LAW AND RELIGION FORUM

One of our Center’s three primary areas of focus concerns the law of religious traditions, and one of our very first conferences back in 2010 was about “Religious Legal Theory.” It’s certainly a subject that Mark has written about, as in his piece on the role of law in Islam and Christianity. Here is a new volume that looks to be a vital resource for this very interesting corner of law and religion: Comparative Religious Law: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, by Norman Doe (Cambridge University Press).

Comparative Religious Law provides for the first time a study of the regulatory instruments of Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious organisations in Britain in light of their historical religious laws. Norman Doe questions assumptions about the pervasiveness, character and scope of religious laws, from the view that they are not or should not be recognised by civil law, to the idea that there may be a fundamental incompatibility between religious and civil law. It proposes that religious laws pervade society, are recognised by civil law, have both a religious and temporal character, and regulate wide areas of believers’ lives. Subjects include sources of law, faith leaders, governance, worship and education, rites of passage, divorce and children, and religion-State relations. A Charter of ‘the principles of religious law’ common to all three Abrahamic faiths is proposed, to stimulate greater mutual understanding between religion and society and between the three faiths themselves.

George Marsden is one of several great Evangelical historians of American religion (a group that also includes the likes of Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch) who has made major contributions to the study of Christianity as a historiographically seriously American phenomenon. Indeed, it strikes me that Noll’s important The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was written in 1990, and since then the community of serious Evangelical scholars in history and elsewhere has become very rich and interesting. Here is a new book by Marsden, Religion & American Culture: A Brief History (Eerdmans) which looks like it could serve as a useful introduction to his work more broadly.

While Americans still profess to be one of the most religious people in the industrialized world, many aspects of American culture have long been secular and materialistic. That is just one of the many paradoxes, contradictions, and surprises in the relationship between Christianity and American culture. In this book George Marsden, a leading historian of American Christianity and award-winning author, tells the story of that relationship in a concise and thought-provoking way.

Surveying the history of religion and American culture from the days of the earliest European settlers right up through the elections of 2016, Marsden offers the kind of historically and religiously informed scholarship that has made him one of the nation’s most respected and decorated historians. Students in the classroom and history readers of all ages will benefit from engaging with the story Marsden tells.

The contest between globalism and nationalism, seen in so many political contests today here and abroad, might be understood as one facet of a deeper problem: whether politics–and liberal politics specifically–is a fundamentally universal activity or instead one rooted in cultural and contingent particularities. Here is a very interesting new book by Middlebury College political theorist Keegan Callanan about Montesquieu’s thought, but with clear implications for the way in which we think about universalism and particularism in politics. Professor Callanan’s book is Montesquieu’s Liberalism and the Problem of Universal Politics (CUP).

Dubbed ‘the oracle’ by no less an authority than James Madison, Montesquieu stands as a theoretical founder of the liberal political tradition. But equally central to his project was his account of the relationship of law to each nation’s particular customs and place, a teaching that militates against universal political solutions. This teaching has sometimes been thought to stand in tension with his liberal constitutionalism. In this book, Keegan Callanan argues that Montesquieu’s political particularism and liberalism are complementary and mutually reinforcing parts of a coherent whole. In developing this argument, Callanan considers Montesquieu’s regime pluralism, psychological conception of liberty, approach to political reform, and account of ‘the customs of a free people’, including the complex interaction of religion and commerce. Callanan concludes that, by re-orienting our understanding of liberalism and redirecting our attention toward liberty’s distinctive preconditions, a return to Montesquieu’s political philosophy leaves us better prepared to confront liberal democracy’s contested claim to universality.

From the well-known author of the deeply influential and not particularly convincing “The End of History and the Last Man” comes this new book about identity and the “demand for recognition” as the key to understanding contemporary politics. Certainly the demand for recognition has fueled many developments in the law, including the recent rise to prominence of dignity-related theories of legal right in constitutional law. The book is Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, by Francis Fukuyama (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and looks to be in part a self-help book for liberal democracies for coping with this form of politics–another call to “forge” a “universal” notion of “dignity.” For a very different, and, to my mind, much more persuasive account of “dignity” today, see Mark’s recent piece on the subject.

In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.

Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.

Identity is an urgent and necessary book—a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.

A new English translation of this wonderful 15th century work by the poet, scholar, man of letters, and Neapolitan statesman Giovanni Pontano. From a time when scholars thought about whether speech was healthy or not for the polity, and sought to influence public policy accordingly. I’m sure that there are more than a few things of use in this old work, originally titled De Sermone, for today’s interminable debates about the value of free speech in American society. The book is The Virtues and Vices of Speech, by Giovanni Pontano (Harvard University Press) (translated by G.W. Pigman III).

Giovanni Pontano, who adopted the academic sobriquet “Gioviano,” was prime minister to several kings of Naples and the most important Neapolitan humanist of the quattrocento. Best known today as a Latin poet, he also composed dialogues depicting the intellectual life of the humanist academy of which he was the head, and, late in life, a number of moral essays that became his most popular prose works. The De sermone (On Speech), translated into English here for the first time, aims to provide a moral anatomy, following Aristotelian principles, of various aspects of speech such as truthfulness and deception, flattery, gossip, loquacity, calumny, mercantile bargaining, irony, wit, and ridicule. In each type of speech, Pontano tries to identify what should count as the virtuous mean, that which identifies the speaker as a person of education, taste, and moral probity.