Posted on by Christina Vlahos

“The Pew and the Picket Line” (eds. Cantwell et al)

In March, the University of Illinois Press will release “The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class,” edited by Christopher D. Cantwell (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Heath W. Carter (Valparaiso University), Janine Giordano Drake (University of Great Falls). The publisher’s description follows:

The Pew and the Picket Line collects works from a new generation of scholars working at the nexus where religious history and working-9780252081484class history converge. Focusing on Christianity and its unique purchase in America, the contributors use in-depth local histories to illustrate how Americans male and female, rural and urban, and from a range of ethnic backgrounds dwelt in a space between the church and the shop floor. Their vivid essays show Pentecostal miners preaching prosperity while seeking miracles in the depths of the earth, while aboveground black sharecroppers and white Protestants established credit unions to pursue a joint vision of cooperative capitalism.

Innovative and essential, The Pew and the Picket Line reframes venerable debates as it maps the dynamic contours of a landscape sculpted by the powerful forces of Christianity and capitalism.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

The Play of Daniel

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James Ruff as Daniel in the Trinity Production (NYT)

Earlier this month, I had a chance to see the Gotham Early Music Scene’s production of The Play of Daniel, a medieval Christmas pageant, performed as part of the annual Twelfth Night Festival at New York’s Trinity Church. The festival, which the church started several years ago, revives the idea of Christmas as a twelve-day holiday beginning on December 25 and running until Epiphany, January 6. It includes concerts and plays at Trinity and nearby St. Paul’s. I hope the organizers include this production of Daniel every year.

Students at Beauvais Cathedral in the north of France wrote Daniel, a drama based on episodes in the Old Testament book, around the year 1200. The text is a mix of Latin and Old French. The music, without rhythmical notation, survives in a manuscript at the British Library; the Trinity production rendered many of the numbers as dances. Interpolated within the biblical story are non-biblical texts, including songs that foretell the coming of Christ and even a Christmas carol of sorts, Congaudemus celebremus natalis sollempnia—“Let us together joyfully celebrate the Feast of the Nativity.” The presence of these songs, as well as some other internal evidence, suggests Daniel is meant to be performed at Christmastime.

The Trinity production was a lot of fun—the music; the costumes, inspired by pictures at the Cloisters in upper Manhattan; the acting, everything. Trinity’s Gothic Revival setting worked perfectly. Early music isn’t everyone’s thing, I know, but I think everyone would enjoy this production, including kids. There are even some laughs.

For people interested in church and state, the play has additional meaning. In the Old Testament book, King Darius’s courtiers urge him to issue an order providing that “whoever prays to anyone, divine or human, for thirty days, except to you, O king, shall be thrown into a den of lions.” Darius issues the order, but Daniel refuses to comply. “He continued to go to his house, which had windows in its upper room open toward Jerusalem, and to get down on his knees three times a day to pray to his God and praise him, just as he had done previously.” The courtiers find out and haul Daniel before Darius, who cannot take back his order, as the laws of the Medes and Persians, once proclaimed, are irrevocable. Daniel goes off to the lions, but God sends an angel to protect him. Moved, Darius frees Daniel and orders the courtiers thrown to the lions instead. They don’t fare as well.

The story of Daniel in the lion’s den is pretty well known, even in our age of biblical illiteracy. But there is another church and state allusion in Daniel, more obscure today, but which contemporary audiences would surely have recognized. Daniel was written at the height of the investiture crisis, a centuries-long struggle for control of the Catholic Church that pitted the Holy Roman Emperor and other sovereigns against the papacy. Harold Berman famously dated the origins of the Western legal system, particularly legal pluralism, to the investiture crisis and what he called “the papal revolution” of the late Middle Ages. When Daniel was written, Becket’s murder was still in living memory, and the outcome of the investiture crisis was far from certain. Surely those students of Beauvais had current events in mind when they staged a drama showing what happens to courtiers who try to impose the power of the state against believers.

If you can, go and see Daniel next Christmas. Meanwhile, to tide you over, here is a video of this year’s performance from Trinity’s website.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

“Race and Secularism in America” (eds. Kahn and Lloyd)

In March, the Columbia University Press will release “Race and Secularism in America,” edited by Jonathon S. Kahn (Vassar College) and Vincent W. Lloyd (Syracuse University).  The publisher’s description follows:

This anthology draws bold comparisons between secularist strategies 9780231174916to contain, privatize, and discipline religion and the treatment of racialized subjects by the American state. Specializing in history, literature, anthropology, theology, religious studies, and political theory, contributors expose secularism’s prohibitive practices in all facets of American society and suggest opportunities for change.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Salehin, “Islamic NGOs in Bangladesh”

In January, Routledge Press will release “Islamic NGOs in Bangladesh: Development, Piety and Neoliberal Governmentality,” by Mohammad Musfequs Salehin (University of Bergen).  The publisher’s description follows:

NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) have emerged in both a development and aid capacity in Bangladesh, 9781138844452providing wide-reaching public services to the country’s population living in extreme poverty. However, resistance to and limitations of NGO-led development – which in conjunction with Bangladesh’s social transformation – led to a new religious-based NGO development practice.

Looking at the role of Islamic NGOs in Bangladesh, the book investigates new forms of neoliberal governmentality supported by international donors. It discusses how this form of social regulation produces and reproduces subjectivities, particularly Muslim women subjectivity, and has combined religious and economic rationality, further complicating the boundaries and the relationship between Islam, modernity, and development. The book argues that both secular and Islamic NGOs target women in the name of empowerment but more importantly as the most reliable partners to meet their debt obligations of micro-financing schemes, including shari’a-based financing. The targeted women, in turn, experience Islamic NGOs as less coercive and more sensitive to their religious environment in the rural village community than are secular NGOs.

Providing a comparative study of the role of religious and secular NGOs in the implementation of neoliberal policies and development strategies, this book will be a significant addition to research on South Asian Politics, Development Studies, Gender Studies, and Religion.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Kaveny, “A Culture of Engagement”

In March, the Georgetown University Press will release “A Culture of Engagement: Law, Religion, and Morality,” by Cathleen Kaveny (Boston College).  The publisher’s description follows:

Religious traditions in the United States are characterized by ongoing tension between assimilation to the broader culture, as typified by 51rjwd8azvl
mainline Protestant churches, and defiant rejection of cultural incursions, as witnessed by more sectarian movements such as Mormonism and Hassidism. However, legal theorist and Catholic theologian Cathleen Kaveny contends there is a third possibility—a culture of engagement—that accommodates and respects tradition. It also recognizes the need to interact with culture to remain relevant and to offer critiques of social, political, legal, and economic practices.

Kaveny suggests that rather than avoid the crisscross of the religious and secular spheres of life, we should use this conflict as an opportunity to come together and to encounter, challenge, contribute to, and correct one another. Focusing on five broad areas of interest—Law as a Teacher, Religious Liberty and Its Limits, Conversations about Culture, Conversations about Belief, and Cases and Controversies—Kaveny demonstrates how thoughtful and purposeful engagement can contribute to rich, constructive, and difficult discussions between moral and cultural traditions.

This provocative collection of Kaveny’s articles from Commonweal magazine, substantially revised and updated from their initial publication, provides astonishing insight into a range of hot-button issues like abortion, assisted suicide, government-sponsored torture, contraception, the Ashley Treatment, capital punishment, and the role of religious faith in a pluralistic society. At turns masterful, insightful, and inspirational, A Culture of Engagement is a welcome reminder of what can be gained when a diversity of experiences and beliefs is brought to bear on American public life.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Richard Epstein and Me on the Freedom of Association and Antidiscrimination Measures

Over at the Library of Law and Liberty blog, the formidable Richard Epstein (NYU/Chicago) has a long essay titled, Freedom of Association and Antidiscrimination Law: An Imperfect Reconciliation.

It was an honor to respond to Professor Epstein’s essay in this comment, in which I investigate some causes of the classical liberal retreat. Other responses by Professor Andrew Koppelman and Professor Paul Moreno will follow. A bit from the beginning of mine:

Professor Richard Epstein has performed a welcome service in reminding us of the classical liberal case for the freedom of association. The classical liberal champions the primacy of rights as guarantors of the individual’s sovereignty to make free dealings with other sovereigns. He values rights as safeguards of the freedom to make moral and economic choices, to unite with others of like mind, and promptly to divest when the benefits of union are no longer perceived. He distrusts rights as claims for the imposition of obligations that override others’ sovereignty, reserving such mandates for special cases—force and fraud, as well as monopolistic control.

As Epstein has incisively noted elsewhere, discriminating associations are features of well-ordered societies in which people disagree about the good life, much as discriminating palates are features of well-ordered societies in which people disagree about good taste.[1] Association implies discrimination; to include some is to exclude others. Discrimination is legally wrongful only when it completely blocks a class of persons from access to a particular set of commoditized goods and services. But it is not legally wrongful if such persons feel the offense of exclusion but still can access alternative market channels. Respect for rights is supposed to limit the power of the state, not enhance it. All this is an appealing view of associational freedom in many ways.

Why, then, is this view so much in retreat? For it is today in open and full retreat. As Epstein’s Liberty Forum essay shows, the scope of antidiscrimination law, and the zeal with which it is enforced, have greatly increased over the last few decades. The power of government to mandate proliferating and ever more rigorous norms of equality has accelerated and shows no signs of abating. More perplexing still is that a significant and growing number of Americans, especially those in elite circles (including in younger generations), have acquired a wolfish appetite for measures that contract First Amendment freedoms and swell the state’s power to stamp out discrimination of increasingly recondite varieties wherever they may exist. Epstein notes all this and rightly laments it. But he does not explain it.

What happened to the libertarian, economically-inflected, live-and-let-live vision of the freely associating society?

Many things that this brief response to Epstein cannot comprehensively catalog. Yet one explanation for the classical liberal retreat lies in its failure to account for the psychologically affective features of law—and in particular its blindness to the influence of its own marketized and contractualized conception of First Amendment freedoms, including associational freedom, on the civic virtues and ideals of the citizenry. Law gives direction; it teaches, orders, and ranks; it creates hierarchies. The classical liberal model of law is no exception.

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Call for Papers: “Freedom of/for/from/within Religion: Differing Dimensions of a Common Right?”

The Fourth International Consortium for Law and Religion Studie Conference will be held at St. Hugh’s College in Oxford September 9-10, 2016. The Conference topic — “Freedom of/for/from/within Religion: Differing Dimensions of a Common Right?” — aims at considering the fundamental right of freedom of religion from differing perspectives, shedding light on its various and interconnected facets and addressing new challenges it faces in the modern world.

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If you are interested in contributing, please submit a 200-300 word abstract (in English) of your proposed presentation by e-mail to: cristiana.cianitto@unimi.it by March 31, 2016.

Further details are available here.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

O’Connor, “Mixtec Evangelicals”

In March, the University Press of Colorado will release “Mixtec Evangelicals: Globalization, Migration, and Religious Change in a Oaxacan Indigenous Group,” by Mary I. O’Connor (University of California, Santa Barbara).  The publisher’s description follows:

Mixtec Evangelicals is a comparative ethnography of four Mixtec communities in Oaxaca, detailing the process by which economic 4cd424ae582c0816d2a216de8e1edde7_smigration and religious conversion combine to change the social and cultural makeup of predominantly folk-Catholic communities. The book describes the effects on the home communities of the Mixtecs who travel to northern Mexico and the United States in search of wage labor and return having converted from their rural Catholic roots to Evangelical Protestant religions.

O’Connor identifies globalization as the root cause of this process. She demonstrates the ways that neoliberal policies have forced Mixtecs to migrate and how migration provides the contexts for conversion. Converts challenge the set of customs governing their Mixtec villages by refusing to participate in the Catholic ceremonies and social gatherings that are at the center of traditional village life. The home communities have responded in a number of ways—ranging from expulsion of converts to partial acceptance and adjustments within the village—depending on the circumstances of conversion and number of converts returning.

Presenting data and case studies resulting from O’Connor’s ethnographic field research in Oaxaca and various migrant settlements in Mexico and the United States, Mixtec Evangelicals explores this phenomenon of globalization and observes how ancient communities are changed by their own emissaries to the outside world. Students and scholars of anthropology, Latin American studies, and religion will find much in this book to inform their understanding of globalization, modernity, indigeneity, and religious change.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Adams, “Black Women’s Christian Activism”

In February, the New York University Press will release “Black Women’s Christian Activism: Seeking Social Justice in a Northern Suburb,” by Betty Livingston Adams (New York University).  The publisher’s description follows:

When a domestic servant named Violet Johnson moved to the affluent white suburb of Summit, New Jersey in 1897, she became one of just 9780814745465_fullbarely a hundred black residents in the town of six thousand. In this avowedly liberal Protestant community, the very definition of “the suburbs” depended on observance of unmarked and fluctuating race and class barriers. But Johnson did not intend to accept the status quo. Establishing a Baptist church a year later, a seemingly moderate act that would have implications far beyond weekly worship, Johnson challenged assumptions of gender and race, advocating for a politics of civic righteousness that would grant African Americans an equal place in a Christian nation. Johnson’s story is powerful, but she was just one among the many working-class activists integral to the budding days of the civil rights movement.

In Black Women’s Christian Activism, Betty Livingston Adams examines the oft overlooked role of non-elite black women in the growth of northern suburbs and American Protestantism in the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on the strategies and organizational models church women employed in the fight for social justice, Adams tracks the intersections of politics and religion, race and gender, and place and space in a New York City suburb, a local example that offers new insights on northern racial oppression and civil rights protest. As this book makes clear, religion made a key difference in the lives and activism of ordinary black women who lived, worked, and worshiped on the margin during this tumultuous time.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

“Beyond the Secular West” (ed. Bilgrami)

In March, the Columbia University Press will release “Beyond the Secular West,” edited by Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia University).  The publisher’s description follows:

What is the character of secularism in countries that were not pervaded by Christianity, such as China, India, and the nations of the9780231170802 Middle East? To what extent is the secular an imposition of colonial rule? Has modern secularism evolved organically, or is it even necessary, and has it always meant progress? How does secularism comport with local religious cultures in Africa, and how does it work with local forms of power and governance in Latin America?

A vital extension of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, in which he exhaustively chronicled the emergence of secularism in Latin Christendom, this anthology applies Taylor’s findings to secularism’s global migration. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Nacim, Rajeev Bhargava, Akeel Bilgrami, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Sudipta Kaviraj, Claudio Lomnitz, Alfred Stepan, Charles Taylor, and Peter van der Veer each explore the transformation of Western secularism beyond Europe, and the collection closes with Taylor’s response to each essay. What began as a modern reaction to—as well as a stubborn extension of—Latin Christendom has become a complex export shaped by the world’s religious and political systems. Brilliantly alternating between intellectual and methodological approaches, this volume fosters a greater engagement with the phenomenon across disciplines.