Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Five Views on Natural Law

I’ve enjoyed Zondervan’s “Critical Points” series, which publishes brief and accessible introductions to contested questions in Christian thought. Here is a new volume in the series, Natural Law: Five Views, edited by Ryan Anderson and Andrew Walker. The book brings together scholars of natural law from the Protestant and Catholic traditions, which seem to be working in parallel. Here’s the publisher’s description:

The story of “natural law” – the idea that God has written a law on the human heart so that ethical norms derive from human nature – in twentieth-century Protestant ethics is one of rejection and resurgence. For half a century, luminaries like Karl Barth, Carl F. H. Henry, and Cornelius Van Til cast a shadow over natural law moral reflection because of its putative link to natural theology, autonomous reason, associations with Catholic theology, and ethical witness devoid of special revelation. However, over the past twenty years, Protestant theologians have renewed their interest in the subject, often animated by debates on Christian involvement in the public arena and on matters of life, death, and gender and sexuality. Much of this engagement has happened within Reformed circles and has largely been conducted without reference to Roman Catholic construals of the natural law. Conversely, Catholic developments in natural-law thinking have paid little attention to the surge of interest on the Protestant side. As a result, Protestant and Catholic natural proponents – and even those skeptical of the natural law – are not in conversation with one another.

The lack of dialog between the various schools of natural law has left a historic tradition within Christian moral thought underdeveloped in contemporary Protestant theology. By bringing together a variety of perspectives in much-needed conversation, this book helps readers to understand the various construals of natural law within the broader strands of Christian and classical traditions and clarifies its unique importance for Christian moral witness in a secular culture. 

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Video of Center Panel on the Catholic Charter School Case

A video of our panel this month in the Catholic Charter School case, Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, set for argument at SCOTUS in a couple of weeks, is now available on the Mattone Center’s YouTube channel. Thanks again for Professors Michael Helfand (Pepperdine) and Michael Moreland (Villanova) for participating. Link is below:

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Video on Chicago-Kent Panel

The panel on religious exemptions from the Chicago-Kent Law Review symposium in which I participated with Stephanie Barclay and Laura Underkuffler is now available on YouTube. Thanks again to the organizers for inviting me. The symposium will appear in print later this year. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for the appearance of the Justice Souter bobblehead at 29:05!

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

New Video on Cantwell v. Connecticut

Happy to announce that the latest episode in our animated video series, “Landmark Cases in Religious Freedom,” is now available on our YouTube channel. This episode covers Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940), in which a Jehovah’s Witness was convicted of inciting a breach of the peace after playing an anti-Catholic phonograph record in a Catholic neighborhood. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Cantwell’s conviction was unconstitutional, establishing for the first time that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause applies to state laws through the Fourteenth Amendment. The case demonstrates how the Constitution protects offensive religious speech absent physical threats or an imminent danger to public order. This precedent remains crucial in today’s debates about religious “hate speech” and the balance between free expression and public safety. Take a look!

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Berner on Educational Pluralism

I’m late getting to this, but I did want to note Ashley Rogers Berner’s most recent book on educational pluralism, Educational Pluralism and Democracy: How to Handle Indoctrination, Promote Exposure, and Rebuild America’s Schools (Harvard). Ashley, a professor of education at Johns Hopkins, is a longtime friend of the Mattone Center who participated in our Tradition Project several years ago. She has written a great deal about how different perspectives, including religious, can benefit K-12 education, and is always worth reading. Here’s the description of the book from the publisher:

In Educational Pluralism and Democracy, education policy expert Ashley Rogers Berner envisions a K–12 education system that serves both the individual and the common good. Calling for education reform that will enable US public schools to fulfill the longstanding promise of American education, Berner proposes a radical reimagining of both the structure and content of US public school systems. She urges policymakers to embrace educational pluralism, an internationally common model in which the government funds diverse types of schools that deliver more universal content.

Providing an incisive assessment of democratic education throughout the world, Berner argues that educational pluralism can build students’ exposure to diverse viewpoints and shared knowledge within distinctive school communities. She shows how pluralism steers a middle path that enables equitable access, promotes academic excellence, and avoids the zero-sum games that characterize US education policy. Pluralism, she observes, will ultimately serve democracy by defusing polarization and increasing social mobility, political tolerance, and civic engagement.

In this thought-provoking proposal, Berner lays out a roadmap for big-picture reform, expertly delineating the mechanisms through which educational norms can change. A practical conclusion describes concrete moves that advocates can pursue to garner support and advance new legislation.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Center Co-Hosts Symposium on Oklahoma Charter School Case

Last night, the Center co-hosted its annual symposium with the St. John’s Journal of Catholic Legal Studies, with guests Professors Michael Helfand of Pepperdine and Michael Moreland of Villanova. A great discussion about the Oklahoma Catholic Charter School case, which SCOTUS will hear later this month. I’ll post the video when it becomes available.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Mattone Center Participates in Law and Religion Moot Court in Rome

Last week, the Mattone Center’s student fellows–Noa Cadet, Riki Markowitz, Karina Mesrobian, and Panayiotis Xenakis, participated in the 8th International Law and Religion Moot Court Competition in Rome. The competition gathers law students from Europe and the US to argue a mock case before panels representing the US Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights. This was the first time the Mattone Center fielded a team in the competition. Congrats to our team, especially oralists Noa Cadet and Riki Markowitz, and many thanks to Jim Herschlein ’85 for helping to coach!

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Moschella on the New Natural Law

This month, the University of Notre Dame Press publishes an introduction what it calls the “new natural law,” Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law: Principles for Human Flourishing, by philosopher Melissa Moschella (Notre Dame). I’m in over my head here, but as I understand it, its proponents argue that new natural law theory (NNLT) integrates the three elements of goods, norms, and virtues more successfully than other approaches. Readers must judge for themselves. Here’s the description from the Notre Dame website:

The foundational principles of ethics and politics are principles that guide us to respect and promote human flourishing. In Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law Melissa Moschella provides an accessible explanation and development of the new natural law account of these principles while clarifying common misconceptions.

As a commonsense ethical theory, natural law grounds ethics in the fundamental dimensions of human flourishing. Moschella lays out the basic principles of natural law, their relationship to the virtues, and their social and political implications. Highlighting the importance of communities for flourishing, Moschella explains how this should shape our understanding of justice and the common good, and shows how natural law principles support limited government and civil liberties. She also considers the relationship between morality and God, and how natural law relates to Christian revelation. This fresh and compelling account of new natural law is the go-to resource to understand this important and influential theory.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Marginalized Religions in the Roman Empire

Most are familiar with the Roman Empire’s treatment of Christianity–which, the conventional account goes, was uniquely bad. But, argues classicist K.P.S. Janssen in a book out this month from Oxford University Press, Marginalized Religion and the Law in the Roman Empire, Rome marginalized other religions as well, and treated them quite similarly in legal terms. Readers can evaluate the argument for themselves. Here’s the description from the Oxford website:

The Roman Empire’s approach to religion has traditionally been described in paradoxical terms. On the one hand, Rome has often been regarded as almost proverbially tolerant, as well as highly flexible in its dealings with the diverse range of religious cults and practices within its territories. On the other hand, the Roman religious landscape was not without its limits, and there were certain groups who found themselves, for one reason or another, on the outside. The legal interactions between these groups and the Roman authorities have largely been studied in isolation. In Marginalized Religion and the Law in the Roman Empire, K. P. S. Janssen instead takes a comparative approach, and investigates how members of various marginalized religious groups were embedded in, and interacted with, the wider Roman legal system. The legal positions of private diviners, Jewish communities and early Christians are compared and contrasted to provide a broader perspective on the legal treatment of marginalized religion in the Roman world. Janssen argues that the known interactions between these respective groups and the Roman authorities are best understood within the wider context of Roman law and administration, and that they furthermore shared a number of important characteristics. While the treatment these groups received was certainly not in all respects identical, the procedural, socio-political, and ideological mechanisms that underpinned the relevant legal measures were nonetheless conspicuously similar.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Theocratic Criminal Law in Iran

The word “theocratic” gets tossed around a lot these days. Usually, it is used to designate what the speaker believes to be a too-close relationship between religion and the state that results in a law or policy the speaker doesn’t like. But genuine theocracies, where clerics serve as the ultimate political authority, are pretty scare. One such theocracy is Iran. A new book from Oxford University Press, On Theocratic Criminal Law: The Rule of Religion and Punishment in Iran, discusses the situation. The author is Bahman Khodadadi (Harvard). Here’s the description from the Harvard website:

On Theocratic Criminal Law explores the roots and structures of the criminal law system of the world’s most prominent constitutional theocracy, the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

While discussing the processes of forced de-westernization and de-modernization which occurred in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, this work examines how the Islamic conception of civil order and polity has been established within the legal and theological framework of the Iranian Constitution. The book engages in a process of ‘rational reconstruction’ of Iranian theocratic criminal law and offers a critical analysis of the way criminal law functions as the centrepiece of this mode of political domination. It illuminates how this revelation-based, punitive ideology functions, how the current Islamic Penal Code (IPC) mirrors prevailing Shiite jurisprudence, and ultimately, from what sort of fundamental defects theocratic criminal law in Iran is suffering. 

This work provides a critical assessment of the criminalization and sentencing theories that have stemmed from the shariatization (Islamization) of all law in the wake of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. By embarking upon a typology of punishment in Shiite Islamic jurisprudence and the Iranian Islamic Penal Code the book then provides a systematic critical analysis of the three types of punishment stipulated in the Iranian Penal Code, namely ta’zir, hadd, and qisas. It also explores the jurisprudential principles and dynamic power of Shiite Islam not only as a driving force behind political and social change but as a force that has been capable of forging a whole theocratic legal system.