Since its founding, described in Thomas Porter’s essay in this issue, the Journal of Law and Religion has grown into an internationally recognized venue for the best scholarly work in law and religion, a field of study and debate that was barely recognized at its founding.Footnote 1 As I briefly sketch, many devoted their time and expertise to this growth, inspired by the vision for a new and yet old way of talking about how law and religion challenge, support, and even echo each other in the conversation about human existence.Footnote 2
The Vision and the Spirit of the Journal
The founders of the Journal of Law and Religion had a clear vision for its purpose. Bucknell theologian Douglas Sturm, one of the editorial board chairs, once wrote about the human paradox at the center of the questions considered by law and religion:
Perhaps more than we can ever fully discern, our lives are but expressions, albeit creative expressions, of a communal matrix that sustains us, inspires us, and constitutes the origin of our dreams and yearnings, our obligations and our rights. We are members of each other. We belong together. That is the source of our joy in life, although that is, as well, the source of the tragedies of life, the dark side of our history that, on all too many occasions, makes us shudder. I do not mean this initial comment, please understand, as sheer sentimentality. It is, instead, both a political affirmation and a religious declaration, and it provides an opening for further reflections on … a vision of justice as solidarity.Footnote 3
Sturm also led in developing and keeping the board and staff grounded in the vision for the journal, which we ultimately described through six characteristics of the journal’s work—the historical, the theoretical, the ethical, the global, the professional, and the spiritual (the last added at the suggestion of board member Emily Hartigan). Those characteristics were reflected in the “Statement of Perspective,” a piece that was printed in many of the early issues of the journal. The statement read as follows:
The Journal of Law and Religion was initiated in 1982 as a collaborative effort of the Council on Religion and Law and the Hamline University School of Law. It was born of a sense of historical malaise. The modern age with its strong propensity toward the secularization of all areas of life, while not without merit in its liberating effects, nonetheless has its dark side.
We live, some say, in a time of profound historical crisis. Domestically and globally, we confront massive issues which force us to reconsider, in fundamental ways, the shape and quality of our common life. Yet many of the disciplines of thought and practice that should be a rich resource in such a time are found wanting—among them, law and religion. Law, a discipline presumably devoted to the ways of justice, has all too often become a set of complex, technical tools without concern for higher purpose. Religion, presumably given to the all-embracing promises and prescriptions implied in the sense of the sacred, has all too often become privatized and neglectful of our public life.
The Journal of Law and Religion is dedicated to a fundamental reappraisal of the disciplines of law and religion as they impinge on each other, might instruct each other, and taken in their conjunction, might off a constructive response to the major issues of our times. As such its concerns are sixfold.
The Journal is thus a forum within which the disciplines of law and religion might together consider with utmost seriousness their joint responsibility for the creation of a civilization of genuine peace and justice. Within the compass of that purpose, the Journal intends to be open-minded and non-prejudicial; it is receptive to submissions from all persuasions and perspectives.
Each of these commitments was critically important to producing work that not only advanced knowledge but challenged the very assumptions with which those working in the field operated. The emphasis on the historical challenged the forgetfulness of the twentieth century—the overlooking of centuries of experience that had gone before—not only in the understanding of how religion could contribute to creating a just world but also in the understanding of the deep human need for engagement with the divine and with others in a realm beyond the material. Most specifically, it challenged the modern forgetfulness that once, these two disciplines—law and religion—were not adversaries of each other, nor strangers who spoke the cacophony of languages neither understood. Rather, they were siblings in the enterprise of understanding the full and complex nature of the human experience, siblings who could fight with each other about what was important to know and to say and to believe, but who could never forget that they came from the same womb and the same family.
The commitment to the theoretical was not to deride the material, practical, or commonplace. It was to recognize that for the journal to make a difference, it had to go beyond presentation of legal doctrine and application, and beyond analysis and elaboration of texts, two of the most common practices in academic work in law and in religion when the journal was founded. Rather, as the “Statement of Perspective” notes, even typical jurisprudential and theological analysis had to be aimed at fundamental questions of the structure and practice of law and of religion and what that meant for the flourishing of humanity and furthering the common good.
The inclusion of the ethical perhaps goes without saying. But I think that most of the journal community understood that the very purpose of the enterprise of law and religion was to understand our ethical relationship, in Emmanual Levinas’s terms, to the one standing over us in her need.Footnote 4 Similarly, the recognition that many involved with the journal have been motivated to be in community with others, even radically different others, in the spirit of inquiry has been a key to the continued success of the journal. This is best illustrated by a story. At one of the evening dinners that our board had before meetings, we invited two members of our advisory committee to speak with us. Ze’ev Falk, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi and lawyer from Jerusalem and Amina Wadud, an African American Muslim feminist theologian, led us in spiritual exercises and prayer despite all of the differences in the room over religion.
It was important to the journal community that the journal speak not only to academics and intellectuals but also to lawyers, judges, pastors, imams, rabbis, and those who worked in the fields hungry for an understanding of what their work meant and how they should go about it: thus, the emphasis on professional and the numerous articles the journal published about the challenges confronted by professionals.
And though it was physically located in the Midwestern heart of the United States, with an initial community of board members and authors that was composed largely of American Christians and Jews, the journal also hoped to transcend law review practice of the previous decades in focusing largely on American law, American religion, and American politics. In this way, by committing to the global, the journal community also recognized that we are knit together on the earth, something that now most people who follow the news realize in a daily way that was not the case when the journal first began. Finally, the later inclusion of spiritual was not an afterthought; it came from the growing realization that when this community spoke and wrote to each other, sometimes in the pages of the journal and sometimes in the symposia that the journal and other organizations sponsored, there was a spirit in the back-and-forth of writer/reader and speaker/audience that could neither be defined nor denied.
This vision of the journal never wavered over the years, even as members of the editorial board came and went and the scholarly field expanded in the United States. The journal, as one of the few consistent voices in this field, was joined by other journals in the field,Footnote 5 along with law school-based centers that were publishing blogs and other work and hosting conferences in law and religion.Footnote 6 The work of law and religion scholars, especially those writing beyond church-state and constitutional issues, became more welcome in both specialty and mainstream law reviews. Scholarship, conferences, institutes, and organizations for those interested in that dialogue proliferated,Footnote 7 and both elite and non-elite law schools added courses and specialists in the field of law and religion to their faculties.Footnote 8
The People Who Made It Happen
As the journal moved into its second life, beginning in the 1987–1988 school year and ending when the journal moved to Emory in 2013, many of those who did the hard work of making the journal come alive moved on to different work. Stephen B. Young resigned as the dean of Hamline Law School, and after some years became global executive director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism.Footnote 9 Wilson Yates, one of the original co-editors, focused on his work as president of United Theological Seminary, serving the seminary until 2005. Michael Scherschligt, the other co-editor, remained on the Hamline faculty and the journal’s board, and served as a mentor to the new editors of the journal.Footnote 10 Scherschligt began to introduce the new editors to the work of the journal with volume 6, and then relinquished his responsibilities with volume 7, issue 2.
Responsibility for the journal then passed into new hands. Taking Wilson Yates’s place as the theologian editor, Patrick Keifert, who taught at Luther Seminary in St. Paul and founded the nonprofit Church Innovations, largely recruited theological authors and occasionally advised on the selection of manuscripts. I was primarily responsible for selecting and editing manuscripts. Howard Vogel, also a professor at Hamline Law, who had an MA from United Seminary, primarily focused on the technical side of the journal.Footnote 11 Working with a small team of law students and the journal’s production manager, Vogel’s meticulous care in ensuring that citations were properly checked and proofreading was flawless contributed to the journal’s growing reputation as the premier journal in this field.
In its second life, the journal was decidedly a shoestring operation. The editors were producing the journal as a voluntary overload to their full-time faculty jobs. I remember reading and editing countless manuscripts at my daughters’ athletic practices or when they were on the playground, and Howard Vogel spent many evening hours talking with students about the manuscripts they were checking.
In later years, Mary Dunnewold, Stephen Liebo, and Beth Honetschlager, legal writing faculty members at Hamline, took over some of Vogel’s responsibilities supervising students in checking citations and proofreading. The three of them spent considerable time teaching law students the technical aspects of citing, verifying, and occasionally even supplying the complex references in sources from ancient Jewish and Muslim manuscripts to modern human rights treaties.Footnote 12
In addition, the journal recruited book review editors from prominent scholars in law and religion who, sometimes with my help, decided what books should be reviewed, recruited reviewers, and often edited book review manuscripts. Edward Gaffney, an early board member and former dean and faculty member at Valparaiso University School of Law, became the first of these book review editors. Another well-known scholar, Steven Smith, a professor at Notre Dame and most recently the University of San Diego, served as book review editor from 2002 to 2004. Leslie Griffin, a professor of law at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a prominent law and religion scholar, served as book review editor from 2005 to 2010. Perry Dane, from Rutgers Law School, was book review editor from 2011 to 2012. Finally, M. Christian Green from Emory served as book review editor in the last years of the journal at Hamline and continued on as a co-editor of the journal when it moved to Emory.Footnote 13 Howard Vogel also took up the responsibility of book reviews for brief periods over these years.
The production and business end of the journal, including word processing, subscriptions, dealing with our printer, authors, and budgets originally rested with Hamline Law’s faculty secretaries, Gail Schroer and Mary Diedrich, who performed this work as part of their faculty support duties. This responsibility was passed on to a production manager/faculty secretary JoAnne Matson and others who served briefly in this capacity. Ultimately, it became virtually a full-time job for Linda Berglin, our last production manager.
Editor Howard Vogel also took on the drudgery of supervising financial aspects and legal filings of the journal. Hamline Law School generously provided the salary for the production manager. In many years, the law school also provided a financial supplement to cover the difference between the costs of production (layout, printing, postage) and the income from subscriptions. For many of these years, the subscription price was very modest: $15 per volume for individuals, $25 per volume for institutions. The journal also had access to a generous founding gift made by Harold Berman. However, the cost of production exceeded income. In many years, the law school did not ask for a contribution to expenses from the journal’s subscription money, which was kept in a separate bank account, allowing the journal to accumulate significant assets over these years.
Once the journal’s editorial board decided to create a nonprofit, hoping that this move would assist the board in fund-raising for the journal, additional legal responsibilities for securing 501(c)(3) status and state and federal reporting responsibilities also fell into Vogel’s lap. Unfortunately, the board’s hopes that an endowment could be raised for the journal were unrealized: not only did the journal not have the staffing to devote significant time to fund-raising, but its primary audiences—institutional libraries and scholars in law or in religion—were not well suited to contribute money for an endowment, though over the years, some journal devotees gave occasional gifts. The corpus of the journal’s money, which primarily consisted of the accumulated subscription money, was later distributed by the Council on Religion and Law, the original Harvard name for the group that the Journal of Law and Religion nonprofit re-assumed after the journal moved to Emory.
The journal’s editorial board in its second phase was not only a working board of directors but also a community of spiritual support and intellectual inquiry consistent with its Statement of Perspective. It is true that at its yearly meeting, the board did the important work of evaluating content, planning issue themes, and assessing the budget and organization. But that was not all, for the board was made up of brilliant and courageous thinkers who for the most part defied the conventional wisdom of their disciplines and communities.
Our board presidents over those years included Bucknell professor Douglas Sturm and Thomas Porter, a Boston lawyer and mediator who participated as a Harvard student in the founding of the journal and was a president of the first Council on Religion and Law. Betty Mensch of the State University of New York’s University at Buffalo chaired the board for a brief time, teaching us all about how gentleness and graciousness can help even in contentious academic debates. In its last years at Hamline, José (Beto) Juárez, former St. Mary’s law professor and former dean of the University of Denver Sturn College of Law and now dean of the Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law chaired the board and guided the organization in selecting a new home for the journal, helping to navigate the legal, financial, and practical steps in the transition.Footnote 14
The journal’s editorial board was a very diverse group of theological and legal academics and practicing lawyers. We had spirited debates between our passionate Catholic board members, St. Mary’s Law School’s Emily Hartigan, who explored the spiritual mystery of the law, and Ed Gaffney, part of whose life’s work has been devoted to exposing the cruelty of the Holocaust and other totalitarian pasts.Footnote 15 The board had the benefit of the careful, nuanced, reflective thoughts of Jewish scholars like Hamline religion professor Earl Schwartz and Rutgers law professor Perry Dane, who could bring whole intellectual worlds out of single texts. We were graced with clear-eyed and straight-talking Protestants with profound commitments to ethical reflection and action on matters like Frank Alexander, who has spent much of his professional life on affordable housing and community development; and Medgar Evers theologian Darryl Trimiew and Georgetown law professor Anthony Cook, whose work has centered on race and justice for the marginalized. We were graciously pushed toward difficult thinking on conflict resolution by Macalester theologian Paula Cooey, who wrote on theological responses to conflict, disruption and assimilation, and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Kathleen Sands, who contributed much-needed humanities perspectives on religion in public life to our conversations.Footnote 16
Some of our board members devoted themselves to thinking about the meaning of a life in the law and the many conflicts that can arise when a lawyer tries to be faithful to his profession and to his faith, like Tom Porter and Fordham law professors Amy Uelmen and Russ Pearce. Colorado’s Deborah Cantrell introduced us to a Buddhist perspective and an ethics of self-reflection on the issues we tackled. Tennessee attorney and judge Nancy Miller-Herron brought practical and gracious observations to our discussion of the theoretical. Others made important contributions to our discussion, as well as to the scholarship, on issues such as the role of religious arguments and ethics in public life, like Emory’s Michael Perry, Southern Methodist University theologian Robin Lovin, Notre Dame’s Cathy Kaveny, and University of Toronto’s Anver Emon.Footnote 17
On the board, we had wonderful feminist Muslim challengers to modern secular and religious orthodoxies, like the indomitable Richmond law professor Azizah al-Hibri, who paved the way for our embrace of Islamic thought, and itinerant and iconoclastic theologian Amina Wadud. We benefited from the probing questions of Wisconsin law professor Asifa Quraishi-Landes and the evocative storytelling of Syrian-Canadian intellectual Afra Jalabi. We were joined by our most religious of agnostics in the religious lawyering movement, University of Pennsylvania’s Howard Lesnick.Footnote 18
Occasionally, we would also consult with our prestigious advisory committee, whose traditions and interests spanned the globe. That list would be lengthy, but it included both practitioners and scholars from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and Native traditions and from countries around the world from South Africa to Germany, New Zealand to Pakistan and Israel.Footnote 19
The board also gathered together in person yearly, usually at Hamline University but also at Fordham and other places, to do the board’s work. As Tom Porter has said, this gathering truly was a community, a place where we could reflect on our professional and personal journeys over the year, and how we saw the wider society evolving. Among the unforgettable moments: Doug Sturm leading us in songs from the union movement; the ecumenical moment when our board members Amina Wadud, castigated for arranging women-led Muslim prayers, and Ze’ev Falk, the faithfully challenging Orthodox Jewish rabbi and lawyer, led us in text study and prayer together; in the midst of post-9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States in 2001, Azizah al-Hibri asking us if we would stand in solidarity with Muslims and taking us to Friday prayers at a local mosque; Frank Alexander, inspiring us with the saints who had gone before, among them Bill Stringfellow and Harold Berman; the many Hamline law and religion symposia that were born out of those meetings—symposia that broadened the circle of community to include a moving feast of lawyers, theologians, ministers, rabbis, imams, activists, law enforcement personnel, and teachers, as well as academics from local and global communities.
We created the Journal of Law and Religion Achievement Award to recognize the courage of those who dared to dream about a new way for law and religion to work together. At the awards dinner, we recognized some of the giants in our field, among others, icons of American law and religion Tom Shaffer (the first recipient of the award), Milner Ball, and Ed Gaffney. Among others, we also recognized Barbara Aldave, working to mold a Latinx Catholic law school at St. Mary’s; Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, who conjoined religious piety and religious freedom; and Howard Zehr, the father of the restorative justice movement in the United States.Footnote 20
Significant Publication Projects
Many of the issues of the journal in its second life held a potpourri of articles submitted by their authors for review.Footnote 21 However, we also hosted the symposia of other organizations and embarked on some major publication projects and themes over this time, which are worth briefly cataloguing.
Our first Muslim board member, Azizah al-Hibri, from the University of Richmond Law School and the founder of Karamah, served as guest editor of our first issue devoted to Islamic jurisprudence, which was circulating amid the turmoil of September 11, 2001.Footnote 22 Thanks to a grant from the Lilly Endowment, the journal was able to send that issue to scholars throughout the world. The lead article in that issue was a stunning visionary article on the Islamic vision of peace and justice by Jawdat Said, a Syrian dissident jailed for his defense of human rights.Footnote 23 Thereafter, as Muslims experienced harassment, violence and discrimination in the wake of 9/11, the journal published a roundtable dedicated to the testimonies of Muslims who had undergone these experiences and articles about the meaning of this dark moment in American history.Footnote 24 The commitment to encouraging and publishing Islamic scholarship was furthered by the outreach of al-Hibri and our other Muslim board members, University of Wisconsin’s Asifa Quraishi, Anver Emon from the University of Toronto, and Afra Jalabi, an independent scholar and the niece of Said. In subsequent issues, we explored issues from Islamic finance to human rights from an Islamic perspective.Footnote 25
The journal also devoted considerable space to the work of emerging scholars on Jewish law, including comparative work on Jewish and American law and Jewish scholarly takes on emerging issues in public life, some of which emanated from the Section on Jewish Law of the Association of American Law Schools, a project facilitated Samuel Levine from Touro.Footnote 26 As part of Ed Gaffney’s major project to compile reviews of the best books of the 1990s in law and religion, we published a bibliography on Jewish law books in volume 17.Footnote 27
The journal attempted to respond to global crises and ethical issues that transcended American politics. One of its early issues was devoted to the aftermath of the end of apartheid in South African and the liberation theology flowing from the difficult politics in that country.Footnote 28 Later, as the world was trying to grapple with the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and efforts by various countries to come to grips with internal and sometimes ethnically charged violence in their nations, we published a lengthy bibliography on transitional justice and truth commissions compiled by South Africans working on restorative justice in their country.Footnote 29
Another simmering issue during this period focused on the beginning and the end of life. In response, the journal published a symposium of articles unpacking Jewish and Buddhist approaches to assisted suicide, euthanasia, and problems of patient autonomy.Footnote 30
The work of the lawyer was also a constant in the journal. The journal published essays from the Fordham Center on Religion’s symposium “Law and the Lawyer,” which focused on the religious lawyering movement, pulling together lawyers and legal academics from a wide variety of religious traditions to think about the role of law and lawyers from the perspective of these traditions.Footnote 31 Over the years, the journal published many articles that explored how lawyers of faith navigate their professions consistently with their identities and what it means to be a person of faith and a lawyer.
Perhaps the most predominant theme of the symposia and roundtables that the journal published was that of religion and politics. Indeed, the first issue of the journal, volume 1, issue 1 (1983), was created in order to publish selected speeches from the Harvard symposium “Religion, Law, and the Political Process Today.”Footnote 32 The second issue was likewise devoted to two related themes, the role of religion in public life and the role of religious leaders in speaking out about public issues.Footnote 33 In 1987, the journal published a Catholic University Law School’s symposium on the religious foundations of civil rights law;Footnote 34 and in 1989, the journal published a Georgetown symposium on contemporary church and state issues.Footnote 35 In 2010,we also published a collection of articles on the problem of religious belief as believers confront the state.Footnote 36
The most far-reaching of the journal’s publication projects was put together by Ed Gaffney, who was involved with the signing of the Williamsburg Charter, a document signed by more than a hundred prominent American public leaders, including former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, Justice William Rehnquist, and legal and theological academics. The charter both celebrated the role of religious freedom in American life and warned of threats to it. Ed buttonholed a host of well-known political and academic voices to rethink the place of religious freedom in contemporary American life. This volume brought together all of the signing documents of the charterFootnote 37 along with speeches made by participants and papers from the First Liberty forums that followed it.Footnote 38
The journal also honored the body of work of several of the important founders and thinkers in the field of law and religion, sometimes in conjunction with the achievement awards that the journal bestowed and other times because of scholarly interest in reviewing the life’s work of a scholar at his retirement or death. Among those we honored was James Luther Adams, a Harvard professor and Unitarian-Universality minister who was one of the founders of the Council on Religion and Law, which became the Journal of Law and Religion. Footnote 39 Robert Rodes, the Notre Dame scholar whose work ranged from English ecclesiastical law to liberation theology to what he called pilgrim law, was recognized in these pages at the end of his career.Footnote 40 Another was Douglas Sturm, the chair of the journal board and one of the early theologians to employ process theology in service of confronting issues in law and religion, particularly those with themes of oppression and solidarity.Footnote 41
Catholic scholar and judge John Noonan, who received the journal’s achievement award, was another scholar whose work was considered in the journal.Footnote 42 Michael Perry, whose work has been seminal to the discussion about the propriety of religious argument in matters of secular public life, both nationally and globally, also was honored with a symposium about his work.Footnote 43 A roundtable from a conference focused on Franklin Gamwell’s 1995 book, Religious Freedom, Modern Democracy and the Common Good, was also published in the journal.Footnote 44
The journal also published work to enable scholars to identify important resources in law and religion. To jump-start the journal’s return to publishing book reviews, Ed Gaffney pulled together scholars from a wide variety of fields to produce a two-issue volume of the journal devoted completely to book reviews on law and religion scholarship in the decade of the 1990s.Footnote 45 We twice called on religious liberty scholar Carl Esbeck to catalogue the Supreme Court’s recent religious liberty cases and provide his perspective on the import of those cases.Footnote 46
There is so much more to say about the thoughtful and provocative articles that the journal has been fortunate to publish over its second life.Footnote 47 None of my words can fully do justice to the quality and diversity of scholarship that appeared in its pages, nor to the work of editors, staff, authors, reviewers, book reviewers, board members, and advisory committee members who devoted their attention to creating this publication year after year. Nor would I try to begin to describe what Doug Sturm called solidarity in the commitment of all of these people to the search for the truth in service of our fellow human beings in all of their religious, political, national, ethnic, and intellectual diversity. Howard Vogel said more simply what this communal experience with the journal has meant to many of us: “My work and association with all involved in bringing to life and keeping the JLR going taught me that Justice is a form of Love.”Footnote 48
Acknowledgments and Citation Guide
The author is a former editor of the Journal of Law and Religion. This essay is cited according to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, 21st edition.