Here’s a new one that is not stricu sensu about religion, though of course it concerns law and religion inasmuch as many of the most controversial areas taken up by the Court involve law and religion questions, whether they are about abortion, disestablishment, free exercise, free speech, the rights of sexual freedom, and many others. Biskupic sets up a tension between promoting a “conservative agenda” and “protect[ing] the Court’s…place in history.” Well, that’s one way to say it. Some of us have been suggesting, albeit from a somewhat different perspective, for some time that the Chief Justice may sense himself to be “conflicted” in this way.

The book is The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts (Basic Books), by the journalist Joan Biskupic.

“John Roberts was named to the Supreme Court in 2005 claiming he would act as a neutral umpire in deciding cases. His critics argue he has been anything but, pointing to his conservative victories on voting rights and campaign finance. Yet he broke from orthodoxy in his decision to preserve Obamacare. How are we to understand the motives of the most powerful judge in the land?

In The Chief, award-winning journalist Joan Biskupic contends that Roberts is torn between two, often divergent, priorities: to carry out a conservative agenda, and to protect the Court’s image and his place in history. Biskupic shows how Roberts’s dual commitments have fostered distrust among his colleagues, with major consequences for the law. Trenchant and authoritative, The Chief reveals the making of a justice and the drama on this nation’s highest court.”

From the prominent French political theorist (and author of a political history of religion in America) Denis Lacorne comes this new book of intellectual history: The Limits of Tolerance: Enlightenment Values and Religious Fanaticism (Columbia University Press). Lacorne’s thesis seems to be the rather familiar one that tolerance is a distinctively 17th and 18th century idea emergent in the views of such people as Locke and Voltaire (Locke is perhaps a more familiar source on this score than Voltaire, whose writing about toleration is rather more uneven in its commitment). There also seems to be a very practical and how-to side of the book, as the description suggests, applying Enlightenment wisdom to contemporary problems. It would be interesting to put Lacorne in conversation with Robert Wilken, whose recent book on a similar theme offers a very different view.

“The modern notion of tolerance—the welcoming of diversity as a force for the common good—emerged in the Enlightenment in the wake of centuries of religious wars. First elaborated by philosophers such as John Locke and Voltaire, religious tolerance gradually gained ground in Europe and North America. But with the resurgence of fanaticism and terrorism, religious tolerance is increasingly being challenged by frightened publics.

In this book, Denis Lacorne traces the emergence of the modern notion of religious tolerance in order to rethink how we should respond to its contemporary tensions. In a wide-ranging argument that spans the Ottoman Empire, the Venetian republic, and recent controversies such as France’s burqa ban and the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, The Limits of Tolerance probes crucial questions: Should we impose limits on freedom of expression in the name of human dignity or decency? Should we accept religious symbols in the public square? Can we tolerate the intolerant? While acknowledging that tolerance can never be entirely without limits, Lacorne defends the Enlightenment concept against recent attempts to circumscribe it, arguing that without it a pluralistic society cannot survive. Awarded the Prix Montyon by the Académie Française, The Limits of Tolerance is a powerful reflection on twenty-first-century democracy’s most fundamental challenges.”

This one is a necessity. The tension between what could be called–very roughly and impressionistically–the “natural law” and “common law” orientations to law is a perennial source of interest. Should we think of law as derived from and guided by certain unchanging moral truths? Or should we instead think of it as a body of wisdom that accretes over time? Principle or experience? Universal or local? Of course both general views about law have played central roles in the history of Anglo-American legal thought.

Here is what looks like a very interesting new study of these age-old questions: Common Law and Natural Law in America: From the Puritans to the Legal Realists (Cambridge University Press), by Andrew Forsyth.

“Speaking to today’s flourishing conversations on both law, morality, and religion, and the religious foundations of law, politics, and society, Common Law and Natural Law in America is an ambitious four-hundred-year narrative and fresh re-assessment of the varied American interactions of ‘common law’, the stuff of courtrooms, and ‘natural law’, a law built on human reason, nature, and the mind or will of God. It offers a counter-narrative to the dominant story of common law and natural law by drawing widely from theological and philosophical accounts of natural law, as well as primary and secondary work in legal and intellectual history. With consequences for today’s natural-law proponents and critics alike, it explores the thought of the Puritans, Revolutionary Americans, and seminal legal figures including William Blackstone, Joseph Story, Christopher Columbus Langdell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the legal realists.”

Here is a new study of powerful female voices of conservative Christianity in the pre- and post-Reagan period. The book is This is Our Message: Women’s Leadership in the New Christian Right (Oxford University Press) by Emily S. Johnson. The publisher tells us that the book adopts an “evenhanded and respectful tone” as to its subject. That’s a very positive quality, of course. For any serious scholarly study.

“Over the past 50 years, the architects of the religious right have become household names: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson. They have used their massively influential platforms to build the profiles of evangelical politicians like Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, and Ted Cruz. Now, a new generation of leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress enjoys unprecedented access to the Trump White House.

What all these leaders share, besides their faith, is their gender. Men dominate the standard narrative of the rise of the religious right. Yet during the 1970s and 1980s nationally prominent evangelical women played essential roles in shaping the priorities of the movement and mobilizing its supporters. In particular, they helped to formulate, articulate, and defend the traditionalist politics of gender and family that in turn made it easy to downplay the importance of their leadership roles. In This Is Our Message, Emily Johnson begins by examining the lives and work of four well-known women-evangelical marriage advice author Marabel Morgan, singer and anti-gay-rights activist Anita Bryant, author and political lobbyist Beverly LaHaye, and televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. The book explores their impact on the rise of the New Christian Right and on the development of the evangelical subculture, which is a key channel for injecting conservative political ideas into purportedly apolitical spaces. Johnson then highlights the ongoing significance of this history through an analysis of Sarah Palin’s vice presidential candidacy in 2008 and Michele Bachmann’s presidential bid in 2012. These campaigns were made possible by the legacies of an earlier generation of conservative evangelical women who continue to impact our national conversations about gender, family, and sex.”