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Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to reconsider its 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage. 
  • The Satanic Temple has been denied the opportunity to amend its Idaho abortion ban lawsuit.
  • The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued a statement addressing their concern for the evolving situation impacting migrants in the United States.
  • The Supreme Court heard arguments in a religious rights case involving a Rastafarian man who is trying to sue Louisiana prison officials after they forcibly shaved his dreadlocks.
  • U.S. bishops announced this week that Catholic hospitals in the United States are expressly prohibited from performing transgender-related surgeries on individuals who identify as the opposite sex.
  • Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America Elpidophoros became a naturalized U.S. citizen on November 10.
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Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • The 10th Circuit held that that the nondiscrimination requirements of Colorado’s Universal Preschool Program do not violate the free exercise or expressive association rights of Catholic schools by excluding them from the program due to their policy of considering the sexual orientation and gender identity of applicants and their parents in making admissions decisions. The Court cited the program’s general applicability in reaching their decision that it does not discriminate against religious schools specifically.
  • A federal district court in Idaho ruled that a charter school violated Truth Family Bible Church’s First Amendment rights when it canceled a lease that allowed the church to hold Sunday services inside its gymnasium.
  • Students and former students at Brooklyn yeshivas, as well as parents, filed a class action lawsuit claiming that New York allows yeshivas to meet state education requirements “without reliably teaching core subjects such as English, math and civics.”
  • An Illinois state appellate court held that the state’s Insurance Abortion Coverage Mandate did not violate a Baptist group’s rights under the Illinois Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The Court reasoned that since the group is neither required to provide insurance that is regulated by the Illinois Department of Insurance, or any insurance at all for that matter, nor subject to any tax or penalty for failing to provide this type of insurance, the regulation did not violate the group’s rights.
  • King Charles announced that he has approved the nomination of Bishop Sarah Mullally for election by the College of Canons of Canterbury Cathedral as Archbishop of Canterbury. Bishop Mullally would be the first woman to hold the position.
  • The FDA recently approved a generic version of the abortion pill, mifepristone. Conservatives objected to the move, including Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who called approval of the pill “a betrayal.”

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Hittinger on Natural Law

This summer, Scholarship Roundup has focused on the revival (if that is the right word) of natural law thinking in American jurisprudence. That revival features especially prominently in scholarship in the Catholic tradition, and one of its leading figures is Russell Hittinger (University of Tulsa). This fall, Catholic University of America Press will publish a new volume of essays by Hittinger, On the Dignity of Society: Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law. Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

In this collection of essays, Francis Russell Hittinger shows that Catholic social teaching is not only an articulate defense of the dignity of the human person, but perhaps more fundamentally an elucidation of the dignity of society. Indeed, Hittinger enables us to see that one cannot properly defend the dignity of the person without also showing the dignity of societies in which human persons – as naturally familial, political, and ecclesial animals – seek their own perfection in communion with others. Hittinger has been a renowned scholar of Catholic social doctrine for some time now, and the essays presented here are the fruit of his mature thinking on the topic over the course of many years. As each chapter shows, Hittinger’s historically important body of work on Catholic moral and social philosophy and theology is rooted in natural law theory and Thomistic philosophy, but also animated by St. Augustine’s thought and thus consistently sensitive to historical contexts and arenas for moral and theological disputation. These magisterial essays therefore integrate historical studies of the development of Catholic social teaching with systematic exposition of the theological coherence of that tradition, while also articulating the essential role of philosophy and natural law within both.

The volume is divided into three parts. The first part is comprised of six essays on Catholic social teaching, the second part is made up of six essays on natural law and its role in social doctrine, and the third part includes two essays discussing the first principles of the Church’s teaching on social issues. This collection will no doubt become a standard in the field of scholarship on Catholic social teaching.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Jewish & Christian Butchers in Rome

There’s an old joke about legal systems, which I’ve heard a few different ways, but which goes basically like this: in France, everything is permitted, except that which is expressly forbidden; in Germany, everything is forbidden, except that which is expressly permitted; and in Italy, everything is permitted, including that which is expressly forbidden. I thought of the joke when I saw the announcement for this fun-looking book forthcoming from Harvard this fall, Feeding the Eternal City: Jewish and Christian Butchers in the Eternal City, by historian Kenneth Stow (Haifa). The book explores the way Jewish and Christian butchers in the Papal States evaded legal restrictions and (mostly) cooperated to sell meat at good prices, to the economic benefit of both. Doux commerce! Here’s the description from the Harvard website:

A surprising history of interfaith collaboration in the Roman Ghetto, where for three centuries Jewish and Christian butchers worked together to provision the city despite the proscriptions of Church law.

For Rome’s Jewish population, confined to a ghetto between 1555 and 1870, efforts to secure kosher meat were fraught with challenges. The city’s papal authorities viewed kashrut—the Jewish dietary laws—with suspicion, and it was widely believed that kosher meat would contaminate any Christian who consumed it. Supplying kosher provisions entailed circumventing canon law and the institutions that regulated the butchering and sale of meat throughout the city.

Kenneth Stow finds that Jewish butchers collaborated extensively with their Christian counterparts to ensure a supply of kosher meat, regardless of the laws that prohibited such interactions. Jewish butchers sold nonkosher portions of slaughtered animals daily to Christians outside the ghetto, which in turn ensured the affordability of kosher meat. At the same time, Christian butchers also found it profitable to work with Jews, as this enabled them to sell good meat otherwise unavailable at attractive prices. These relationships could be warm and almost intimate, but they could also be rife with anger, deception, and even litigation. Nonetheless, without this close cooperation—and the willingness of authorities to turn a blind eye to it—meat-eating in the ghetto would have been nearly impossible. Only the rise of the secular state in the late nineteenth century brought fundamental change, putting an end to canon law and allowing the kosher meat market to flourish.

A rich social history of food in early modern Rome, Feeding the Eternal City is also a compelling narrative of Jewish life and religious acculturation in the capital of Catholicism.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Book on Catholicism and Human Rights

From Cambridge University Press, here is a new book on the often forgotten contribution of Catholic thought to human rights law: Catholic Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights, by scholar Leonard Francis Taylor (National University of Ireland–Galway). The publisher’s description follows:

It is because Catholicism played such a formative role in the construction of Western legal culture that it is the focal point of this enquiry. The account of international law from its origin in the treaties of Westphalia, and located in the writing of the Grotian tradition, had lost contact with another cosmopolitan history of international law that reappeared with the growth of the early twentieth century human rights movement. The beginnings of the human rights movement, grounded in democratic sovereign power, returned to that moral vocabulary to promote the further growth of international order in the twentieth century. In recognising this technique of periodically returning to Western cosmopolitan legal culture, this book endeavours to provide a more complete account of the human rights project that factors in the contribution that cosmopolitan Catholicism made to a general theory of sovereignty, international law and human rights.

  • Provides an engaging narrative on the integration of democratic and human rights norms into Catholicism, which in turn promoted those values through Christianity’s global reach
  • A valuable historical survey of Catholicism as a cosmopolitan project from the medieval to the modern era
  • Undertakes to provide a critical narrative of the development and direction of international law as it was characterised by Catholic preoccupations from the medieval and early modern era
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Ben-Johanan, “Jacob’s Younger Brother”

I’m delighted to join Marc in re-starting our Scholarship Roundup feature here on the Forum. The feature highlights new books and articles on law and religion (generally speaking) that we think will interest our followers. A few of you have told us you miss the feature–so now it’s back!

Here’s a new book from Harvard, out this month, on Jewish-Catholic relations after Vatican II: Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II, by Karma Ben-Johanan (Humboldt). The author suggests that, behind the scenes, each side of the relationship has continued to have reservations about exactly what the 20th-century rapprochement between these two great religions means. Here’s the publisher’s description:

A revealing account of contemporary tensions between Jews and Christians, playing out beneath the surface of conciliatory interfaith dialogue.

A new chapter in Jewish–Christian relations opened in the second half of the twentieth century when the Second Vatican Council exonerated Jews from the accusation of deicide and declared that the Jewish people had never been rejected by God. In a few carefully phrased statements, two millennia of deep hostility were swept into the trash heap of history.

But old animosities die hard. While Catholic and Jewish leaders publicly promoted interfaith dialogue, doubts remained behind closed doors. Catholic officials and theologians soon found that changing their attitude toward Jews could threaten the foundations of Christian tradition. For their part, many Jews perceived the new Catholic line as a Church effort to shore up support amid atheist and secular advances. Drawing on extensive research in contemporary rabbinical literature, Karma Ben-Johanan shows that Jewish leaders welcomed the Catholic condemnation of antisemitism but were less enthusiastic about the Church’s sudden urge to claim their friendship. Catholic theologians hoped Vatican II would turn the page on an embarrassing history, hence the assertion that the Church had not reformed but rather had always loved Jews, or at least should have. Orthodox rabbis, in contrast, believed they were finally free to say what they thought of Christianity.

Jacob’s Younger Brother pulls back the veil of interfaith dialogue to reveal how Orthodox rabbis and Catholic leaders spoke about each other when outsiders were not in the room. There Ben-Johanan finds Jews reluctant to accept the latest whims of a Church that had unilaterally dictated the terms of Jewish–Christian relations for centuries.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Tosato on Biblical Interpretation

Here is an interesting new book from the Pontifical Gregorian University’s press, The Catholic Statute of Biblical Interpretation by Fr. Angelo Tosato, newly translated into English by our friend and frequent academic collaborator, Prof. Monica Lugato of LUMSA. Fr. Tosato, who died in 1999, was a professor at the Lateran and the Gregorian Universities, specializing in Biblical interpretation. But the book is accessible to non-experts as well. Among the topics it covers are the concept of the Bible as a set of divinely inspired texts mediated through human authorship, and the distinction between what Tosato calls “the bishops’ judicial interpretation” of the Bible, which may be authoritative for Catholics at any given time, and the “authentic” interpretation, which is known fully only to God. Because a space inevitably exists between the judicial and authentic interpretation, Tosato argues, the former is always subject to rethinking–guided, of course, by Holy Tradition.

Here is the description of the book from the publisher:

A «rigorous and exhaustive study on the official Catholic doctrine in the realm of Biblical interpretation», this work is «defended by heavily equipped garrisons of quotations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and fortified by walls of Church documents» and based upon a «a profound knowledge of juridical questions and problems». The Author begins by clarifying the definition of the Bible for the Catholic faith, then explores its nature, origin, purpose and functions in relation to its different addressees, finally analysing the prerequisites, criteria, and forms of accurate biblical interpretation. «One detail may draw the reader’s attention. Angelo Tosato asserts, with solid reasons, that the juridical authority of the Magisterium is limited to the actualised interpretation of biblical texts for our world, and has not to deal with the proper exegetical and scientific task of recovering the original meaning of these texts. The Magisterium’s decisions, moreover, can be modified, corrected, and rectified, as every human decision». But this is just one of the many components of the Catholic Statute of biblical interpretation, a Statute that seeks to reveal «the vast and gorgeous panoramas of a truthful interpretation of our Scriptures».

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Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

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Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by ascarcella

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web: