What role does the honor commandment play in contemporary law and culture? Answering this question is especially pertinent in the early twenty-first century. With advances in longevity and declining birth rates, a growing percentage of the population is graying. In 2015, there were 901 million people aged sixty or over worldwide; a number projected to rise to 1.4 billion in 2030. By 2050, there will be more persons over the age of sixty than children under the age of fifteen. As the number of our global elders grows, so too will the number of those needing and providing physical and financial care.

In this article, we present a short case study based on an incident that occurred in Israel several years ago. The incident did not reach the courts but was made public by the family members of the older woman at the center of it. The family argued that the actions taken by one of the parties involved should have been defined as elder abuse, but no criminal charges were ever brought. Yet the issues concern key legal and ethical questions about law, religion, and older persons. More specifically, the incident raises the issue of the moral commitment to one's past religious beliefs in reference to one's current choices and preferences once living with dementia. We contend in this article that an Aristotelean account of human dignity would have provided the most satisfactory way to resolve the tensions created by this incident.

In this essay, analyzing the “daughter track” of daughter-provided elder care, through feminist philosopher Lisa Tessman's “burdened virtues” framework, I examine the ethical questions surrounding gender, sacrifice, and elder care on the daughter track, particularly concerning contexts of virtue and necessity. Second, I examine how Tessman's “burdened virtues” framework applies to the “daughter track” situation, particularly regarding virtues born of necessity. Third, I examine some wider legal and social justice issues that remain unresolved in eldercare provision by daughters. Finally, I conclude with some reflections on the “daughter track” as a law and religion issue and how law, in particular, might better support women in being not only “dutiful daughters,” but “graceful pillars,” in the care of their elders.

In the United States, informal elder care is principally the responsibility of younger relatives. Adult children perform the majority of elder care and non-relatives perform only 14 percent of care. Caregiving in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, or LGBT, community follows a very different pattern that reflects the importance of “chosen family” in the lives of LGBT older adults. Instead of relying on relatives, LGBT older adults largely care for each other. Relatives provide only 11 percent of all elder care. This article explores the high level of caregiving by non-relatives in the LGBT community. It asks what motivates friends, neighbors, and community members to provide care for someone whom the law considers a legal stranger. It also asks what steps policy makers can take to facilitate and encourage this type of caregiving. Finally, it asks what lessons can be learned from LGBT older adults about the nature of both caregiving and community. As the aging population becomes more diverse, aging policies will have to become more inclusive to address the differing needs of various communities, including LGBT older adults. The potential lessons learned from the pattern of elder care in the LGBT community, however, extend far beyond a simple commitment to diversity.

Christian sermons characteristically result from the interaction of a biblical text and the social and cultural contexts in which the sermon is created and into which it is spoken. In this regard, biblical texts are understood not as containers of unchanging truth but as fields of meaning capable of yielding different insights in each new context, and sermons constitute oral performances of these insights. As a test case, American Christian sermons based upon the so-called fifth commandment (“Honor your father and your mother …”) were examined from two time periods: 1960–1980 and 2000–present. In the earlier period, a time of anxiety about changing norms of social authority, the sermons typically presented the fifth commandment as addressed to young children, calling them to obey their parents. In the later period, a time when the large baby boomer generation is increasingly assuming care for aging parents, the sermons typically presented the fifth commandment as addressed not to youth but rather to adults charged with the responsibility to care for the elderly. While understanding the fifth commandment as addressed to adult children is probably closer to the original meaning of the text, both audiences for the commandment (adult children and youthful children) are within the field of meaning of the text and, indeed, both understandings find expression elsewhere in scripture.

Palliative care is an interdisciplinary approach to caring for individuals and families who are suffering with serious illness. Medical and psycho-social-spiritual symptoms and needs are assessed and addressed. Much of palliative care is about working with patients and families to bring their context to light, that is, to understand not only their medical situation but also their wishes, values, cultural background, previous experiences, and quality of life. As palliative care clinicians, we have seen how popular understanding and misunderstanding about what it means to “honor thy mother and father” can influence medical decision making. Whether or not adult children of patients have familiarity with the honor commandment, the biblical text “honor thy father and mother,” or whether they identify with a particular religious tradition, this theme plays a central—and often unaddressed—role as adult children strive to make decisions with and for a seriously ill parent. In this article we examine the commandment to honor one's father and mother by exploring its religious, spiritual, textual, and cultural origins, as well as subsequent Jewish commentary. We also contextualize the honor commandment in the palliative care setting through clinical case studies that illustrate the concerns of adult children who wish to honor their parents but are perplexed or conflicted about what this mandate means in the face of difficult medical and psycho-social-spiritual circumstances.

There is no uniform Islamic law of elder care. Instead, the Qur’ān and Hadith, the fundamental building blocks of Islamic law, create general obligations to support aged parents that each Islamic society must specifically produce in practice. Before Islam swept Central Asia, nomads developed an elder-care tradition that thrives to this day in the former Soviet States of Kazakhstan (population 17 million), Kyrgyzstan (5.7 million), Tajikistan (8 million), Turkmenistan (5.2 million), and Uzbekistan (30 million). In many instances, Islamic law inclines toward adopting local customs and traditions so long as these practices do not conflict with fundamental Islamic law principles. Islamic law's openness to local influence is stymied in the Central Asian example because the edgen system that undergirds Central Asian elder care directly conflicts with the Islamic law of inheritance allotments. This article explains the edgen system and how it conflicts with Islamic law. A prominent contemporary Central Asian Islamic scholar's legal opinions illustrate a device in Islamic law called ḥiylah, or a legal ruse. Through this ruse, Central Asian families are able to maintain traditional elder care practices while also complying with Islamic law. Nevertheless, as the article concludes, the Central Asian elder-care system is based on unpaid female labor and female disinheritance. Female inheritance is a central feature of Islamic law. Yet, the edgen tradition puts women at a disadvantage in terms of labor and inheritance that Islamic law seeks to avoid.

Buddhist scholars like Kenneth Ch'en have argued that the teaching of filial piety was a special feature of Chinese Buddhism as a response to the Chinese culture. Others, among them John Strong and Gregory Schopen, have shown that filial piety was also important in Indian Buddhism, but Strong does not consider it integral to the belief system and Schopen did not find evidence of it in early writings he examined. In this article, through an analysis of early Buddhist resources, the Nikāyas and Āgamas, I demonstrate that the practice of filial piety has been the chief good karma in the Buddhist moral teaching since its inception, although it is not as foundational for Buddhist ethics as it is for Confucian ethics. The Buddha advised people to honor parents as the Brahmā, the supreme god and the creator of human beings in Hinduism, as parents have done much for their children. Hence, Buddhism teaches its followers to pay their debts to parents by supporting and respecting them, actions that are considered the first of all meritorious deeds, or good karma, in Buddhist moral teachings. Moreover, according to the Buddhist teaching of karma, matricide and patricide are considered two of the five gravest bad deeds, and the consequence is immediate rebirth in hell. Mahāyāna Buddhism developed the idea of filial piety further and formulated the four debts to four groups of people—parents, sentient beings, rulers, and Buddhism—a teaching that became very popular in Chinese Buddhism and spread to other East Asian countries.

This article presents the legal outlooks of two fundamental religious judicial systems—the halakha of Judaism and the shari'a of Islam—on the effect of war on private ownership. Specifically, we address the situation in which the conquered inhabitants are Jews or Muslims and halakha or shari'a are the legal systems of their religions, respectively, but the conqueror is a nonbeliever or secular sovereign. Such situations evoke the following questions: To what extent the transfer of ownership by the conquering sovereign is recognized by the religious laws of the conquered population? May a member of the conquered religion acquire property that was seized by the nonbeliever sovereign from a member of the conquered religion? Is transfer of ownership by virtue of conquest permanent or reversible, so once the conquest ends, ownership reverts to the pre-conquest owner? Various approaches to those questions within each of two religious legal systems are presented. Some of the similarities and the differences between halakha and shari'a are pointed out.

What if instead of studying religions by texts, history, and practices we studied them by what they fear? I first had this thought in considering philosophical differences between Plato's Republic and Laws. What accounted for the shift from the profound idealism of the Republic to the apparent authoritarianism of the Laws? The standard answer is that Plato was born in a time of troubles, at the tail end of the oligarchic regime of the Thirty Tyrants, who took hold of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian Wars. As recounted in the Apology, it was a regime that was famously and vigorously opposed by Plato's great teacher, Socrates. Socrates is absent from Plato's last dialogue, the Laws, written as an older man, after a stint in prison for having opposed another tyrant. In the Laws, the contemplation of ideal forms in Republic gives way to promulgation of detailed laws to achieve unity, harmony, and a perhaps tenuous peace. Most imperative of all is the need to avoid the chaos of war and tyranny. The philosopher is gone—Plato has lawyered up.