It seems only fitting that we are a bit delayed in noting this (still) new volume intended to rehabilitate good old Æthelred the Unready (Yale University Press), by Levi Roach. (Those who remember their Walter Scott will want to distinguish Æthelstane the Unready, who also very much requires a favorable reconstruction). Actually, Æthelred sounds like an absolutely wonderful man (though, even after the rehabilitation, perhaps not a terrific king).

The Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred “the Unready” (978–1016) has long been considered to be inscrutable, irrational, and poorly advised. Infamous for his domestic and international failures, Æthelred was unable to fend off successive Viking raids, leading to the notorious St. Brice’s Day Massacre in 1002, during which Danes in England were slaughtered on his orders. Though Æthelred’s posthumous standing is dominated by his unsuccessful military leadership, his seemingly blind trust in disloyal associates, and his harsh treatment of political opponents, Roach suggests that Æthelred has been wrongly maligned. Drawing on extensive research, Roach argues that Æthelred was driven by pious concerns about sin, society, and the anticipated apocalypse. His strategies, in this light, were to honor God and find redemption. Chronologically charting Æthelred’s life, Roach presents a more accessible character than previously available, illuminating his place in England and Europe at the turn of the first millennium.

Hostility to Catholicism is one of the hearty perennials of the study of law and religion in America. I have recently argued in this piece that there was an important shift in the political rhetoric of the late 19th and early 20th century from accentuating anti-Catholic to anti-Christian themes. That shift continues to be a vital one in today’s understanding of the separation of church and state.

But Anti-Catholicism in American: 1620-1860 (Cambridge University Press), by Maura Jane Farrelly (author of an excellent earlier volume entitled, “Papist Patriots”) begins in the colonial period and works its way to the Civil War. It looks well worth exploring.

Using fears of Catholicism as a mechanism through which to explore the contours of Anglo-American understandings of freedom, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860 reveals the ironic role that anti-Catholicism played in defining and sustaining some of the core values of American identity, values that continue to animate our religious and political discussions today. Farrelly explains how that bias helped to shape colonial and antebellum cultural understandings of God, the individual, salvation, society, government, law, national identity, and freedom. In so doing, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860 provides contemporary observers with a framework for understanding what is at stake in the debate over the place of Muslims and other non-Christian groups in American society.

Very few subjects have been more controversial and contested in American constitutional law and politics than the moral and legal status of the unborn. Even still, the issue persists and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. In this volume, philosophers Kate Greasley and Christopher Kaczor engage in an extended debate on the matter–Abortion Rights: For and Against (Cambridge University Press).

This book features opening arguments followed by two rounds of reply between two moral philosophers on opposing sides of the abortion debate. In the initial opening essays, Kate Greasley and Christopher Kaczor lay out what they take to be the best case for and against abortion rights. In the ensuing dialogue, they engage with each other’s arguments and each responds to criticisms fielded by the other. Their conversational argument explores such fundamental questions as: what gives a person the right to life? Is abortion bad for women? And what is the difference between abortion and infanticide? Underpinned by philosophical reasoning and methodology, this book provides opposing and clearly structured perspectives on a highly emotive and controversial issue. The result gives readers a window into how moral philosophers argue about the contentious issue of abortion rights, and an in-depth analysis of the compelling arguments on both sides.

Perhaps it is in part because I’m greatly anticipating attending and participating in this wonderful conference which will explore the perennial problem of good and evil, and because the issue of evil is at the forefront of what I, at least, find most interesting about criminal law, this book (now in its second edition) on The Problem of Evil (Notre Dame University Press), edited by Michael Peterson, looks comprehensive and fascinating. Organized as a series of essays that includes “Job’s Complaint and the Whirlwind’s Answer,” Dostoyevsky on “Rebellion,” and many other classic sources, as well as contemporary philosophical reflections on the nature of evil, it looks like a very helpful resource on the subject.

Of all the issues in the philosophy of religion, the problem of reconciling belief in God with evil in the world arguably commands more attention than any other. For over two decades, Michael L. Peterson’s The Problem of Evil: Selected Readings has been the most widely recognized and used anthology on the subject. Peterson’s expanded and updated second edition retains the key features of the original and presents the main positions and strategies in the latest philosophical literature on the subject. It will remain the most complete introduction to the subject as well as a resource for advanced study.

Peterson organizes his selection of classical and contemporary sources into four parts: important statements addressing the problem of evil from great literature and classical philosophy; debates based on the logical, evidential, and existential versions of the problem; major attempts to square God’s justice with the presence of evil, such as Augustinian, Irenaean, process, openness, and felix culpa theodicies; and debates on the problem of evil covering such concepts as a best possible world, natural evil and natural laws, gratuitous evil, the skeptical theist defense, and the bearing of biological evolution on the problem. The second edition includes classical excerpts from the book of Job, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and Hume, and twenty-five essays that have shaped the contemporary discussion, by J. L. Mackie, Alvin Plantinga, William Rowe, Marilyn Adams, John Hick, William Hasker, Paul Draper, Michael Bergmann, Eleonore Stump, Peter van Inwagen, and numerous others. Whether a professional philosopher, student, or interested layperson, the reader will be able to work through a number of issues related to how evil in the world affects belief in God.

In a recent paper, I argue that the ambit of civic identity among Americans is shrinking, which is one reason for the rise of identity politics, including a particular variety of anti-Christian identity politics. In Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship (Harvard UP), Carrie Hyde, a professor of English, contends that the “cultural forms” of American citizenship were drawn from a variety of sources, including Christian theology and natural law. One note of caution, however: the blurb says that the recovery of these sources “provides a powerful critique of originalism.” If originalism is being used here to denote a particular theory of constitutional interpretation, I don’t see how what is described in the blurb deals it any kind of blow at all.

Citizenship defines the U.S. political experiment, but the modern legal category that it now names is a relatively recent invention. There was no Constitutional definition of citizenship until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, almost a century after the Declaration of Independence. Civic Longing looks at the fascinating prehistory of U.S. citizenship in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, when the cultural and juridical meaning of citizenship—as much as its scope—was still up for grabs. Carrie Hyde recovers the numerous cultural forms through which the meaning of citizenship was provisionally made and remade in the early United States.

Civic Longing offers the first historically grounded account of the formative political power of the imaginative traditions that shaped early debates about citizenship. In the absence of a centralized legal definition of citizenship, Hyde shows, politicians and writers regularly turned to a number of highly speculative traditions—political philosophy, Christian theology, natural law, fiction, and didactic literature—to authorize visions of what citizenship was or ought to be. These speculative traditions sustained an idealized image of citizenship by imagining it from its outer limits, from the point of view of its “negative civic exemplars”—expatriates, slaves, traitors, and alienated subjects.

By recovering the strange, idiosyncratic meanings of citizenship in the early United States, Hyde provides a powerful critique of originalism, and challenges anachronistic assumptions that read the definition of citizenship backward from its consolidation in the mid-nineteenth century as jus soli or birthright citizenship.