This book provides an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of Eastern Christian churches in Europe, the Middle East, America, Africa, Asia and Australia. Written by leading international scholars in the field, it examines both Orthodox and Oriental churches from the end of the Cold War up to the present day. The book offers a unique insight into the myriad church-state relations in Eastern Christianity and tackles contemporary concerns, opportunities and challenges, such as religious revival after the fall of communism; churches and democracy; relations between Orthodox, Catholic and Greek Catholic churches; religious education and monastic life; the size and structure of congregations; and the impact of migration, secularization and globalization on Eastern Christianity in the twenty-first century.
Despite the ongoing global expansion of Christianity, there remains a lack of comprehensive scholarship on its development in Asia. This volume fills the gap by exploring the world of Asian Christianity and its manifold expressions, including worship, theology, spirituality, inter-religious relations, interventions in society, and mission. The contributors, from over twenty countries, deconstruct many of the widespread misconceptions and interpretations of Christianity in Asia. They analyze how the growth of Christian beliefs throughout the continent is linked with the socio-political and cultural processes of colonization, decolonization, modernization, democratization, identity construction of social groups, and various social movements. With a particular focus on inter-religious encounters and emerging theological and spiritual paradigms, the volume provides alternative frames for understanding the phenomenon of conversion and studies how the scriptures of other religious traditions are used in the practice of Christianity within Asia.
On June 20, the Center for Law and Religion will co-host a conference, “International Religious Freedom and the Global Clash of Values,” at the Libera Università Maria SS. Assunta in Rome. The conference will bring together American and European scholars and officials; proceedings will be in English and Italian with simultaneous translation. Panels will include “Comparative Perspectives on International Religious Freedom,” “Christian and Muslim Perspectives on International Religious Freedom,” and “The Politics of International Religious Freedom.” Participants will include Abdullahi An-Na’im, Pasquale Annicchino, Heiner Bielefeldt, Giuseppe Dalla Torre, Marc DeGirolami, Thomas Farr, Ken Hackett, Monica Lugato, Mark Movsesian, Francisca Pérez-Madrid, Olivier Roy, Nina Shea, Marco Ventura, John Witte, and Roberto Zaccaria.
For details and information about registration, please click here.
More sad news from Nigeria today. A pair of car bombs in the city of Jos has killed more than 100 people. The bombings took place in a predominantly Christian neighborhood. Authorities believe Boko Haram is responsible.
As everybody now knows, Boko Haram is an Islamist terrorist group, linked with al Qaeda, which seeks to establish an Islamist state in Nigeria. About a month ago, the group kidnapped hundreds of girls from a public school in the city of Chibok. The girls’ whereabouts remain unknown. Boko Haram’s leader has threatened to sell them into slavery.
The kidnapping has become a cause célèbre–as Terry Mattingly writes, an Official News Story. Major papers and cable news outlets have given it extended coverage. A worldwide hashtag campaign, #BringBackOurGirls, features the likes of Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Angelina Jolie. John McCain thinks the US should send in special forces to rescue the girls, whether or not Nigeria approves. Well, he wants to intervene everywhere. But otherwise sensible commentators, like Peggy Noonan, agree with him.
What Boko Haram has done to the schoolgirls is an atrocity. It’s appropriate to condemn the kidnapping and do what we can to bring the perpetrators to justice, and, most of all, get the girls home. But here’s the thing. Boko Haram has been carrying out atrocities for years. The group has murdered thousands and caused thousands more to flee. It has burned churches with people inside them; it has massacred people in the streets. But until now, the Western media has paid little attention. Why the change?
Here’s a possible explanation: the majority of Boko Haram’s targets and victims have been Christians–according to one estimate, something like 60%. In fact, 60% may understate things. Boko Haram considers schools and places of entertainment “Christian” institutions, so one should see attacks on those places as part of an anti-Christian campaign as well. In fact, although it hasn’t been widely reported, Chibok is a predominantly Christian city, and most of the kidnapped schoolgirls are Christians. That was the point.
It’s sadly very difficult to get the Western media and human-rights activists to focus on the worldwide persecution of Christians. Kidnap schoolgirls, though, and people sit up and pay attention. The War on Women interests us; the War on Christians, not so much. I suppose the moral is, if you’re a terrorist and you want to get the West to notice you, choose victims we care about.
Alan Meese and Nate Oman, both of William and Mary, have written an exceptionally lucid essay in the Harvard Law Review Forum on one of the main issues in Hobby Lobby: whether a for-profit corporation can qualify as a person for purposes of RFRA. It’s one of the best things on Hobby Lobby I’ve read and I recommend it to people trying to make sense of the issue.
Meese and Oman make three big points. First, closely-held corporations like Hobby Lobby fit naturally within RFRA’s language. Second, there is nothing unusual about closely-held corporations that embody shareholders’ religions. Many such firms exist, and they do not violate some elementary principle of corporate law. Third, limiting the exercise of religion to natural persons mistakes an important goal of religious freedom. “[R]eligious freedom is broader than an individualist concern with personal rights,” they explain. “Rather, it is about limiting the ability of the state to regulate a particular kind of conduct–religious exercise–even when corporate bodies engage in that conduct.”
To me, the second point is the most suggestive for the outcome of Hobby Lobby. Most people think of corporations as large, publicly-traded firms with thousands of passive shareholders who have little to do with day-to-day operations: Exxon Mobil. It would be strange for such a corporation to exercise a religion. But most corporations, like Hobby Lobby itself, are small, private firms with a handful of shareholders. It’s not at all strange to think that the five owners of Hobby Lobby could legitimately want to run their corporation in a way that advances their religious values.
Meese and Oman argue against drawing a distinction, for RFRA purposes, between large corporations like Exxon Mobil and close corporations like Hobby Lobby. But the distinction could be a way for the Court to avoid practical difficulties. The Court could hold that close corporations like Hobby Lobby are RFRA persons and save the question of large corporations for another day. Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts hinted at that outcome during oral argument.
We’ll see what the Court decides. Meanwhile, Meese and Oman have written a very worthwhile essay. You can read it here.
This book presents a new explanation of the rise, development and demise of social movements and cycles of protest in autocracies; the conditions under which protest becomes rebellion; and the impact of protest and rebellion on democratization. Focusing on poor indigenous villages in Mexico’s authoritarian regime, the book shows that the spread of U.S. Protestant missionaries and the competition for indigenous souls motivated the Catholic Church to become a major promoter of indigenous movements for land redistribution and indigenous rights. The book explains why the outbreak of local rebellions, the transformation of indigenous claims for land into demands for ethnic autonomy and self-determination, and the threat of a generalized social uprising motivated national elites to democratize. Drawing on an original dataset of indigenous collective action and on extensive fieldwork, the empirical analysis of the book combines quantitative evidence with case studies and life histories.
Once known as “Pariahs,” Dalits are primarily descendants of unfree agrarian laborers. They belong to India’s lowest castes, face overwhelming poverty and discrimination, and continue to be a source of public anxiety. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, this book follows the conception and evolution of the “Pariah problem” in public consciousness in the 1890s. It shows how high-caste landlords, state officials, and well-intentioned missionaries conceived of Dalit oppression and prevented substantive solutions to the “Pariah Problem”—with consequences that continue to be felt today.
The book begins with a description of the everyday lives of Dalit laborers in the 1890s and highlights the systematic efforts made by the state and Indian elites to protect Indian slavery from public scrutiny. Protestant missionaries were the first non-Dalits to draw attention to their plight. However, their vision of the Pariahs’ suffering as a result of Hindu religious prejudice obscured the fact that the entire agrarian political-economic system depended on Pariah labor. The Indian public as well as colonial officials came to share a view compatible with missionary explanations, which meant all subsequent welfare efforts directed at Dalits focused on religious and social transformation rather than on structural reform. Methodologically, theoretically, and empirically, this book breaks new ground to demonstrate how events in the early decades of state-sponsored welfare directed at Dalits laid the groundwork for the present day, where the postcolonial state and well-meaning social and religious reformers continue to downplay Dalits’ landlessness, violent suppression, and political subordination.
This week’s selections include a pair of reviews of two recent books, a piece on implementing religious law, an overview of the law of religious freedom in China, and a discussion of European anti-ritual-slaughtering laws.
1. Frederick Schauer (UVA Law), On the Utility of Religious Toleration: This review of Brian Leiter’s Why Tolerate Religion? accepts Professor Leiter’s deontically-grounded claims for religion’s non-specialness but challenges the claims grounded in utilitarianism, arguing that a stronger version of utilitarianism would accept unprincipled and even irrational distinctions as potentially welfare-maximizing.
2. Paul Horwitz (Alabama Law), ‘A Troublesome Right’: The ‘Law’ in Dworkin’s Treatment of Religion: A review of the late Ronald Dworkin’s Religion Without God, in which Professor Horwitz takes special aim at Professor Dworkin’s legal demotion of the right of religious freedom. He writes that the “gloss of abstraction” in Dworkin’s arguments results in substantial overstatements of the problems that Dworkin identifies.
4. Ping Xiong (University of South Australia), Freedom of Religion in China Under the Current Legal Framework and Foreign Religious Bodies: A very helpful introduction to the landscape of religious freedom in China. The regime of religious freedom is explored from the perspective of the major religions practiced in China–Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Confucianism–as well as smaller religious groups.
5. Robert J. Delahunty (University of St. Thomas School of Law), Does Animal Welfare Trump Religious Liberty? The Danish Ban on Kosher and Halal Butchering: Professor Delahunty explores the history of European “hygienic” and “humane” laws that ban ritual slaughtering practices. He concludes that these laws do little or nothing to promote animal welfare and probably are motivated by European unease with the growing Muslim population.
Jerusalem’s formal political borders reveal neither the dynamics of power in the city nor the underlying factors that make an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians so difficult. The lines delineating Israeli authority are frequently different from those delineating segregated housing or areas of uneven service provision or parallel national electoral districts of competing educational jurisdictions. In particular, the city’s large number of holy sites and restricted religious compounds create enclaves that continually threaten to undermine the Israeli state’s authority and control over the city. This lack of congruity between political control and the actual spatial organization and everyday use of the city leaves many areas of occupied East Jerusalem in a kind of twilight zone where citizenship, property rights, and the enforcement of the rule of law are ambiguously applied.
Michael Dumper plots a history of Jerusalem that examines this intersecting and multileveled matrix and in so doing is able to portray the constraints on Israeli control over the city and the resilience of Palestinian enclaves after forty-five years of Israeli occupation. Adding to this complex mix is the role of numerous external influences—religious, political, financial, and cultural—so that the city is also a crucible for broader contestation. While the Palestinians may not return to their previous preeminence in the city, neither will Israel be able to assert a total and irreversible dominance. His conclusion is that the city will not only have to be shared, but that the sharing will be based upon these many borders and the interplay between history, geography, and religion.
Every year an estimated 600,000 U.S. Latinos convert from Catholicism to Protestantism. Today, 12.5 million Latinos self-identify as Protestant—a population larger than all U.S. Jews and Muslims combined. Spearheading this spiritual transformation is the Pentecostal movement and Assemblies of God, which is the destination for one out of four converts. In a deeply researched social and cultural history, Gastón Espinosa uncovers the roots of this remarkable turn and the Latino AG’s growing leadership nationwide.
Latino Pentecostals in America traces the Latino AG back to the Azusa Street Revivals in Los Angeles and Apostolic Faith Revivals in Houston from 1906 to 1909. Espinosa describes the uphill struggles for indigenous leadership, racial equality, women in the ministry, social and political activism, and immigration reform. His analysis of their independent political views and voting patterns from 1996 to 2012 challenges the stereotypes that they are all apolitical, right-wing, or politically marginal. Their outspoken commitment to an active faith has led a new generation of leaders to blend righteousness and justice, by which they mean the reconciling message of Billy Graham and the social transformation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Latino AG leaders and their 2,400 churches across the nation represent a new and growing force in denominational, Evangelical, and presidential politics.
This eye-opening study explains why this group of working-class Latinos once called “The Silent Pentecostals” is silent no more. By giving voice to their untold story, Espinosa enriches our understanding of the diversity of Latino religion, Evangelicalism, and American culture.
Twenty-First Century, edited by Lucian N. Leustean (Aston University, UK). The publisher’s description follows:
