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.

Three recent books focused on law, gender, and Islam not only make important individual contributions to the field of law and religion, but together, in their attention to issues of gender, sex, violence, and law, signal an important development in both this field and the field of Islamic studies. This state of the field essay examines Kecia Ali's revised and expanded edition of Sexual Ethics and Islam, Ayesha Chaudhry's Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition, and Hina Azam's Sexual Violation in Islamic Law. Individually and collectively, these works shed light on the way that societies use gender as a fundamental tool of social organization and hierarchy. While Ali, Chaudhry, and Azam focus mainly on the classical Sunni Islamic tradition, their insight has wider methodological import for the study of law and religion. Further, they illuminate the intellectual diversity within the Islamic tradition, both in the past and in the present. In doing so, they draw attention to the process of how the intellectual tradition is retrieved and appropriated in contemporary contexts. Finally, their work is historical and descriptive as well as normative: this kind of scholarship challenges the distinction in the study of religion between these two categories. Ali, Chaudhry, and Azam each places her observations and arguments about classical Sunni Islamic texts and traditions in productive conversation with ethical and legal questions that Muslims face today.

In this essay, a response to an article by Patrick Parkinson, Shannon Gilreath disputes Parkinson’s claim that religiously motivated discrimination against transgender people should be the subject of special exceptions to prevailing antidiscrimination law, especially where the transgender person does not seek to conform to the traditional male/female gender binary. Gilreath maps the ways in which Parkinson’s proposal is an argument for biological superiority, which has been the rationalization for systematic and systemic social inferiority throughout history, including most notably in the contexts of race, gender, and sexuality oppression. In concluding that Parkinson’s proposal is little more than a restatement of the faulty differences-based approach to equality through law, Gilreath ultimately concludes that its principles are wholly inconsistent with the legitimate purposes of antidiscrimination law.

Theological explorations of law have sometimes followed a “prophetic” model in which scripture or theological ethics serves as the primary norm for human law. After all, if God has spoken his Law into the world, especially a world beset by sin and oppression, should not human law answer to that Law? Moreover, is not law more authoritative when it is “found” or “discovered” within the framework of divine revelation than when it is “made” autonomously by fallen human beings?

The Catholic Church claims a wide authority to make pronouncements on faith and morals, and have them respected by members of the church. The nature and extent of the respect to be accorded them is subject to considerable debate, some of it both extensive and acrimonious. It is claimed, to be sure, that certain pronouncements are infallible; if so, they are obviously beyond debate. But for most pronouncements no such claim is made. Furthermore, the question whether a given pronouncement is infallible or not is itself debatable, and can generally not be infallibly resolved.

We are confronted, therefore, with an array of assertions of varying provenance to which we are expected to give some measure of credence, even though we have no guarantee that they are true, or even that their authors are particularly well-informed. They take their authority from that of the church, which in its corporate capacity is the repository of God's Revelation, and the beneficiary of His guidance.

What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
—Wallace Stevens

This essay was presented as the 2015 McDonald Distinguished Scholar Lecture at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University.

Law is central to an understanding of the development of modern Korean Buddhism. New legal and regulatory structures that were introduced during the first two decades of the twentieth century in Korea significantly impacted the course of modern Korean Buddhist history. The relationship between modern secular laws and Buddhist organizations during this period, however, was forged chiefly in the context of increasing Japanese political control over Korea, especially after the start of direct colonial rule following annexation in 1910. Therefore, the critical legal issues involved in the historical development of early modern Korean Buddhism have typically been subsidiary to the analyses of Japanese colonial policies toward the monastic community. The precise contours of the relationship between Buddhism and law in the modern period remain largely unexplored and thus indistinct because the focus in previous studies has been placed on the confrontation between the sangha and the colonial state.

The first thing I thought when I finished reading Stephen Carter's recent book, The Culture of Disbelief, was: This guy needs to get out of New Haven more often. Anybody who believes that America does not take religion seriously cannot possibly be looking at all of America.

When I look at America, I apparently see a very different culture from the one Carter identifies. The divergence in our perceptions is not merely an empirical disagreement; rather, this divergence in fact masks a basic doctrinal difference. I am suggesting, in other words, that it is because we have such different views of legal doctrine that we perceive the place of religion in our society so differently.

This is a legal essay, however. Its subject is thus primarily the doctrinal issues; these issues occupy Parts 3 through 6 below (and, to a lesser extent, Part 2). I argue that American culture is like a religion, with its own texts, its own authorities, and its own values. One of these values is that other religions must remain in their own sphere. While my focus here is legal doctrine, insofar as it is accurate to maintain that doctrinal differences in the realm of religion and the law can significantly drive divergent perceptions of religious reality, then it may be useful to underscore Carter's own view of reality as well as my rather different perception; such an underscoring is the objective of Parts 1 and 2.

The great and chief end … of men's uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property (John Locke).

The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalist private property, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people. (Karl Marx).

Conditions of the common life of peoples have undergone a radical transformation from the seventeenth century to the present. The character of daily work, the form of family life, the structure of nations and empires in our times are fundamentally unlike those of three centuries ago. In the economic sector, property is among the categories of thought and practice whose features have been transfigured during the period.

The purpose of this survey is to note important caselaw developments in the state and lower federal courts concerning religious liberty during 1985. Purposely omitted are the widely reported United State Supreme Court opinions, as well as cases where the high court has granted review during its 1985-86 term. The focus here is to collect significant cases that may otherwise escape broad attention. Only the facts and rationale of each court's decision is recorded. No editorial comment on the merits of these cases is intended.

The ancient Greeks never speak of themselves as “polytheistic,” of their religion as “polytheism.” Certainly, thinkers comparing various world-views must have given a place to this one early on. Sextus Empiricus, ca. A.D. 200, notes that, if one looks around, some people assume one god, hena theon, some many, pollous; such an observation could probably have been made hundreds of years before. Yet from here to the labels “polytheistic” and “polytheism” is a big step. They are met in no text B.C. It is Philo, outsider and critic, who first employs them.

The ground was prepared in that the adjective was current long before, though not descriptive of a creed. Significantly, the noun is not traceable earlier at all, nor the nominal use of the adjective, what we translate as “a polytheist.” Here is the passage with the adjective from Aeschylus. The daughters of Danaus flee from Egypt to Greece with their father in order not to be forced into marriage by their cousins. Expecting the latter to pursue them, they take refuge at the sanctuary of Argos, favoured—the father explains—by quite a few of the mightiest Olympians; and they implore the king not to let them be dragged from this “many-godded seat.” Even for Lucian, Philo's junior by over a century, the adjective has much the same meaning and, of course, there is no noun.

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Thomas Paine, pamphleteer of the American Revolution and defender of the French Revolution, captures in this phrase a central insight conveyed in the idea of human rights: we have it in our power to begin the world again. The sentiment is cast in simple declarative form. As such it may seem naive. We are, after all, constrained—are we not—by the inheritance of a world already accomplished, a world whose structures bind us in untold ways? But the intention of Paine's statement is more than aspirational. It affirms a vision of what is possible—and what is desirable—given the deepest character of who we are and what we might become. If we comprehend the full dialectic between self and world, then we have it in our power to begin the world again even as the world is the matrix—the source and the condition—of our power. That's a central insight conveyed in the idea of human rights which has stirred up such controversy, philosophical and political, since it emerged at the beginnings of the modern era.

The history of Church-State relations in seventeenth and eighteenth century America is the account of the process by which the arguments of those who asked for exemptions from contemporary Church-State practices became the accepted norms for society at large.

There is an essential distinction, however, between the demand for exemptions in that period and modern claims for exemptions on account of religion. In our time, religious people ask for exemptions from laws that society generally sees as inherently secular; and they generally ask for exemptions for themselves or their group, but do not specifically attack the laws and usually have little difficulty with others being bound by them. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, laws such as proclamations of days of prayer and fasting, or laws for the financial support of clergy, were essentially religious in nature but were passed for the secular purpose of bolstering the moral fabric of society. Moreover, although those opposing them were often willing to settle for exemptions only for themselves, they usually attacked the legislation as bad for society, as a violation of religious liberty.