Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Pin on Human Dignity

Very happy to announce the publication this month of Andrea Pin’s latest book, Dignity in Judgment: Constitutional Adjudication in Comparative Perspective (Oxford). Andrea is a Full Professor at Padua and one of the world’s leading scholars in comparative constitutional law–as well as a friend of the Mattone Center and frequent participant in our program. Always worth reading!

Here is the description from the Oxford website:

Dignity is a complex philosophical, theological, and constitutional concept. Courts have often progressively distanced the notion of dignity in constitutional law from its religious connotation to emphasize individual autonomy and self-determination. This process has made the notion of dignity less ambiguous, but narrower and more controversial.

Dignity in Judgment: Constitutional Adjudication in Comparative Perspective compares how the apex courts of Canada, Colombia, Egypt, the EU, and Israel operationalize the concept of dignity in their case law. While these countries share an Abrahamic faith and secularization tendencies, these legal systems host a plurality of societal values, and their courts have the reputation of having an activist approach to adjudication. This book offers an in depth-analysis of key decisions that reflect or use the concept of dignity, including capital punishment, antiterrorism measures, biotechnologies, and same-sex relations to build a model of human dignity that facilitates mutual understandings among and within legal traditions. It shows how religious and secular understandings of dignity have shaped its interpretation through the decades.

Insightful and thought-provoking, Dignity in Judgment explores the concept of dignity as it appears in the law by uncovering its character across different legal cultures and religious contexts.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Manent on Pascal

This is a bit outside my wheelhouse, but I did want to note that next month Notre Dame Press will release an English translation of French scholar Pierre Manent’s recent book, Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition. Many observers have noted an uptick in Christianity in France (and the US), especially among young men. How much of this is a genuine spiritual movement and how much a cultural “Team Christianity” isn’t yet clear, and of course some would deny there is a difference between the two, anyway. Whatever explains the uptick, it’s hard to imagine a French Christianity without Pascal–which makes the Manent book important reading for this moment. The publisher’s description follows:

Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference is the first English translation of Pierre Manent’s penetrating engagement with the seventeenth century polymath and apologist for the Christian faith, Blaise Pascal.

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was the first Christian apologist to address modern human beings on their own terms and present a defense of the Christian religion that still resonates today. A major publishing and intellectual event in France when it first appeared in 2022, Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference is Pierre Manent’s investigation of Pascal’s exploration of Christianity in the wake of a sharp atheistic turn at the dawn of the modern state and modern science. Comprehensive in scope and profound in treatment, this engagement with all of Pascal’s writings, including his famous Pensées, appeals to the reader’s head and heart. Manent emphasizes the joy that comes from engaging the truth of faith, and he argues that we are diminished by forgetting the unique and distinctive contributions of Christianity.

More than brilliant exegesis, Manent enlists Pascal in a much greater endeavor: to make what he calls “the Christian proposition” concerning God and man intelligible to Europeans who have made it their business to ignore the religion that founded Europe and the larger Western world.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Wilsey on Religious Freedom

A great benefit of my sabbatical several years ago at Princeton’s James Madison Program was having an office next door to Professor John Wilsey. I always enjoyed and learned a great deal from our hallway conversations. Now lots of other people can benefit, too, since John, a church historian at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is out with a new book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer (Eerdmans). Looks very interesting. Here’s the publisher’s description:

In this timely book, historian John D. Wilsey addresses urgent questions about religious freedom in America. How have conservatives historically understood the meaning of religious freedom? How do Americans who identify as conservative now think about religious freedom in this era? What are the differences between the historical and contemporary views, and how do those differences shape fights about religious freedom today?
 
Writing for fellow Americans concerned about threats to religious liberty, Wilsey draws on US history to explain why rather than weaponizing religious freedom in the context of the culture wars, today’s conservatives need to rally around religious freedom to promote peace between church and state. With wisdom and acuity, Wilsey charts a path forward for thinking about and maintaining a uniquely American tradition: the harmony between liberty and religion that each generation has received as an inheritance from the generations preceding theirs.

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

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

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.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Wearing Religious Symbols in Italy

The US doesn’t have too much trouble with people wearing religious symbols in public places. In Europe, though, this has been a consistent controversy–famously in France, but in other jurisdictions as well. A new book from Routledge, Secularism and Freedom of Religion in Italy, addresses the approach of Italian law. The author is political scientist Maria Cristina Ivaldi (University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli). Here’s the publisher’s description:

The display of religious symbols in the public space has been the subject of much debate. This book provides an overview of the presence of religious symbols in Italian public institutions from a legal standpoint.

The situation is analysed from the perspective of the principles of laicità/secularism, as defined by the Constitutional Court, and freedom of religion. It is argued that while the display of religious symbols in public institutions has been widely investigated doctrinally, the wearing of religious symbols in Italy has generally been neglected. Key cases are examined in light of national jurisprudence as well as intervention by the European Court of Human Rights and relevant judgments from foreign courts regarding this issue. Finally, the work considers the presence of religious symbols that transcend national borders, as in the case of arts, sport and advertising. A comparison is made with the French system which takes a very different approach. The book outlines possible ways forward in light of the growing interculturality of European societies.

It will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the areas of law and religion, and comparative law.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Burge on the American Religious Landscape

For many years, I have profited from the work of political scientist Ryan Burge (Eastern Illinois University). His monographs on the composition of religious groups in the US have been quite valuable, especially when it comes to chronicling the rise of the Nones. He’s always thorough, readable, and insightful. So I’m looking forward to his latest monograph from Oxford University Press, The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends, and the Future. Oxford will release the book next month. Here’s the description from the Oxford website:

At its founding, the United States was an overwhelmingly Protestant country. However, over the last 250 years, it has become increasingly diverse with tens of millions of Catholics, millions of Latter-day Saints, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews, alongside a rapidly increasing share of Americans who claim no religious affiliation at all. 

The American Religious Landscape uses an in-depth statistical analysis of large datasets to answer foundational questions about this diversity, such as: How many Hindus are there in the US? Which state has the highest concentration of Muslims? Are atheists more highly educated than the general population? How many Roman Catholics attend Mass weekly? It focuses on the overall size, geographic distribution, and demographic composition of twelve different religious groups in short and accessible chapters that, taken together, serve as a basic introduction to the state of religion in America. Through dozens of charts, graphs, and maps–designed for readability and clarity–readers will be left with a solid understanding of the contours of contemporary American religion and what it could look like in the future.