Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Wilken, “Liberty in the Things of God”

It’s perhaps somewhat early to notice this new and important book, scheduled for summer of 2019, but it deserves at least two book notes from us. We were lucky enough to host Professor Robert Louis Wilken at the Center for Law and Religion’s Colloquium a few weeks ago to discuss several draft chapters of this new book, a deep study of the Christian Patristic period for early arguments concerning religious liberty. Arguments which, Professor Wilken writes, can be connected to several others of the Protestant Reformation many centuries later and are the true foundation for our American conception of religious freedom.

Congratulations to Robert on this major achievement. The book is Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (Yale University Press). Look out for it Wilken.jpgnext year.

In the ancient world Christian apologists wrote in defense of their right to practice their faith in the cities of the Roman Empire. They argued that religious faith is an inward disposition of the mind and heart and cannot be coerced by external force, laying a foundation on which later generations would build.

Chronicling the history of the struggle for religious freedom from the early Christian movement through the seventeenth century, Robert Louis Wilken shows that the origins of religious freedom and liberty of conscience are religious, not political, in origin. They took form before the Enlightenment through the labors of men and women of faith who believed there could be no justice in society without liberty in the things of God. This provocative book, drawing on writings from the early Church as well as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reminds us of how “the meditations of the past were fitted to affairs of a later day.”

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Center for Law and Religion at Notre Dame this Week

Mark and I will both be in South Bend this week, at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture’s annual conference. This year’s conference, organized by Carter Snead with his usual flair and skill, is Higher Powers. The theme picks up on a remark by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in a memorable address at Harvard 25 years ago, and the conference takes the occasion to reflect on Solzhenitsyn’s life and thought.

Mark will be speaking about “Church and State in a Time of Polarization,” while I will be speaking about “The Higher Purposes of Free Speech.” The full schedule for the conference is here. We hope to see many of our readers and friends!

Posted on by Daniel Vitagliano · 1 Comment

Around the Web

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

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Milton et al., “Toward a Westphalia for the Middle East”

It isn’t my area, but this book proposes an interesting thesis: that a series of agreements Westphalia.jpegakin to the Peace of Westphalia following the 30 Years War is needed today for the Middle East. The book is Towards a Westphalia for the Middle East (OUP), by Patrick Milton, Michael Axworthy, and Brendan Simms.

It was the original forever war, which went on interminably, fuelled by religious fanaticism, personal ambition, fear of hegemony, and communal suspicion. It dragged in all the neighbouring powers. It was punctuated by repeated failed ceasefires. It inflicted suffering beyond belief and generated waves of refugees. No, this is not Syria today, but the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), which turned Germany and much of central Europe into a disaster zone.

The Thirty Years’ War is often cited as a parallel in discussions of the Middle East. The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the conflict in 1648, has featured strongly in such discussions, usually with the observation that recent events in some parts of the region have seen the collapse of ideas of state sovereignty–ideas that supposedly originated with the 1648 settlement.

Axworthy, Milton and Simms argue that the Westphalian treaties, far from enshrining state sovereignty, in fact reconfigured and strengthened a structure for legal resolution of disputes, and provided for intervention by outside guarantor powers to uphold the peace settlement. This book argues that the history of Westphalia may hold the key to resolving the new long wars in the Middle East today.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Micah Schwartzman at the Colloquium in Law and Religion Today

We are delighted to welcome Professor Micah Schwartzman to the Colloquium in Law Micah.jpegand Religion today.

Micah will be discussing his co-authored piece with Professor Leslie Kendrick about the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, The Etiquette of Animus, forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review. Welcome, Micah!

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Simpson, “Permanent Revolution”

This week’s law and religion book notices begin with an absolute must-read. A new work of intellectual history tracing the way in which evangelical Protestantism’s reaction against Catholicism laid the groundwork for, and eventually became, contemporary liberalism. In this present moment of contestation about the sources, nature, and future of liberalism in American, this particular genealogical effort looks well worth reading and thinking about.

The book is Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism Liberalism(HUP), by James Simpson (history and English, Harvard).

The English Reformation began as an evangelical movement driven by an unyielding belief in predestination, intolerance, stringent literalism, political quietism, and destructive iconoclasm. Yet by 1688, this illiberal early modern upheaval would deliver the foundations of liberalism: free will, liberty of conscience, religious toleration, readerly freedom, constitutionalism, and aesthetic liberty. How did a movement with such illiberal beginnings lay the groundwork for the Enlightenment? James Simpson provocatively rewrites the history of liberalism and uncovers its unexpected debt to evangelical religion.

Sixteenth-century Protestantism ushered in a culture of permanent revolution, ceaselessly repudiating its own prior forms. Its rejection of tradition was divisive, violent, and unsustainable. The proto-liberalism of the later seventeenth century emerged as a cultural package designed to stabilize the social chaos brought about by this evangelical revolution. A brilliant assault on many of our deepest assumptions, Permanent Revolution argues that far from being driven by a new strain of secular philosophy, the British Enlightenment is a story of transformation and reversal of the Protestant tradition from within. The gains of liberalism were the unintended results of the violent early Reformation.

Today those gains are increasingly under threat, in part because liberals do not understand their own history. They fail to grasp that liberalism is less the secular opponent of religious fundamentalism than its dissident younger sibling, uncertain how to confront its older evangelical competitor.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Translation of Renan on Nationalism

9780231174305Ernest Renan was a crank, with unsavory racial attitudes and crackpot ideas about Judaism and Christianity. As a theorist of nationalism, however, he has been quite influential, the way cranks often are. His definition of a nation as a group of people who wish to live together, united by a common history and shared interests rather than ethnicity or religion, is at the heart of liberal theories of nationalism. We close this week’s book posts with a new translation from Columbia University Press of Renan’s seminal work on nationalism, as well as other writings: What is a Nation? and Other Political Writings. The translator is M. F. N. Giglioli (University of Bologna). Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

Ernest Renan was one of the leading lights of the Parisian intellectual scene in the second half of the nineteenth century. A philologist, historian, and biblical scholar, he was a prominent voice of French liberalism and secularism. Today most familiar in the English-speaking world for his 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?” and its definition of a nation as an “everyday plebiscite,” Renan was a major figure in the debates surrounding the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, and the birth of the Third Republic and had a profound influence on thinkers across the political spectrum who grappled with the problem of authority and social organization in the new world wrought by the forces of modernization.

What Is a Nation? and Other Political Writings is the first English-language anthology of Renan’s political thought. Offering a broad selection of Renan’s writings from several periods of his public life, most previously untranslated, it restores Renan to his place as one of France’s major liberal thinkers and gives vital critical context to his views on nationalism. The anthology illuminates the characteristics that distinguished nineteenth-century French liberalism from its English and American counterparts as well as the more controversial parts of Renan’s legacy, including his analysis of colonial expansion, his views on Islam and Judaism, and the role of race in his thought. The volume contains a critical introduction to Renan’s life and work as well as detailed annotations that assist in recovering the wealth and complexity of his thought.

Posted on by Anthony Nania

Around the Web

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

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Evans, “Armenia”

d2e932e91d41bfd9fef0256a3808e679The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is currently hosting a wonderful exhibit on Armenia during the Middle Ages. The exhibit contains major historical objects, including carved stone crosses, illuminated manuscripts, and reliquaries that have never traveled outside the country. And there is a connection for law-and-religion fans: Armenia was the first state in history to adopt Christianity as its religion, a generation or so before Rome (Marc DeGirolami, nota bene). Many of the objects on display reflect a particular relationship between church and state. Christian separationists rightly point to the potential for corruption when the church draws too close to the state, but there are advantages for the religion as well. It’s hard to imagine other institutions with the wherewithal to sponsor works of such beauty and intense spirituality, whose impact on viewers remains profound today.

Armenia bordered Christian Byzantium and Zoroastrian (and later Muslim) Persia, a position that often put it in a difficult political situation–what’s new?–but that also enriched its culture. Medieval Armenian culture was suffused with Christianity, as it remains, more or less, today. But that Christianity did not prevent Armenians from drawing from, and in turn influencing, surrounding cultures. So the exhibit will interest not only people who seek to understand the historical relationship between Christianity and the state, but among Christians and non-Christians in that part of the world.

Yale University Press has released the exhibit’s companion volume, Armenia: Art, Religion, and Trade in the Middle Ages, by Helen C. Evans, the Met’s curator of medieval art. Here’s the description from Yale’s website:

A fascinating exploration of art created by the varied Armenian kingdoms that connected the East and West during the Middle Ages

As the first people to officially convert to Christianity, Armenians commissioned and produced astonishing religious objects. This sumptuous volume depicts and contextualizes the compelling works of art that defined the rich and complicated culture of medieval Armenians, including carvings, liturgical furnishings, beautifully illustrated manuscripts, gilded reliquaries, exquisite textiles, printed books, and more. Situated at the center of trade routes that connected the East and West during the Middle Ages, Armenia became a leading international trade partner for Seljuk, Mongol, Ottoman, and Persian overlords, while also serving as a powerful ally to Byzantium and European Crusader states. Written by a team of international scholars, with contributions from Armenian religious leaders, this book will stand as the definitive text on the art and culture of medieval Armenia.

 

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Stollberg-Rilinger, “The Holy Roman Empire”

9780691179117_0Everybody knows Voltaire’s famous quip about the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation: in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Mock on, mock on. It doesn’t figure much in people’s imaginations nowadays–it’s rather like the Austria-Hungary in that way–but the Holy Roman Empire managed to last for centuries and, although people don’t often acknowledge the fact, it provides much of the substratum for the present-day European Union. A new book from Princeton University Press, The Holy Roman Empire: A Short History, by University of Munster historian Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (translated by Princeton historian Yair Mintzker) works to rehabilitate the empire’s reputation. Here’s the description from the Princeton website:

A new interpretation of the Holy Roman Empire that reveals why it was not a failed state as many historians believe.

The Holy Roman Empire emerged in the Middle Ages as a loosely integrated union of German states and city-states under the supreme rule of an emperor. Around 1500, it took on a more formal structure with the establishment of powerful institutions—such as the Reichstag and Imperial Chamber Court—that would endure more or less intact until the empire’s dissolution by Napoleon in 1806. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger provides a concise history of the Holy Roman Empire, presenting an entirely new interpretation of the empire’s political culture and remarkably durable institutions.

Rather than comparing the empire to modern states or associations like the European Union, Stollberg-Rilinger shows how it was a political body unlike any other—it had no standing army, no clear boundaries, no general taxation or bureaucracy. She describes a heterogeneous association based on tradition and shared purpose, bound together by personal loyalty and reciprocity, and constantly reenacted by solemn rituals. In a narrative spanning three turbulent centuries, she takes readers from the reform era at the dawn of the sixteenth century to the crisis of the Reformation, from the consolidation of the Peace of Augsburg to the destructive fury of the Thirty Years’ War, from the conflict between Austria and Prussia to the empire’s downfall in the age of the French Revolution.

Authoritative and accessible, The Holy Roman Empire is an incomparable introduction to this momentous period in the history of Europe.