Posted on by Mark Movsesian

“The Urban World and the First Christians” (Gill et al. eds)

9780802874511“For here we have no lasting city,” the first-century Epistle to the Hebrews proclaims, “but we are looking for the city that is to come.” Early Christianity was mostly, though not exclusively, an urban phenomenon, and, notwithstanding the ambivalence the author of Hebrews felt towards the earthly city, Christians learned, of necessity, to negotiate their way in it. A forthcoming book from Eerdmans, The Urban World and the First Christians, edited, among others, by archeologist David Gill (University of Suffolk), discusses how Christians of the apostolic and sub-apostolic eras adapted to the urban social, cultural, and physical environments. Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

In the tradition of The First Urban Christians by Wayne Meeks, this book explores the relationship between the earliest Christians and the city environment. Experts in classics, early Christianity, and human geography analyze the growth, development, and self-understanding of the early Christian movement in urban settings.

The book’s contributors first look at how the urban physical, cultural, and social environments of the ancient Mediterranean basin affected the ways in which early Christianity progressed. They then turn to how the earliest Christians thought and theologized in their engagement with cities. With a rich variety of expertise and scholarship, The Urban World and the First Christians is an important contribution to the understanding of early Christianity.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Wright, “The Terror Years”

9780804170031Last month, Penguin Random House released the paperback edition of The Terror Years: From Al Qaeda to the Islamic State, by journalist Lawrence Wright. Wright’s 2007 work about 9/11, The Looming Tower, deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize, and this book, which picks up from where the earlier book left off, looks very worthwhile. Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

These powerful investigative pieces, which take us from the religious police of Saudi Arabia to the rise of the Islamic State, comprise an essential primer on jihadist movements in the Middle East—and the attempts of the West to contain them. In these pages, Lawrence Wright examines al-Qaeda as it experiences a rebellion from within and spins off a growing web of worldwide terror. He shows us the Syrian film industry before the civil war—compliant at the edges but already exuding a barely masked fury. He gives us the heart-wrenching story of American children kidnapped by ISIS—and Atlantic publisher David Bradley’s efforts to secure their release. And he details the roles of key FBI figures John O’Neill and his talented protégé Ali Soufan in fighting terrorism. In a moving epilogue, Wright shares his predictions for the future. Rigorous, clear-eyed, and compassionate, The Terror Years illuminates the complex human players on all sides of a devastating conflict.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Ahmed, “Afghanistan Rising”

9780674971943-lgGiven the announcement last week that the United States is recommitting to its military strategy in Afghanistan, this forthcoming book from Harvard University Press seems especially relevant. In Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires, historian Faiz Ahmed (Brown University) argues that at the turn of the 20th Century, Afghanistan attempted to create a modern, constitutional state within the Islamic law tradition. Very few Americans know about this historical episode, or why the attempt to modernize the country ultimately failed. This book looks to be a useful resource for scholars and policymakers. Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

Debunking conventional narratives of Afghanistan as a perennial war zone and the rule of law as a secular-liberal monopoly, Faiz Ahmed presents a vibrant account of the first Muslim-majority country to gain independence, codify its own laws, and ratify a constitution after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Afghanistan Rising illustrates how turn-of-the-twentieth-century Kabul—far from being a landlocked wilderness or remote frontier—became a magnet for itinerant scholars and statesmen shuttling between Ottoman and British imperial domains. Tracing the country’s longstanding but often ignored scholarly and educational ties to Istanbul, Damascus, and Baghdad as well as greater Delhi and Lahore, Ahmed explains how the court of Kabul attracted thinkers eager to craft a modern state within the interpretive traditions of Islamic law and ethics, or sharia. From Turkish lawyers and Indian bureaucrats to Pashtun clerics trained in madrasas of the Indo-Afghan borderlands, this rich narrative focuses on encounters between divergent streams of modern Muslim thought and politics, beginning with the Sublime Porte’s first mission to Afghanistan in 1877 and concluding with the collapse of Ottoman rule after World War I.

By unearthing a lost history behind Afghanistan’s founding national charter, Ahmed shows how debates today on Islam, governance, and the rule of law have deep roots in a beleaguered land. Based on archival research in six countries and as many languages, Afghanistan Rising rediscovers a time when Kabul stood proudly as a center of constitutional politics, Muslim cosmopolitanism, and contested visions of reform in the greater Islamic world.

 

Posted on by Liam Ray

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Orgad, “The Cultural Defense of Nations”

9780198806912Nationalism is currently resurging in the West. Nationalism explains the Brexit vote in 2016, the rise of anti-European political parties in Europe, and the Trump phenomenon in the US. For the most part, the academy refuses to treat nationalism as at all legitimate, assuming that it is simply a mask for much darker, illiberal forces — which it sometimes is, of course. A new book from Oxford University Press, The Cultural Defense of Nations: A Liberal Theory of Majority Rights, by Liav Orgad (WZB Berlin Social Science Center), takes nationalism seriously and offers a defense of it from within the liberal tradition. Looks interesting. Here’s the description from the Oxford website:

Never in human history has so much attention been paid to human movement. Global migration yields demographic shifts of historical significance, profoundly shaking up world politics as has been seen in the refugee crisis, the Brexit referendum, and the 2016 US election.

The Cultural Defense of Nations addresses one of the greatest challenges facing liberalism today: is a liberal state justified in restricting immigration and access to citizenship in order to protect its majority culture? Liberal theorists and human rights advocates recognize the rights of minorities to maintain their unique cultural identity, but assume that majorities have neither a need for similar rights nor a moral ground for defending them. The majority culture, so the argument goes, “can take care of itself.” However, with more than 250 million immigrants worldwide, majority groups increasingly seek to protect what they consider to be their national identity. In recent years, liberal democracies have introduced proactive immigration and citizenship policies that are designed to defend the majority culture.

This book shifts the focus from the prevailing discussion of cultural minority rights, for the first time directly addressing the cultural rights of majorities and, for the first time, addressed the cultural rights of majorities. It proposes a new approach by which liberal democracies can welcome immigrants without fundamentally changing their cultural heritage, forsaking their liberal traditions, or slipping into extreme nationalism.

Disregarding the topic of cultural majority rights is not only theoretically wrong, but also politically unwise. With forms of “majority nationalism” rising and the growing popularity of extreme right-wing parties in the West, the time has come to liberally address contemporary challenges.

Posted on by Liam Ray

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Marshall, “1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation”

The year 2017 is, as we have noted here before, the quincentennial of the famous, or 1517.jpegperhaps infamous(?), but nevertheless probably apocryphal, posting by Martin Luther of the 95 theses, the symbolic launch of the Reformation. Here is what looks like another important and interesting book on the Reformation by the award winning historian, Peter Marshall: 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation. The publisher is OUP and the description is below.

Martin Luther’s posting of the 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517 is one of the most famous events of Western history. It inaugurated the Protestant Reformation, and has for centuries been a powerful and enduring symbol of religious freedom of conscience, and of righteous protest against the abuse of power.

But did it actually really happen?

In this engagingly-written, wide-ranging and insightful work of cultural history, leading Reformation historian Peter Marshall reviews the available evidence, and concludes that, very probably, it did not. The theses-posting is a myth. And yet, Marshall argues, this fact makes the incident all the more historically significant. In tracing how–and why–a “non-event” ended up becoming a defining episode of the modern historical imagination. Marshall compellingly explores the multiple ways in which the figure of Martin Luther, and the nature of the Reformation itself, have been remembered and used for their own purposes by subsequent generations of Protestants and others–in Germany, Britain, the United States and elsewhere.

As people in Europe, and across the world, prepare to remember, and celebrate, the 500th anniversary of Luther’s posting of the theses, this book offers a timely contribution and corrective. The intention is not to “debunk”, or to belittle Luther’s achievement, but rather to invite renewed reflection on how the past speaks to the present–and on how, all too often, the present creates the past in its own image and likeness.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Zelinsky, “Taxing the Church”

From Edward Zelinsky of Cardozo Law School comes this timely and important book Zelinsky.jpegabout the relationship of religion and taxation in American law, Taxing the Church: Religion, Exemptions, Entanglement, and the Constitution. I was very pleased to read the entire manuscript in draft and to provide a blurb for the jacket: “With great erudition and careful attention to the many complexities of our system of taxation and tax exemption for religious institutions, Professor Zelinsky makes a contextually sensitive case for taxation in certain contexts and not others. His discussion of ‘enforcement entanglement’ and ‘borderline entanglement’ is particularly rich and illuminating.” The publisher is Oxford University Press and here is the description.

This book explores the taxation and exemption of churches and other religious institutions, both empirically and normatively. This exploration reveals that churches and other religious institutions are treated diversely by the federal and state tax systems. Sectarian institutions pay more tax than many believe. In important respects, the states differ among themselves in their respective approaches to the taxation of sectarian entities. Either taxing or exempting churches and other sectarian entities entangles church and state. The taxes to which churches are more frequently subject – federal Social Security and Medicare taxes, sales taxes, real estate conveyance taxes – fall on the less entangling end of the spectrum. The taxes from which religious institutions are exempt – general income taxes, value-based property taxes, unemployment taxes – are typically taxes with the greatest potential for church-state enforcement entanglement. It is unpersuasive to reflexively denounce the tax exemption of religious actors and institutions as a subsidy. Tax exemption can implement the secular, non-subsidizing goal of minimizing church-state enforcement entanglement and thus be regarded as part of a normative tax base.

Taxing the church or exempting the church involves often difficult trade-offs among competing and legitimate values. On balance, our federal system of decentralized legislation reasonably make these legal and tax policy trade-offs, though there is room for improvement in particular settings such as the protection of internal church communications and the expansion of the churches’ sales tax liabilities.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Laborde, “Liberalism’s Religion”

This seems to be a book not about liberalism as a kind of religion (or as valuing a Laborde.jpgparticular kind of religion), but instead about what liberalism–particularly the secular liberalism of the kind championed by the author–ought to do with religion in today’s day and age. A book very much in line with recent efforts to destabilize the category of religion as meriting special legal (and constitutional) protection, which in turn requires severing the reasons for its protection from their historical roots. Indeed, ultimately, I wonder whether the book actually is about the distinctive sort of religion acceptable to liberalism, or perhaps even about liberalism as itself espousing a variety of religion. The author is Cécile Laborde, the publisher is Harvard UP, and here is the description.

Liberal societies conventionally treat religion as unique under the law, requiring both special protection (as in guarantees of free worship) and special containment (to keep religion and the state separate). But recently this idea that religion requires a legal exception has come under fire from those who argue that religion is no different from any other conception of the good, and the state should treat all such conceptions according to principles of neutrality and equal liberty. Cécile Laborde agrees with much of this liberal egalitarian critique, but she argues that a simple analogy between the good and religion misrepresents the complex relationships among religion, law, and the state. Religion serves as more than a statement of belief about what is true, or a code of moral and ethical conduct. It also refers to comprehensive ways of life, political theories of justice, modes of voluntary association, and vulnerable collective identities.

Disaggregating religion into its various dimensions, as Laborde does, has two clear advantages. First, it shows greater respect for ethical and social pluralism by ensuring that whatever treatment religion receives from the law, it receives because of features that it shares with nonreligious beliefs, conceptions, and identities. Second, it dispenses with the Western, Christian-inflected conception of religion that liberal political theory relies on, especially in dealing with the issue of separation between religion and state. As a result, Liberalism’s Religion offers a novel answer to the question: Can Western theories of secularism and religion be applied more universally in non-Western societies?

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Benne, “Keeping the Soul in Christian Higher Education”

Here is another entry in new books about Christianity and the American university, but Roanoke.jpegthis time with a historical (as well as Lutheran) orientation: Keeping the Soul in Christian Higher Education: A History of Roanoke College, by Robert Benne of the College’s Religion and Philosophy department. The publisher is Eerdmans and the description is here.

Many colleges with historical church ties experience significant tension between the desire to compete in the secularized world of higher education and the desire to remain connected to their religious commitments and communities. In this history of one such school, Roanoke College, Robert Benne not only explores the school’s 175-year tradition of educational excellence but also lays bare its complicated and ongoing relationship with its religious heritage.

Benne examines the vision of ten of Roanoke’s presidents and how those visions played out in college life. As he tells the college’s story, Benne points to specific strengths and weaknesses of Roanoke’s strategies for keeping the soul in higher education and elaborates what other Christian colleges can learn from Roanoke’s long quest.