Posted on by Mark Movsesian

France: Guerres de Noel

nativity-scene-at-b-ziers-012
A Municipal  Christmas Creche in Nantes (Guardian)

 

At the First Things site, I have an essay (“Crèche Clash“) on the continuing Christmas Wars in France. The Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest administrative court, recently ruled on the legality of the Nativity scenes that many French municipalities display every December. Although it didn’t cite any American cases, the French court relied on the same test American courts have developed to determine the constitutionality of Christmas displays in this country, the so-called endorsement test:

The Conseil begins by stating that laïcité forbids “any display by public authorities of signs and symbols showing a public recognition or a preference for a given religion.” A Christmas crèche poses a difficult case. Although a crèche can convey a religious message, it also has a non-religious meaning as a familiar seasonal decoration. One message is forbidden for the state, the other acceptable. Display of a crèche by a public authority is therefore legal, the Conseil declares, “only” where the crèche “has a cultural, artistic or festive purpose, but not if it expresses” recognition of or preference for a religion. To determine the meaning of a display, one must consider the particular circumstances, “including the existence or the absence of local traditions and the location of the display.”

Readers familiar with the American case law will recognize this as a version of the “endorsement test” our own courts use to evaluate the constitutionality of public nativity scenes. Under the test, first proposed by Supreme Court Justice Sandra O’Connor in a 1984 case from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a display violates the Establishment Clause if it amounts to an official endorsement of religion, that is, if it suggests that the government approves a particular religious message (or disapproves such a message, though that issue does not regularly arise). Official endorsements make non-adherents feel like second-class citizens, the reasoning goes—like less than full participants in the political community. As a consequence, such endorsements violate the Constitution.

In the essay, I argue that the French version of the endorsement test turns out to be just as confusing as the American, with many of the same deficiencies–including its tendency to outlaw traditional features of public life. You can read the essay here.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Leithart, “The End of Protestantism”

America, Chesterton said, is a nation with the soul of a church. And that church is a Protestant one. The Protestant conception of the church–or, perhaps, one particular Protestant conception–has profoundly influenced the institutional expression of Christianity, and indeed all religions, in this country. When most Americans think of “church,” they imagine a voluntary, self-supported collection of like-minded believers–a congregation. If the congregation goes astray in its doctrine and practice, the remedy is to form a new congregation.

In a provocative new book from Brazos Press, The End of Protestantism: Pursuing Unity in a Fragmented Church, theologian and essayist Peter Leithart argues that the fissiparous character of Protestantism, which Americans take for granted, is both unhistorical and inconsistent with Christianity. He argues for another approach that he says is more consistent with the central truths of the Reformation.

The publisher’s description follows:

9781587433771One of the unforeseen results of the Reformation was the shattering fragmentation of the church. Protestant tribalism was and continues to be a major hindrance to any solution to Christian division and its cultural effects. In this book, influential thinker Peter Leithart critiques American denominationalism in the context of global and historic Christianity, calls for an end to Protestant tribalism, and presents a vision for the future church that transcends post-Reformation divisions.

Leithart offers pastors and churches a practical agenda, backed by theological arguments, for pursuing local unity now. Unity in the church will not be a matter of drawing all churches into a single, existing denomination, says Leithart. Returning to Catholicism or Orthodoxy is not the solution. But it is possible to move toward church unity without giving up our convictions about truth. This critique and defense of Protestantism urges readers to preserve and celebrate the central truths recovered in the Reformation while working to heal the wounds of the body of Christ.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Jacoby, “Strange Gods”

Conversion is perhaps the most controversial subject in international religious freedom. Although the idea that people should be able freely to convert from one religion to another is widely accepted in the West, even among religious believers, it is not widely accepted elsewhere, especially in Muslim-majority countries, where conversion from Islam is often still illegal. In fact, although human rights advocates insist that the right to convert is part of international law, the status of the right is somewhat ambiguous.

In February, Penguin Random House will release a new history of conversion, Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion, by writer Susan Jacoby. Looks interesting, though grouping George W. Bush and Muhammad Ali together in the same category seems a little odd. Jacoby argues, among other things, that the idea of individual religious choice is a product of the secular Enlightenment–which may explain why the non-Western world is still deeply suspicious.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

9780375423758In a groundbreaking historical work that addresses religious conversion in the West from an uncompromisingly secular perspective, Susan Jacoby challenges the conventional narrative of conversion as a purely spiritual journey. From the transformation on the road to Damascus of the Jew Saul into the Christian evangelist Paul to a twenty-first-century “religious marketplace” in which half of Americans have changed faiths at least once, nothing has been more important in the struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one’s choice or to reject belief in God altogether.

Focusing on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—each claiming possession of absolute truth—Jacoby examines conversions within a social and economic framework that includes theocratic coercion (unto torture and death) and the more friendly persuasion of political advantage, economic opportunism, and interreligious marriage. Moving through time, continents, and cultures—the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin’s dour theocracy, Southern plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters’ religion—the narrative is punctuated by portraits of individual converts embodying the sacred and profane. The cast includes Augustine of Hippo; John Donne; the German Jew Edith Stein, whose conversion to Catholicism did not save her from Auschwitz; boxing champion Muhammad Ali; and former President George W. Bush. The story also encompasses conversions to rigid secular ideologies, notably Stalinist Communism, with their own truth claims.

Finally, Jacoby offers a powerful case for religious choice as a product of the secular Enlightenment. In a forthright and unsettling conclusion linking the present with the most violent parts of the West’s religious past, she reminds us that in the absence of Enlightenment values, radical Islamists are persecuting Christians, many other Muslims, and atheists in ways that recall the worst of the Middle Ages.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Ryerson, “John Adams’s Republic”

I wonder it it’s fair any longer to refer to John Adams as a forgotten founder. His stock has risen among American historians in the past 20 years or so. He even got an HBO mini-series–though, so far, no Broadway musical. In law and religion circles, Adams most famous for his observation that the US Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people” and “is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Whether or not one agrees with Adams on that, his contributions to American constitutional theory are increasingly acknowledged.

This past year, the Johns Hopkins University Press published a new study of Adams’s political thought, John Adams’s Republic: The One, the Few and the Many, by historian Richard Alan Ryerson. The publisher’s description follows:

9781421419220Scholars have examined John Adams’s writings and beliefs for generations, but no one has brought such impressive credentials to the task as Richard Alan Ryerson in John Adams’s Republic. The editor-in-chief of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Adams Papers project for nearly two decades, Ryerson offers readers of this magisterial book a fresh, firmly grounded account of Adams’s political thought and its development.

Of all the founding fathers, Ryerson argues, John Adams may have worried the most about the problem of social jealousy and political conflict in the new republic. Ryerson explains how these concerns, coupled with Adams’s concept of executive authority and his fear of aristocracy, deeply influenced his political mindset. He weaves together a close analysis of Adams’s public writings, a comprehensive chronological narrative beginning in the 1760s, and an exploration of the second president’s private diary, manuscript autobiography, and personal and family letters, revealing Adams’s most intimate political thoughts across six decades.

How, Adams asked, could a self-governing country counter the natural power and influence of wealthy elites and their friends in government? Ryerson argues that he came to believe a strong executive could hold at bay the aristocratic forces that posed the most serious dangers to a republican society. The first study ever published to closely examine all of Adams’s political writings, from his youth to his long retirement,John Adams’s Republic should appeal to everyone who seeks to know more about America’s first major political theorist.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Levy, “The Genius of Judaism”

Next month, Penguin Random House will release a new book by philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Genius of Judaism. The book discusses contemporary anti-Semitism and argues that Western democratic ideals have Jewish roots. Here’s the publisher’s description:

9780812992724For more than four decades, Bernard-Henri Lévy has been a singular figure on the world stage—one of the great moral voices of our time. Now Europe’s foremost philosopher and activist confronts his spiritual roots and the religion that has always inspired and shaped him—but that he has never fully reckoned with.

The Genius of Judaism is a breathtaking new vision and understanding of what it means to be a Jew, a vision quite different from the one we’re used to. It is rooted in the Talmudic traditions of argument and conflict, rather than biblical commandments, borne out in struggle and study, not in blind observance. At the very heart of the matter is an obligation to the other, to the dispossessed, and to the forgotten, an obligation that, as Lévy vividly recounts, he has sought to embody over decades of championing “lost causes,” from Bosnia to Africa’s forgotten wars, from Libya to the Kurdish Peshmerga’s desperate fight against the Islamic State, a battle raging as we speak. Lévy offers a fresh, surprising critique of a new and stealthy form of anti-Semitism on the rise as well as a provocative defense of Israel from the left. He reveals the overlooked Jewish roots of Western democratic ideals and confronts the current Islamist threat while intellectually dismantling it. Jews are not a “chosen people,” Lévy explains, but a “treasure” whose spirit must continue to inform moral thinking and courage today.

Lévy’s most passionate book, and in many ways his most personal, The Genius of Judaism is a great, profound, and hypnotic intellectual reckoning—indeed a call to arms—by one of the keenest and most insightful writers in the world.

 

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 6 Comments

On Bach’s B minor Mass

Here’s a fun article on J.S. Bach’s magnificent Mass in B minor, one of the magisterial and final pinnacles of his oeuvre, and yet in some ways puzzling. What, after all, was a faithful Lutheran doing setting an entire Roman Catholic Mass–a Missa Tota?

And for performances, stay away from the trendy and the faux HIP (Historically Informed Performances). Someday I will write a rancorous essay entitled, “Historically Informed Performances: The Living (and oh so HIP) Originalism of Classical Music.”

Instead savor the magnificently moody and measured performances of Furtwängler and Scherchen. Or, if you can’t get ahold of those, this version conducted by Herbert von Karajan will do.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Kellogg, “The Wisdom of the Middle Ages”

In Law and Revolution, law professor Harold Berman famously described how legal pluralism, a central feature of the Western legal tradition, traces back to the Middle Ages. And medieval legal pluralism was not simply a product of competing jurisdictions, but of a philosophy comfortable with complexity generally.

Here is an interesting-looking new book on medieval philosophy from Penguin Random House, The Wisdom of the Middle Ages, by Michael K. Kellogg. The publisher’s description follows:

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Berner, “Pluralism and American Public Education”

Ashley Berner, the Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and a past guest blogger here at the Law and Religion Forum, has just written an important and readable book on educational pluralism, Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School (Palgrave Macmillan). I highly recommend it for anyone interested in public education in America, including the place of religious and other non-state schools.

I’ll be doing an interview with Ashley later this month. For now, here’s Palgrave Macmillan’s description of the book:

51qs7fvxql-_sx328_bo1204203200_This book argues that the structure of public education is a key factor in the failure of America’s public education system to fulfill the intellectual, civic, and moral aims for which it was created. The book challenges the philosophical basis for the traditional common school model and defends the educational pluralism that most liberal democracies enjoy. Berner provides a unique theoretical pathway that is neither libertarian nor state-focused and a pragmatic pathway that avoids the winner-takes-all approach of many contemporary debates about education. For the first time in nearly one hundred fifty years, changing the underlying structure of America’s public education system is both plausible and possible, and this book attempts to set out why and how.

 

Posted on by L&R Forum

Winterer, “American Enlightenments”

From Yale University Press, a new intellectual history of America after the Revolution, American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason, by Caroline Winterer (Stanford). The publisher’s description follows:

d55b12cf44c33ef5c1c02428f6c1dd26A provocative reassessment of the concept of an American golden age of European-born reason and intellectual curiosity in the years following the Revolutionary War:

The accepted myth of the “American Enlightenment” suggests that the rejection of monarchy and establishment of a new republic in the United States in the eighteenth century was the realization of utopian philosophies born in the intellectual salons of Europe and radiating outward to the New World. In this revelatory work, Stanford historian Caroline Winterer argues that a national mythology of a unitary, patriotic era of enlightenment in America was created during the Cold War to act as a shield against the threat of totalitarianism, and that Americans followed many paths toward political, religious, scientific, and artistic enlightenment in the 1700s that were influenced by European models in more complex ways than commonly thought. Winterer’s book strips away our modern inventions of the American national past, exploring which of our ideas and ideals are truly rooted in the eighteenth century and which are inventions and mystifications of more recent times.