Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

“Theoterrorism v. Freedom of Speech”

Here is a new book concerning international incidents in which free speech rights run up against terrorism undertaken in the name of religion. The book is Theoterrorism v. Freedom of Speech: From Incident to Precedent (Amsterdam University Press), by religion scholar Paul Cliteur and author-editor of the very interesting The Fall and Rise of Blasphemy Laws.

“The Rushdie Affair, the Danish Cartoon Affair, the assault on Charlie Hebdo, and the earlier Carrell Affair, are examples of religious fanatics’ extreme reactions to religious satire and criticism. Perpetrators of these actions consider themselves as true believers. This book aims to understand their motives by means of the concept of theoterrorism: terrorism grounded in religious zealotry.”

Posted on by L&R Forum

Legal Spirits Episode 005: Praying on the 50-Yard Line

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In this episode of Legal Spirits, Center Director Mark Movsesian and Associate Director Marc DeGirolami discuss the Court’s recent denial of cert in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, a case in which the Ninth Circuit ruled that a public high school football coach could be fired for praying on the 50-yard line after each game. Movsesian and DeGirolami explain why a seemingly offhand comment by Justice Alito might signal a change in the Court’s free exercise jurisprudence, and whether, even under current doctrine, the coach might have had a legal right to pray.

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Posted on by Daniel Vitagliano

Around the Web

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

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

A History of Prohibition and States’ Rights

“Prohibition,” as I’ve had occasion to observe before, is a law school course that could teach itself. There are regulatory, church-state, jurisprudential, and constitutional dimensions to be explored. Probably others too. Here’s a new book that emphasizes the national-state federalism dimension: Prohibition, the Constitution, and States’ Rights (University of Chicago Press), by Sean Beienburg.

“Colorado’s legalization of marijuana spurred intense debate about the extent to which the Constitution preempts state-enacted laws and statutes. Colorado’s legal cannabis program generated a strange scenario in which many politicians, including many who freely invoke the Tenth Amendment, seemed to be attacking the progressive state for asserting states’ rights. Unusual as this may seem, this has happened before—in the early part of the twentieth century, as America concluded a decades-long struggle over the suppression of alcohol during Prohibition.

Sean Beienburg recovers a largely forgotten constitutional debate, revealing how Prohibition became a battlefield on which skirmishes of American political development, including the debate over federalism and states’ rights, were fought. Beienburg focuses on the massive extension of federal authority involved in Prohibition and the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, describing the roles and reactions of not just Congress, the presidents, and the Supreme Court but political actors throughout the states, who jockeyed with one another to claim fidelity to the Tenth Amendment while reviling nationalism and nullification alike. The most comprehensive treatment of the constitutional debate over Prohibition to date, the book concludes with a discussion of the parallels and differences between Prohibition in the 1920s and debates about the legalization of marijuana today.”

Posted on by L&R Forum

A New Collection of Sources on Early Modern Europe

9780815373537To close out the week’s books, here is a new collection from Routledge on early modern Europe, A Sourcebook of  Early Modern European History, edited by Ute Lotz-Heumann (University of Arizona). Many foundational concepts in American church-state relations date from this period, and the book addresses a number of subjects that law and religion scholars will find interesting. Here’s the publisher’s description:

A Sourcebook of Early Modern European History not only provides instructors with primary sources of a manageable length and translated into English, it also offers students a concise explanation of their context and meaning.

By covering different areas of early modern life through the lens of contemporaries’ experiences, this book serves as an introduction to the early modern European world in a way that a narrative history of the period cannot. It is divided into six subject areas, each comprising between twelve and fourteen explicated sources: I. The fabric of communities: Social interaction and social control; II. Social spaces: Experiencing and negotiating encounters; III. Propriety, legitimacy, fidelity: Gender, marriage, and the family; IV. Expressions of faith: Official and popular religion; V. Realms intertwined: Religion and politics; and, VI. Defining the religious other: Identities and conflicts.

Spanning the period from c. 1450 to c. 1750 and including primary sources from across early modern Europe, from Spain to Transylvania, Italy to Iceland, and the European colonies, this book provides an excellent sense of the diversity and complexity of human experience during this time whilst drawing attention to key themes and events of the period. It is ideal for students of early modern history, and of early modern Europe in particular.

Posted on by amnania

Around the Web

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

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Chapman on Government Funding of Christian Education for Native Americans (and the meaning of the Establishment Clause)

Pretty neat paper by Nathan Chapman on the history of federal funding of Christian education for Native Americans from the Revolution to Reconstruction, and its implications–if any–for the meaning of the Establishment Clause. Here’s the abstract:

In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Supreme Court stated two principles that continue to animate Establishment Clause doctrine. The first is that courts should look to founding-era history—especially the history of “religious assessments,” or taxes used to fund churches—to interpret the Establishment Clause. The second is that, based on this history, the government may provide limited secular goods to religious schools, but the Establishment Clause prohibits the government from directly funding religious education.

What Everson ignored, and what subsequent legal scholarship has likewise overlooked, is that the founding-era government did directly fund religious education: from the Revolution to Reconstruction, the federal government partnered with Christian missionaries to “civilize” American Indians. Initially ad hoc, this practice was formalized with the Civilization Funds Act of 1819, which authorized the government to distribute $10,000 per year to “persons of good moral character” to educate and “civilize” the tribes. For over fifty years, the government funded Christian missionaries who incorporated religious instruction and worship into their curricula. Curiously, no one ever raised a constitutional objection.

This Article is the first to provide a thorough analysis of the government-missionary partnerships and to explore why no one objected to their constitutionality. The evidence strongly suggests eighteenth and nineteenth-century Americans supported them because of a shared view of social progress that merged Christianization, education, and civilization. They simply could not have imagined separating Christianity and education. This evidence reshapes the conventional narrative of the historical development of non-establishment norms in the United States, especially the centrality of the Jeffersonian “taxpayer conscience” objection to religious assessments.

This history also has important implications for Establishment Clause doctrine. The challenge is ascertaining a constitutional principle from a practice that itself went unquestioned. The history does, however, suggest that the government may directly fund general education, even when that education entails incidental voluntary religious instruction. This principle complements the theoretical norm of “substantive neutrality” and supports the Supreme Court’s current doctrinal trajectory of easing restrictions on government funding of religious education.

Posted on by L&R Forum

A New Translation of Second Nicea

9781786941275The Seventh Ecumenical Council, Second Nicaea (787 AD), is famous for its rejection of iconoclasm, a question that roiled the Byzantine state in the eighth century.  It’s the last council accepted as ecumenical by Eastern Orthodox Christians. (The Catholic Church has convened many since, including, most recently, Vatican II). All of which is to say that Second Nicea represents an important moment in church-and-state history.

Late last year, Oxford University Press published a new, two-volume English translation of the formal acts of the Council. Very few English translations exist, so this is an important addition to the scholarly literature. The book is The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787),  and the translator is Richard Price (University of London). Here’s the description from the Oxford website:

The Second Council of Nicaea (787) decreed that religious images were to set up in churches and venerated. It thereby established the cult of icons as a central element in the piety of the Orthodox churches, as it has remained ever since. In the West its decrees received a new emphasis in the Counter-Reformation, in the defence of the role of art in religion. It is a text of prime importance for the iconoclast controversy of eighth-century Byzantium, one of the most explored and contested topics in Byzantine history. But it has also a more general significance – in the history of culture and the history of art. This edition offers the first translation that is based on the new critical edition of this text in the Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum series, and the first full commentary of this work that has ever been written. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers from a variety of disciplines.

Posted on by L&R Forum

The Anti-Weber

3a49f43d92258c9b95781734e9db2f85 (1)A new book from Yale University Press argues that Max Weber had it all wrong. Christianity, even in its Protestant version, doesn’t create a capitalist mentality. Rather, Christianity offers a direct challenge to capitalism. Seems pretty straightforward, actually. The book, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, by Yale theologian Kathryn Tanner, is one of many new works, from both the left and the right, that critique the easy association many American Christians make between their religion and market economics. Here’s the description from the Yale website:

One of the world’s most celebrated theologians argues for a Protestant anti-work ethic

In his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber famously showed how Christian beliefs and practices could shape persons in line with capitalism. In this significant reimagining of Weber’s work, Kathryn Tanner provocatively reverses this thesis, arguing that Christianity can offer a direct challenge to the largely uncontested growth of capitalism.

Exploring the cultural forms typical of the current finance-dominated system of capitalism, Tanner shows how they can be countered by Christian beliefs and practices with a comparable person-shaping capacity. Addressing head-on the issues of economic inequality, structural under- and unemployment, and capitalism’s unstable boom/bust cycles, she draws deeply on the theological resources within Christianity to imagine anew a world of human flourishing. This book promises to be one of the most important theological books in recent years.

Posted on by L&R Forum

A New History of Catholicism in Postcolonial Africa

9780674987661-lgHere is a new book from Harvard on the history of Catholicism in Africa in the postcolonial period, African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church, by Tufts University historian Elizabeth A. Foster. The publisher’s description of the book, below, suggests an historical struggle in French Africa between conservative European clerics and liberation-minded Africans. Ironic, that–because nowadays the struggle in Catholicism, and other Christian communions, is between progressive European clerics and conservative African ones. Times change:

A groundbreaking history of how Africans in the French Empire embraced both African independence and their Catholic faith during the upheaval of decolonization, leading to a fundamental reorientation of the Catholic Church.

African Catholic examines how French imperialists and the Africans they ruled imagined the religious future of French sub-Saharan Africa in the years just before and after decolonization. The story encompasses the political transition to independence, Catholic contributions to black intellectual currents, and efforts to alter the church hierarchy to create an authentically “African” church.

Elizabeth Foster recreates a Franco-African world forged by conquest, colonization, missions, and conversions—one that still exists today. We meet missionaries in Africa and their superiors in France, African Catholic students abroad destined to become leaders in their home countries, African Catholic intellectuals and young clergymen, along with French and African lay activists. All of these men and women were preoccupied with the future of France’s colonies, the place of Catholicism in a postcolonial Africa, and the struggle over their personal loyalties to the Vatican, France, and the new African states.

Having served as the nuncio to France and the Vatican’s liaison to UNESCO in the 1950s, Pope John XXIII understood as few others did the central questions that arose in the postwar Franco-African Catholic world. Was the church truly universal? Was Catholicism a conservative pillar of order or a force to liberate subjugated and exploited peoples? Could the church change with the times? He was thinking of Africa on the eve of Vatican II, declaring in a radio address shortly before the council opened, “Vis-à-vis the underdeveloped countries, the church presents itself as it is and as it wants to be: the church of all.”