James Luther Adams died last summer at the age of 92. He was one of four or five giants in his generation of American Christian ethicists. Many members of this society who were doctoral students under him have themselves become important teachers and writers of religious ethics.

George Huntston Williams has described Adams as one of the three most significant figures in the history of the Unitarian Universalist denomination, yet Adams grew up as the son of a Baptist and Plymouth Brethren preacher. Adams lived in tension but not in rejection with this Fundamentalist youth. On the one hand, he found lacking there what became his constant passion. Christian life must be carried out in the midst of the institutions of society.

In consultation with his pastoral advisor, James Luther Adams dictated two letters when one of his many strokes forced him to ponder his own mortality with a new urgency. In the first letter, he specified that a memorial service be held at his beloved Arlington Street Church in Boston (rather than in an academic setting), that it be on a Sunday afternoon so his daughters and the clergy could come, and that we have particular pieces of music.

His wishes in death extended his commitments in life: he loved the church and called those in academia to attend to its importance in the souls of individuals and in the destiny of civilizations, even though he often became a “smiling prophet” in his impatience with the ecclesiastical community. He loved his family, in spite of the fact that he knew that he often neglected them because he was preoccupied with a multitude of adopted sons and daughters, represented by the many ministers and professors here today. And he loved the arts, holding that true beauty also shows itself to have a “heart of service,” one that can reveal “the nature of existence, and the character of the transformed life,” as a marvelous homage to him, in ARTS, says.

James Luther Adams was famous for his pioneering work in religion and public life, religion and society. His interests embraced economics, public policy, contemporary culture, civil liberties, and church law. His wide-ranging mind at times compellingly focused on issues in civil law as well. I say “compellingly” advisedly, for Adams was essentially a Protestant theologian who had a central concern with the work and influence of Luther, so it was natural and inevitable that his interest would flow from theology of law to the wider subject of law and religion.

Adams' study of an issue was often characterized by certain intellectual qualities. He tried to include almost all aspects of the question; he was not satisfied, as courts at times are, with seeing only a single set of facts and answering a question that is limited only to the facts before him. He could see other sets of facts, and asked, what about them? This approach naturally forced him to look for an organizing principle, an all-embracing concept or set of concepts. First, then, he tried to be comprehensive in his examination; and secondly, he tried to be principled in his analysis and thinking.

Sister Lewis sits
pedaling her rusty sewing machine
in her dark and tiny hut
in the hills of Jamaica.
Only the thinnest sliver of light
filters through the one paneless window.
Sister Lewis is making children's dresses
for the wealthy.
From early morning till the last light slips
behind the hills she sews
back hunched eyes straining
fingers flying feet pedaling.
She is surrounded in the dark and dank by
piles of colorful cloth
the pastels, the lacy frills with which
we happily dress our little white girls.
She sews well.

When it comes to human rights violations, the cruelty of the action seems obvious, the enemy seems clear. That is often true, no doubt. But what makes me sure that it is what the victim sees? What if I consider something as cruel, but the victim does not regard it as such? What if I don't see something as being as painful as the victim does?

I am thinking of a story I was told in the Philippines. The Filipina who told it to me had joined the Resistance Movement and had been arrested by the military together with some others, including her husband. When she told me the story of her arrest, the fear of being raped was mentioned again and again. The fear was there—when she got caught in the mountains, when the soldiers brought her down, while she was being interrogated, in detention, even when she was already released while she was making love to her husband. She told me: “Sometimes, during our sex life, sometimes in the middle of it I would say: what if the military was doing it to me?” She described her time in detention, how the group of political prisoners developed a “project.” She said, “The project is, you have to be pregnant.” During Marcos' time, being pregnant was considered a humanitarian reason to be released.

From the onset, one must dispel the idea that addressing gender issues or referring to “women” and “woman” is marginal to larger considerations of civil society and current global dynamics. Double standards with regard to images and treatment of women are indicators of distorted visions of social justice. Without remorse, women are often consigned to a sub-category in the estimation and construction of the social order through which we acquire justice.

What I discuss here are some preliminary ideas about social justice. My vision of social justice is predicated upon two things: my personal experiences of inequities because of race, class and gender; and my search in the Islamic tradition, and more precisely, in the Qur'anic text, for a perspective on civil society which dispels the tendencies towards oppression and social injustice.

At the center of Muslim life sits The Qur'an — the Recitation — scripture for Muslims. Islamic dress, though understood intimately and expressed culturally by Muslims, seems to pose several dilemmas in the U.S. Yet, the most used translation of The Qur'an states:

Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty: that will make for greater purity for them: And Allah is well acquainted with what they do.

And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty: that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof: that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their fathers, their husband's fathers, their sons, their husband's sons, their brother or their brothers' sons, or their sisters' sons, or their women, or the slaves their right hands possess, or male servants free of physical needs, or small children who have no sense of the shame of sex: and that they should not strike their feet in order to draw attention to their hidden ornaments. And O you believers! Turn all toward Allah that you may attain bliss.

“The freer women are to share their gifts with society and to assume leadership in society, the better are the prospects for the entire human community to progress in wisdom, justice and dignified living …” So argued Mary Ann Glendon, the Vatican delegate to the Fourth World Conference on Women in September, 1995. While Glendon's point is well taken, in many societies, including the Catholic Church which Glendon represented at the Conference, women often do not have the opportunity to choose their roles and share their gifts and talents with society in the manner they deem most appropriate. In patriarchal societies women's roles and contributions are often reduced to the periphery. This is the case in traditional societies where the community is viewed as the bearer of rights, and the roles assigned women are designed to ensure that they conform to the needs of the community, rather than the needs of individual women. Women are often socialized into accepting the roles mapped out for them by the community, and attempts to challenge them often lead only to ostracization by the community.

Not enough has been done to integrate the value of equal rights for women into Jewish religious life and teaching. On the one hand, traditional Judaism (both in its sources and by its spokesmen) differentiates between the status of man and woman, without seriously taking into consideration the feeling of the latter, and without respecting her human rights. On the other hand, Jewish Feminism starts from modern individual or group feelings of frustration, without taking God seriously, with little understanding for the spirituality of Bible and tradition and with recklessness regarding the preservation of the Jewish family and people.

Jewish Feminism is quite right to criticize Jewish tradition for failing to lift up the lack of attention to women's contribution to both the spirituality and the preservation of Torah Judaism. Tradition did recognize the contribution of women to both spirituality and preservation, but indirectly and in a form that would not be appropriate for the modern day.

Since women's rights first entered the agenda of the United Nations (“U.N.”), there has been a running tension between the expression and codification of those rights and the right to freedom of religion. Thus far, this tension has resulted in an uneasy relationship between U.N. instruments regarding religious rights and U.N. instruments on women's rights. The former stand mute with respect to the relationship between women's rights and religion. The latter are encumbered with substantial reservations by countries concerned with safeguarding their religious tenets and traditions.

This paper will examine the tension between women's rights and religious rights as expressed in certain State Parties' reservations to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (“CEDAW”) that are based on Islamic Law and the extent to which CEDAW can ensure adherence to its norms while recognizing the right to freedom of religion or belief. The article does not purport to offer any authoritative commentary of Islamic law. Rather, its objective is to highlight connections between CEDAW's tenets, the nature of Islam-based reservations, and the course of women's lives in certain reserving countries.

Ironically, certain contemporary international human rights norms appear to place governments in an adversary relationship to certain peoples, such as Hasidic and Orthodox Jews, whose attempted destruction provided the impetus for modern human rights law. This raises the paradoxical spectre of human rights law being used as a tool of cultural genocide.

This conflict is, of course, not confined to Hasidic and Orthodox Jews; indeed, it appears that the majority of people on the earth are identified with a people-group whose cultural/religious practices violate certain international human rights norms. While it is common to use Islam as an example, this paper initially concentrates on traditional Judaism because of the special place of the Holocaust as a catalyst for the modern international human rights movement.

“Reformation denial” has become the new fashion among Western historians today. A generation ago, the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation was almost universally regarded as a formative era in the development of Western ideas and institutions. Today, it is regularly described as an historians' fiction and historical failure. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, and other sixteenth century figures certainly called for reforms of all sorts, recent interpretations allow. But they inspired no real reformation. Their ideas had little impact on the beliefs and behavior of common people. Their policies perpetuated elitism and chauvinism more than they cultivated equality and liberty. Their reforms tended to obstruct nascent movements for democracy and market economy and to inspire new excesses in the patriarchies of family, church, and state.

In every legal system a gap exists between the law as it is actually enforced by the courts and the ethical categorical imperative. Although it was rejected by Justice Holmes in his “bad man rule,” a strong claim can be made that the measure of an enlightened and advanced legal system and society is its success in bridging this gap. Within a religious legal system which rejects the clear separation of law and ethics, the severity of this problem is ameliorated. As illustrated by Jewish law, even such a system's purely civil law must be influenced by ethical duties to a far greater degree than in secular legal systems.

This article compares the legal rules and jurisprudence of the American common law and Jewish law in the area of finding and returning lost or abandoned property, illustrating the interplay between the purely legal and ethical components of the respective legal systems. Surprisingly enough, the differences between the two systems are not usually significant; they follow the same basic legal principles, and typically lead to the same results. There are, however, two major exceptions: Jewish law imposes a duty to rescue the lost property of one's neighbor, while the common law does not require that one initiate the process by retrieving the article. Thus according to Jewish law, when one happens to stumble across lost property, one must intervene to retrieve it; according to the common law one need not. Second, Jewish law imposes ethical duties as part of its legal mandate, a practice the common law does not follow.

Hidden in plain sight in hundreds of judicial opinions is an extraordinary principle—love your neighbor as yourself. At first blush the idea of its application to our legal relations seems odd: This is a matter of morality, not legality. But the biblical command to love neighbor as self has exerted an important influence upon the decisions of American courts. While more frequently excluded from application, the love command has found expression in a wide range of cases. From criminal to civil procedure, from torts to contracts, from employment to family disputes, neighbor-love has been a vital part of American jurisprudence.

This article will highlight the application of the love command to legal disputes by courts, as well as provide a brief overview of the biblical texts and scholarly legal commentary dealing with the love command. Its main purpose is descriptive—pointing out what we haven't noticed—but it is also normative—we have missed something important—neighbor-love is not out of place in the courtroom. It has been, and should continue to be, applied to legal relationships by our courts.

The headline in the October 1, 1994 edition of the San Francisco Examiner read “Law Saves Churches From Preservation.” It is not intuitively apparent that churches would want to utilize the law to be saved from historic preservation; in fact, it is at least equally logical to assume that preservation of historic churches would be a goal around which clergy and preservationists would rally. Secular preservationists, of course, may find in a given church superior formal aesthetic qualities or crucial social or historical significance. Religious leaders, for their part, may welcome historic preservation for theological reasons, so that the buildings will stand as “witnesses to faith”; others may see preservation “as part of a church's responsibility to the wider community.” Regardless of their motivations, though, there's significant potential for cooperation among preservationists and religious leaders. However, as landmark and historic district preservation has emerged as an important governmental planning and land use tool, cooperation has inevitably given way to conflict. Ultimately, issues of preservation yield to issues of authority and autonomy, that is, whether freedom of religion or preservation should prevail.