schools for decades now, and it would be odd to see a sudden “backlash” against Halloween on these grounds.

Rather, it is the perceived marginalization of Christmas by the school district–and the offense and hurt feeling that that has caused–which now bubbles up and finds expression in complaints about Halloween as a “religious” occasion. An occasion that previously was only slightly offensive, or not offensive at all, has become much more offensive in light of the culture of offense that itself is felt to have down-graded holidays like Christmas.

So goes the logic of insult–responsive as it is to tit-for-tat hurts and slights. It would be unfair and probably incorrect to say that the Supreme Court is primarily responsible for cementing a culture of insult in law. But by adopting a jurisprudence of offense in this area, it has set itself up for an untenable downward spiral of legal insult, as more and more occasions, activities, and educational traditions become the object of legal claims of unfairness, inequality, or offensiveness.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Thanks to Perry Dane

A hearty thank you to Perry Dane, who joined us as our guest over the past month. We’ve greatly enjoyed having you with us, Perry. Come back soon!

Posted on by JCPW

Furedi, “Authority: A Sociological History”

9780521189286In September, Cambridge University Press published Authority: A Sociological History by Frank Furedi (University of Kent, Canterbury). The publisher’s description follows.

Concern with authority is as old as human history itself. Eve’s sin was to challenge the authority of God by disobeying his rule. Frank Furedi explores how authority was contested in ancient Greece and given a powerful meaning in Imperial Rome. Debates about religious and secular authority dominated Europe through the Middle Ages and the Reformation. The modern world attempted to develop new foundations for authority – democratic consent, public opinion, science – yet Furedi shows that this problem has remained unresolved, arguing that today the authority of authority is questioned. This historical sociology of authority seeks to explain how the contemporary problems of mistrust and the loss of legitimacy of many institutions are informed by the previous attempts to solve the problem of authority. It argues that the key pioneers of the social sciences (Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, Tonnies and especially Weber) regarded this question as one of the principal challenges facing society.