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Newbigin, “The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India”

9781107037830This October, Cambridge University Press will publish The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India: Law, Citizenship, and Community by Eleanor Newbigin (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London). The publisher’s description follows.

Between 1955 and 1956 the Government of India passed four Hindu Law Acts to reform and codify Hindu family law. Scholars have understood these acts as a response to growing concern about women’s rights but, in a powerful re-reading of their history, this book traces the origins of the Hindu law reform project to changes in the political-economy of late colonial rule. The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India considers how questions regarding family structure, property rights and gender relations contributed to the development of representative politics, and how, in solving these questions, India’s secular and state power structures were consequently drawn into a complex and unique relationship with Hindu law. In this comprehensive and illuminating resource for scholars and students, Newbigin demonstrates the significance of gender and economy to the history of twentieth-century democratic government, as it emerged in India and beyond.

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Pritchard, “Religion in Public”

0804785767This November, Stanford University Press will publish Religion in Public: Locke’s Political Theology by Elizabeth A. Pritchard (Bowdoin College). The publisher’s description follows.

John Locke’s theory of toleration is generally seen as advocating the privatization of religion. This interpretation has become conventional wisdom: secularization is widely understood as entailing the privatization of religion, and the separation of religion from power. This book turns that conventional wisdom on its head and argues that Locke secularizes religion, that is, makes it worldly, public, and political. In the name of diverse citizenship, Locke reconstructs religion as persuasion, speech, and fashion. He insists on a consensus that human rights are sacred insofar as humans are the creatures, and thus, the property of God. Drawing on a range of sources beyond Locke’s own writings, Pritchard portrays the secular not as religion’s separation from power, but rather as its affiliation with subtler, and sometimes insidious, forms of power. As a result, she captures the range of anxieties and conflicts attending religion’s secularization: denunciations of promiscuous bodies freed from patriarchal religious and political formations, correlations between secular religion and colonialist education and conversion efforts, and more recently, condemnations of the coercive and injurious force of unrestricted religious speech.

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Horwitz on Overlapping Jurisdictions

Paul Horwitz (University of Alabama School of Law) has posted Rethinking the Law, Not Abandoning it: A Comment on ‘Overlapping Jurisdictions’. The abstract follows.

This short paper responds to a symposium article published by John Witte and Joel Nichols entitled “Who Governs the Family?: Marriage as a New Test Case of Overlapping Jurisdictions,” 4 Faulkner L. Rev. 321 (2013). Much of the response was motivated by a statement in an earlier draft of that paper suggesting that advocates of the use of shari’a in marriage cases “have given up on the state” and “want to become a law unto themselves.” I question that statement, and also take the occasion to discuss the legal status of anti-shari’a laws themselves.

My paper makes two basic points. First, although I am generally skeptical that equality is a sufficiently clean and clear principle to serve as the lodestar for all Religion Clause cases, I do believe there are cases where equality does a good deal of useful work. One such area is the legislative and judicial dispute over laws banning the judicial use of shari’a in interpreting marriage contracts. The Tenth Circuit’s decision in Awad v. Ziriax, in which it concluded that such a law violated the antidiscrimination principle offered in Larson v. Valente, shows that equality can be a powerful tool in such cases. It also sheds light on two points that have not been made much in law and religion scholarship: that Larson’s antidiscrimination principle can serve valuable information-forcing purposes, and that this principle can be profitably understood as a matter of political economy.

Second, I argue that although there are some grounds for Witte’s description of shari’a advocates as having given up on the state, that is a disturbing way to think of the issue, and not a necessary one. We need not think of religious arbitration panels and other mechanisms of religious law as an utter abandonment of “law” or “the state.” Rather, we can understand them as a challenge to what we mean by those terms. Religious arbitration of choice-of-law arrangements, and religious institutional autonomy arguments more generally, invite us to adopt a different view of what constitutes “the law” and, perhaps, a more skeptical view of the scope and dominance of “the state.”

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Allen, “The Global War on Christians”

9780770437350This October, Random House will publish The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution by John L. Allen Jr. (Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and Vatican analyst for CNN and NPR). The publisher’s description follows.

One of the most respected journalists in the United States and the bestselling author of The Future Church uses his unparalleled knowledge of world affairs and religious insight to investigate the troubling worldwide persecution of Christians.

From Iraq and Egypt to Sudan and Nigeria, from Indonesia to the Indian subcontinent, Christians in the early 21st century are the world’s most persecuted religious group. According to the secular International Society for Human Rights, 80 percent of violations of religious freedom in the world today are directed against Christians. In effect, our era is witnessing the rise of a new generation of martyrs. Underlying the global war on Christians is the demographic reality that more than two-thirds of the world’s 2.3 billion Christians now live outside the West, often as a beleaguered minority up against a hostile majority– whether it’s Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East and parts of Africa and Asia, Hindu radicalism in India, or state-imposed atheism in China and North Korea. In Europe and North America, Christians face political and legal challenges to religious freedom. Allen exposes the deadly threats and offers investigative insight into what is and can be done to stop these atrocities.

“This book is about the most dramatic religion story of the early 21st century, yet one that most people in the West have little idea is even happening: The global war on Christians,” writes John Allen. “We’re not talking about a metaphorical ‘war on religion’ in Europe and the United States, fought on symbolic terrain such as whether it’s okay to erect a nativity set on the courthouse steps, but a rising tide of legal oppression, social harassment and direct physical violence, with Christians as its leading victims. However counter-intuitive it may seem in light of popular stereotypes of Christianity as a powerful and sometimes oppressive social force, Christians today indisputably form the most persecuted religious body on the planet, and too often its new martyrs suffer in silence.”

This book looks to shatter that silence.

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Regan, “The American Constitution and Religion

51oQdDf7byL__SY346_This November, The Catholic University of America Press will publish The American Constitution and Religion by Richard J. Regan. The publisher’s description follows.

The Supreme Court’s decisions concerning the first amendment are hotly debated, and the controversy shows no signs of abating as additional cases come before the court. Adding much-needed historical and philosophical background to the discussion, Richard J. Regan reconsiders some of the most important Supreme Court cases regarding the establishment clause and the free exercise of religion. Governmental aid to church-affiliated elementary schools and colleges; state-sponsored prayer and Bible reading; curriculum that includes creationism; tax exemption of church property; publicly sponsored Christmas displays—these and other notable cases are discussed in Regan’s chapters on the religious establishment clause. On the topic of the free-exercise clause, Regan considers such subjects as the value of religious freedom, as well as the place of religious beliefs in public schooling and government affairs. Important cases concerning conscientious objection to war, regulation of religious organizations and personnel, and western traditions of conscience are also examined. This book, written for students of law, political science, and religion, presents the relevant case law in chronological order. The addition of the historical context and Regan’s philosophical discussion enhances our understanding of these influential cases.

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“The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity” (Brudholm & Cushman, eds.)

9781107624757This November, Cambridge University Press will publish The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives edited by Thomas Brudholm (University of Copenhagen) and Thomas Cushman (Wellesley College). The publisher’s description follows.

A peculiar and fascinating aspect of many responses to mass atrocities is the creative and eclectic use of religious language and frameworks. Some crimes are so extreme that they “cry out to heaven,” drawing people to employ religious vocabulary to make meaning of and to judge what happened, to deal with questions of guilt and responsibility, and to re-establish hope and trust in their lives. Moreover, in recent years, religious actors have become increasingly influential in worldwide contexts of conflict-resolution and transitional justice. This collection offers a critical assessment of the possibilities and problems pertaining to attempts to bring religious – or semi-religious – allegiances and perspectives to bear in responses to the mass atrocities of our time: When and how can religious language or religious beliefs and practices be either necessary or helpful? And what are the problems and reasons for caution or critique? In this book, a group of distinguished scholars explore these questions and offer a range of original explanatory and normative perspectives.