In our most recent podcast, Mark and I spoke with Professors Julia Mahoney and Steven Smith about the prospects for a revival of classical law in America. That retrieval would depend, at least in part, upon the systematic reintroduction of Christian concepts and categories. Our guests had mixed views on the matter, reflecting different feelings about what the future might hold.

Here is a new volume of essays that seems to support Professor Mahoney’s sense of things (and to which Professor Smith contributed a chapter!): The Oxford Handbook of Christianity and Law, co-edited by our friend and law-and-religion titan, Professor John Witte, Jr., and Professor Rafael Domingo. The book is massive, and I don’t see a single chapter I am not interested to read. A must-have to usher in the season of Advent.

This volume tells the story of the interaction between Christianity and law—historically and today, in the traditional heartlands of Christianity and around the globe. Sixty new chapters by leading scholars provide authoritative but accessible accounts of foundational Christian teachings on law and legal thought over the past two millennia as well as the current interaction and contestation of law and Christianity on all continents. Several chapters explore the ways in which Christianity shaped and was shaped by core public, private, penal, and procedural laws. Other chapters analyze various old and new forms of Christian canon law, natural law theory, and religious freedom norms as well as Christian teachings on fundamental principles of law, politics, and legal order. A final cluster of chapters probe Christian contributions to controversial and cutting legal issues of migration, biotechnology, environmentalism, and racial justice. Together, the chapters make clear that Christianity and law have had a perennial and permanent influence on each other over time and across cultures, albeit with varying levels of intensity and effectiveness.