John Milbank's critique of the secular as a violent distortion of Christian theology is well established. Less clear is how Milbank's framework might bear upon secular liberalism as it specifically relates to liberal ideas of religious freedom and public or secular reasons in political contexts. This is especially worthy of investigation since “religious freedom” is part of the liberal framework Milbank so stridently critiques. This article attempts to reconcile Milbank's theological critique of secular liberalism with the idea of religious freedom by applying Milbank's theology and the law of love to liberal notions of public discourse for the purpose of redeeming and transforming that discourse. This redeemed “liberalism” provides a framework for persuasion to the Good by recognizing that all public positions (including secularism) are ultimately faith positions, and advocates a discourse governed by the law of love to produce genuine religious freedom that paradoxically transcends and fulfils the liberal ideals that secular liberalism proclaims but can never attain.

James Baldwin’s autobiographical essay “Equal in Paris” is a perceptive and often amusing account of the American writer’s first visit to Paris. An aspiring novelist who left America in rage over his experience of the country’s injustice and contempt toward Black Americans, Baldwin is acutely aware of racial prejudice in majority white societies. He tells of his experience of staying in a dilapidated hotel, of being wrongly accused of theft and then imprisoned in a Paris jail for more than a week over Christmas. Baldwin’s astute observations of Parisian life and its institutions, show how as a Black American, he struggles to understand this new cultural environment which like most Western societies, has its own form of racism. But this is also a story of an artist’s search for a new intellectual home where he can breathe freely and write. His new friendships with other artists and observations about cosmopolitan European life, allow him to assess what it means to be an American in Paris. This includes exploring those social attitudes that divide America and Europe and those that are universal.

It gives me great pleasure to be here today and to give remarks on a subject in which I take considerable interest, the legal and social status of women. I would like to thank Ambassador Mejdoub, the Hannibal Club, and the President's Interagency Council on Women for providing this forum to discuss and promote women's issues.

Women from all countries have much to share with each other about their own cultures, experiences, successes, and failures. Today, as always, women are the primary caregivers worldwide. We bear and nurture the children, and we manage the household for our families. But we also work outside the home. We want and expect to have equal opportunities in business, in the professions, and in public service. We want and expect to be paid as much as men for the same work. While women have made tremendous advances in this century, the process of achieving gender equality is still an ongoing one, in this country and throughout the world. In many respects, we have traveled far, although we have a way yet to go. We remember the old adage that “[t]he test of every civilization is the position of women in the society.”

Kathleen Brady's article, Religious Group Autonomy: Further Reflections About What Is At Stake, is intended to shore up her position that religious organizations deserve extremely broad autonomy from the law. Her thesis is two-fold. First, she believes that the law should not interfere with the internal operations of religious organizations, which is the position she has taken before. Second, she backs off the position apparent in her earlier work that religious organizations do great good, and, therefore, deserve autonomy. Now she posits a new thesis that religious organizations need to be protected from regulation, because they are working out the truth, and society needs the truth. This latter principle rests on the empirical claim that no one can fully know the truth (or even relative harm and benefit), and, therefore, when the law limits religious organizations, it halts the development of truth.

There was a time when I would have agreed with her, but I was then taught that my views were not based in reality. The problem posed by religious entities, even when they intend to seek the truth, is that they are run by humans, with the full spectrum of human fallibility. On this score, religious organizations really are no different than large corporations. The whole range of destructive behavior can be seen in both: fraud, extortion, misappropriation of funds, lying, deceit, covering up scandals like child abuse or doctoring financial records for the sake of the organization's image, and the list goes on. If religious actors are not deterred and punished for bad acts, they wreak great wrongs. This inescapable empirical reality plainly undermines Brady's earlier claims that seemed to imply that religious organizations deserve autonomy for the good they do.

In a world of but few moral verities, Judge Richard Posner and others pursuing the economic approach to law have introduced a normative principle into discussions of law and policy that receives very wide currency. They propose that society should always sanction market exchanges, as a means of maximizing wealth, unless some exceptional normative commitment on society's part requires otherwise. Where the principle reigns, nonmarket values are treated as restrictions on individual autonomy requiring special justification.

As a consequence, the justifiability of restricting market freedom becomes a standard mode of framing normative issues. Disagreements about values are formulated as disputes over whether contracts should be enforced. Arguments are made for and against enforcing contracts for the purchase and sale of votes, the intervivos transfer of eyes or kidneys, addictive recreational drugs, enslavement or prostitution, and environmental purity.

American culture bears a lasting imprint from its Puritan founders. Their ideal of a social and political community based on a religious covenant has provided a sense of mutual obligation and commitment to public purposes in American life that cannot be fully explained by the contractarian notion of “mutually disinterested” persons who join forces to further their individual aims more effectively. Covenant theology, at the beginnings of modern liberal individualism, sustained an older notion of the self fulfilled in community. At the same time, however, the covenantal emphasis on consent, the voluntary creation of new communities of identity, introduced new elements of historicity, initiative, and equality into old political theories. The distinctive covenantal form of some basic democratic norms thus continues to exert an influence on public choice and political ideals, even in a public philosophy which is today dominated by contractarian and utilitarian theories.

The organization of a Section on Law and Religion in 1976 by the Association of American Law Schools (after Watergate) was followed in 1977 by the incorporation of the Council on Religion and Law. My participation in both led to the study of theology and especially to the question, what, if anything, can a legal scholar, particularly one specialized in penal law and the philosophy of law, contribute to the literature on the interrelations of law and religion? In the English-speaking world not many legal scholars have written on this subject, and none, to my knowledge, on the interrelationship of religion and modern criminal law. I here confine my discussion to the Bible and, more particularly, to some of the writing on atonement by Christian theologians.

The central focus of Christianity is on the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the relevant theme, originating in the Old Testament and frequently addressed in the New Testament, is that of atonement. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament accept and emphasize the vicarious significance of the sacrifice—the lamb in the Old Testament, Jesus in the New Testament. The one sacrificed takes on itself or himself the sins of Israel or the sins of all mankind. Likewise, the sacrifice frees all Israel or all mankind from sin, and the consequence is reconciliation with God.

In the article The Use of Natural Law in Early Calvinist Resistance Theory, David VanDrunen, Robert B. Strimple Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at Westminster Seminary (California), analyzes natural law as it appeared in the writings of several sixteenth—century resistance theorists—John Knox, Christopher Goodman, John Ponet, Theodore Beza, Francois Hotman, and the unknown writer of Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. Van Drunen's article is much needed, since Richard Tuck, in his otherwise astute 1979 study on natural law, does not adequately address Reformation-era developments, focusing instead on Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf, and other seventeenth-century theorists. Nevertheless, I take issue with Van Drunen's assertion that these writers were all “committed to the theology of Calvin” and were “early Calvinist resistance theorists.” One could make the case that most of these writers were, but there is one notable exception: English reformer, humanist, bishop, and polemicist John Ponet.

It is a thousand miles from the coast of the land of Israel to the city of Rome, over the sea that is called in both Hebrew and Latin, “the Sea In-Between.” The closing chapters of the book of Acts tell of the Apostle Paul's journey over that sea, from Caesarea to Rome, around the year 60 C.E. By this time, of course, Paul had made many journeys in his life: from Tarsus to Jerusalem, Jerusalem to Damascus, to Ephesus, Athens, Corinth and numerous other cities east of Rome. At the conclusion of his Epistle to the Romans, Paul mentions that he planned to visit Rome as well, on his way to Spain. But as best we can tell, when Paul did finally come to Rome, his wanderings ended, for he came as a prisoner, and it was in Rome, according to Church tradition, that he was eventually put to death.

In the book of Acts, the portrayal of the events leading up to Paul's journey to Rome—its description of his arrest and subsequent appearances before various courts and authorities—is clearly reminiscent of the Gospel descriptions of Jesus' arrest and execution approximately thirty years earlier. In both accounts, we read of disturbances in the Temple, crowds of angry Jews calling for an innocent victim's death, his arrest and confrontations with both Jewish and Roman authorities, and acknowledgement by representatives of Rome of the victim's innocence. However, the conditions surrounding the two series of events suggest two very different historical moments. And Paul's response to those who would sit in judgment of him, and to the jurisdictions they represented, at least as recorded in Acts, suggests a sea of difference between Paul's outlook and that of his Lord.

It is commonplace for the English to regard their age and culture as “post-Christian.” What exactly is meant by this label is not always clear, but it seems meant to bespeak a hardheaded realism accompanied by a kind of wistfulness for a more certain, vibrant, robust past. So while supporting note is often taken of the low rate of church attendance in England, the sense of loss runs deeper, as if all that is left from the past is a kind of “domesticated pantheism” which somewhat ironically operates as a “bulwark against religion.” Reminders of this bygone culture are found in a countryside of handsome churches, cities landmarked by grand cathedrals, and a ceremonial clergy whose robes and scepters make for great spectacle and some good TV; but the churches are empty and the clergy are said to be mostly dispirited, effete, irrelevant, “enfeebled and unsure.” The term “post-Christian,” however, carries an even deeper charge insofar as it suggests something more about the state of English culture in the late twentieth century than simply the decay of the established Church as the institutional bearer of the main nourishment of Western civilization. In some sense, we are to suppose that, in England at least, the Christian world is dead and that the established Church of England remains but a many-branched museum, staffed with actors playing uncertain parts whose demise as a part of the apparatus of state is near at hand.

Ukraine's “Orange Revolution” in 2004-05 captivated an international audience. Western reporting on this “democratic moment” focused on Victor Yuschenko's eventual hard-fought victory, labeling it an indication of Ukraine's commitment to breaking ties with its Soviet socialist past and to establishing itself fully as a capitalist market economy. In the shrinking global economy, Ukraine, suddenly, was a hot commodity. Yet, in the flurry of rhetoric about a former Soviet state achieving independence and sovereignty, moving from a socialist past to a capitalist future, few seemed directly to address the issue of private property. There seemed to be very little mention, though, at least in the popular media, of the shape of a right to private property in Ukrainian law. This was surprising in view of the fact that this is a basic prerequisite to a market economy. In fact, Ukrainian law does offer some minimal guidance concerning this important concept.

Technological consciousness and libertarian doctrine reduce the material world to an instrument—or better, to an amorphous resource existing solely for those ends which we freely choose. We are trapped in matter without true form or meaning.

Even for the Christian, such reduction has grave consequences. God resides in a distant heaven or in a distant time. Only after years of exile in a nature bereft of divinity can we hope, perhaps, to be rewarded with bodily salvation in a different universe. In the meantime, any spirituality we hold to must be necessarily non-material— founded in a dualistic belief in the presence of the intangible Deity whispering to our own intangible selves. We are put asunder, into godless brains and disembodied souls.