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Kopel on Evolving Christian Attitudes Towards Personal and National Self-Defense

David B. Kopel (Denver University – Sturm College of Law) has posted Evolving Christian Attitudes Towards Personal and National Self-Defense. The abstract follows.

This Article analyzes the changes in orthodox Christian attitudes towards defensive violence. While the article begins in the 19th century and ends in the 21st, most of the Article is about the 20th century. The article focuses on American Catholicism and on the Vatican, although there is some discussion of American Protestantism.

In the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries, the traditional Christian concepts of Just War and of the individual’s duty to use force to defend himself and his family remained uncontroversial, as they had been for centuries. Disillusionment over World War One turned many Catholics and Protestants towards pacifism. Without necessarily adopting pacifism as a Read more

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Zawati on Just War, Peace and Human Rights Under Islamic and International Law

Hilmi M. Zawati (McGill University) has posted Just War, Peace and Human Rights Under Islamic and International Law. The abstract follows.

The present thesis attempts a critical examination of the theory of war under Islamic and public international law, in an effort to demonstrate that jihad is a just, defensive, and exceptional form of warfare, geared to the maintenance of peace, and the protection of human rights for all people, whether those rights be exercised alone or in association with others, without distinction as to race, sex, language or religious belief. Through an examination of the norms of Islamic and public international law on armed conflict, this thesis argues that Islamic law, which governs the doctrine of jihad, is realistic and practical. Further, it made a great contribution to international humanitarian law more than a millennium before the codification of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and eight centuries before the appearance of Hugo Grotius treatise De jure belli ac pacis libri tres in 1625.

Furthermore, this comparative study reveals that the word jihad might be one of the most misunderstood terms in the history of Islamic legal discourse. This analysis also claims that the division of the world into dar al-Islam (territory of Islam) and dar al-harb (territory of war), which is not predicated on a state of mutual hostility, was dictated by particular events, and was not imposed by scripture. Moreover, this discussion provides that Islamic humanitarian law regulates conduct during a jihad on the basis of certain humane principles, compatible with those upon which modern international conventions are based. Finally, this thesis concludes that there is a unique relationship between jihad and the notion of just war, a matter which qualifies it as the bellum justum of Islam.

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Sezgin on the Role of Alternative Legalities

Yuksel Sezgin (CUNY John Jay) has posted The Role of Alternative Legalities in Bringing About Socio-Legal Change in Religious Systems. The abstract follows.

Do women have equal rights under Islamic, Jewish or Hindu laws? As far as the actual practice is concerned, the answer is not an affirmative one, as most religious traditions have historically discriminated against women particularly in familial relations. Moreover, in most religious traditions human agency is usually prohibited from interfering with ‘divine’ law that is assumed to represent the ‘God’s’ will and commands. Then, how can gender equality or uplifting of women be achieved under religio-legal systems? If ‘sacred’ laws cannot be amended, does it mean that religio-legal systems are constantly stagnated or frozen in time? Are women eternally doomed to suffer under patriarchal and discriminatory religious laws? The answer is simply ‘no’. For instance, Sisters in Islam, a Muslim feminist organization in Malaysia holds the view that it is not Qur’an or Islam that oppresses women but it is the male-centric and repressive legality built around the originally emancipatory message and word of God that came to discriminate against women. In this regard, they argue that what needs to be changed to improve the status of women is not the law or the text itself but the legality built around it. In fact, all over the world women are contesting legality of customary and religious laws and rendering a more egalitarian and emancipatory understanding of the texts and traditions without necessarily contesting their legitimacy, source or originality.

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Walker, “Reason and Religion in Late Seventeenth-Century England”

WalkerThis January, I.B. Tauris will publish Reason and Religion in Late Seventeenth-Century England: The Politics and Theology of Radical Dissent (2013) by historian Christopher J. Walker. The publisher’s description follows.

Reason has always held an uncertain position within Christianity. “I believe because it is absurd’,” wrote Tertullian in the third century as he dismissed rational thought. For Augustine of Hippo, reason had some merit as a route to faith but otherwise was of limited value, since it could undermine a person’s ability to approach God: “the wisdom of the creature,” he opined, “is a kind of twilight.” In seventeenth-century England, reason had come to mean, most usually, a spirit of free enquiry: the exercise of human intelligence upon some form of truth, whether religious or scientific. The notion of revelation, by contrast, indicated the wider accepted divine scheme within which human existence was situated. Christopher J Walker here explores the tensions between the forces of reason and revelation within English religion in the volatile period following the end of the Civil War. Ranging widely across the ideas of The Great Tew Circle, the Cambridge Platonists and dissenters like Paul Best and John Bidle (the “father of English Unitarianism”), the author shows, controversially, that the rational thinking and politics of many of the most supposedly radical figures of the era were not antipathetic to Christian faith but actually integral to it. His book makes an important contribution to the history of both religion and ideas.

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Brekus, “Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity In Early America”

OsbornThis past December, Yale University Press published Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America by Catherine A. Brekus (University of Chicago). The publisher’s description follows.

In 1743, sitting quietly with pen in hand, Sarah Osborn pondered how to tell the story of her life, how to make sense of both her spiritual awakening and the sudden destitution of her family. Remarkably, the memoir she created that year survives today, as do more than two thousand additional pages she composed over the following three decades. Sarah Osborn’s World is the first book to mine this remarkable woman’s prolific personal and spiritual record. Catherine Brekus recovers the largely forgotten story of Sarah Osborn’s life as one of the most charismatic female religious leaders of her time, while also connecting her captivating story to the rising evangelical movement in eighteenth-century America.

A schoolteacher in Rhode Island, a wife, and a mother, Sarah Osborn led a remarkable revival in the 1760s that brought hundreds of people, including many slaves, to her house each week. Her extensive written record—encompassing issues ranging from the desire to be “born again” to a suspicion of capitalism—provides a unique vantage point from which to view the emergence of evangelicalism. Brekus sets Sarah Osborn’s experience in the context of her revivalist era and expands our understanding of the birth of the evangelical movement—a movement that transformed Protestantism in the decades before the American Revolution.

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Brems (ed.), “Diversity and European Human Rights”

BremsThis January, Cambridge University Press published Diversity and European Human Rights: Rewriting Judgments of the ECHR edited by Eva Brems (Universiteit Ghent). The publisher’s description follows.

Through redrafting the judgments of the ECHR, Diversity and European Human Rights demonstrates how the court could improve the mainstreaming of diversity in its judgments. Eighteen judgments are considered and rewritten to reflect the concerns of women, children, LGB persons, ethnic and religious minorities and persons with disabilities in turn. Each redrafted judgment is accompanied by a paper outlining the theoretical concepts and frameworks that guided the approaches of the authors and explaining how each amendment to the original text is an improvement. Simultaneously, the authors demonstrate how difficult it can be to translate ideas into judgments, whilst also providing examples of what those ideas would look like in judicial language. By rewriting actual judicial decisions in a wide range of topics this book offers a broad overview of diversity issues in the jurisprudence of the ECHR and aims to bridge the gap between academic analysis and judicial practice.

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Moseley, “Nations and Nationalism in the Theology of Karl Barth”

51G+ef0ZdGL._SS500_In March, Oxford University Press will publish Nations and Nationalism in the Theology of Karl Barth by Carys Moseley (University of Edinburgh). The publisher’s description follows.

Karl Barth was well-known for his criticism of German nationalism as a corrupting influence on the German protestant churches in the Nazi era. Defining and recognising nationhood as distinct from the state is an important though underappreciated task in Barth’s theology. It flows out of his deep concern for the capacity for nationalist dogma – that every nation must have its own state – to promote warfare. The problem motivated him to make his famous break with German liberal protestant theology.

In this book, Carys Moseley traces how Barth reconceived nationhood in the light of a lifelong interest in the exegesis and preaching of the Pentecost narrative in Acts 2. She shows how his responsibilities as a pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church required preaching on this text as part of the church calendar, and thus how his defence of the inclusion of the filioque clause in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed stemmed from his ministry, homiletics and implicit missiology.

The concern to deny that nations exist primordially in creation was a crucial reason for Barth’s dissent from his contemporaries over the orders of creation, and that his polemic against ‘natural theology’ was largely driven by rejection of the German liberal idea that the rise and fall of nations is part of a cycle of nature which simply reflect divine action. Against this conceit, Barth advanced his famous doctrine of the election of Israel as part of the election of the community of the people of God. This is the way into understanding the division of the world into nations, and the divine recognition of all nations as communities wherein people are meant to seek God.