This is a self-indulgent, and perforce idiosyncratic, excursus into some (but by no means all) of the vast body of literature that has been published in recent years touching on secularism and cultural heritage in Europe, surveyed from the vantage point of law and religion scholarship. It was commissioned by the Journal of Law and Religion as part of its ambitious project for sharply focused and widely angled snapshots of the state of the field at the present moment.1 And, for this English writer, with this particular topic, the moment could not be more propitious.

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.

The article challenges the fashionable but finally unsupportable opinion in political and academic circles that there exists no compelling, unitary, universally resonant moral and legal justification of human rights. The argument is intimated by two overlooked passages in the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that presuppose the right of self-defense against arbitrary force, understood as both a moral and legal concept, and as relevant both to personal and collective life. It shows how the logic of defensive force underlies the three formative human rights instruments: the UDHR, and the two covenants on political, legal, economic, social, and cultural rights. The underlying claim is that good reasons of a particular kind are required to justify any use of force, a claim that makes perfect sense against the backdrop of the atrocities committed by the German fascists and their allies in the mid-twentieth century. The article also refers to compelling, if preliminary, evidence of the widespread cross-cultural acceptance of the moral and legal right of self-defense, suggesting a basis for the worldwide comprehensibility and appeal of human-rights language.

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.

Drawing on a qualitative study conducted with both individuals who have been shunned from the Jehovah’s Witnesses community and those who were in a position to shun others, the authors identify areas of development within the Serious Crime Act 2015 and propose that there is scope to interpret the law broadly to include instances of people shunned from the Jehovah’s Witnesses community.

The religion of our father Abraham was the religion of a single believer. He was, as described by Thomas Jefferson, a sect of one person calling for recognition by the overwhelming majority. But even his descendants remained a tiny majority among the population of the area; they were aware of being a small people (Deut 7:7) in danger of being absorbed by the Canaanite culture in the neighborhood.

The danger of acculturation was felt not only from the majority, but equally felt from other minority cults and religions (Num. 33:55; Jos 23:13), whose religious practices set a negative example for Israel and its religion. The rule prohibiting any participation in foreign cults and marginalizing religious minorities in Israel's society (for example, Exod 34:11-17) presents itself as a conditio-sine-qua-non in the covenant with the God of Israel.

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports … let it simply be asked where is the security for prosperity, for reputation, for life— if the sense of religious obligation desert … and let us with caution indulge the proposition that morality can be maintained without religion. George Washington—Farewell Address

There is often a message in a title. The title chosen for the Symposium, “The Religious Foundations of Civil Rights Law,” is no exception. Though the initial impression of its meaning will vary in accordance with the interests of the individual reader, the basic message of the Symposium is a simple one: law and religion are fundamentally related.

Filiation among Muslims in India is governed by Muslim personal law, a largely uncodified corpus of key Islamic legal treatises that has subsequently been interpreted and applied through the Common Law frame of British colonial courts and the post-Independence Indian judicial system by virtue of the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act 1937. Muslim personal law recognizes only legitimate filiation resulting from a valid or irregular marriage, barring illegitimate children from maintenance and intestate succession and prohibiting adoption. However, a number of legislative enactments have modified key aspects of the law of filiation among Muslims: shifting the presumption of legitimacy arising from a valid marriage to the time of the wedding, rather than the time of conception; invalidating the doctrine of dormant fetus; and lifting certain disabilities incurred from illegitimacy. Further, although adoption based on customary law is somewhat common in India and has been recognized by courts, its effect among Muslims has tended only to lift the bar to paternal succession and seldom creates filiation with the adoptive family. Notwithstanding, following the enactment of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2000 and its subsequent amendments, an optional secular legal framework for adoption is now available to Muslim prospective parents. The procedure set forth by the Act is nonetheless unwieldly and implementation faces the very practical difficulties of the state in managing and protecting the vast number of destitute and abandoned children in India, for the most part with an unknown filiation.

When Ronald Dworkin was to deliver his 1988 Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Stanford University, he was introduced by the university's president, Donald Kennedy. Kennedy offered an appreciative account of Dworkin's background and achievements, noted the title of the upcoming talk, then gathered up his notes and turned the podium over to the speaker. Dworkin proceeded to give a two-hour oration on the foundations of liberal equality, breathtaking in its detail and logical rigor and flowing eloquently without a hitch or hesitation. Just as he was concluding, Kennedy rushed up to the dais and exclaimed to the audience: “Please forgive me, I just realized that when I picked up my notes, I also inadvertently picked up Professor Dworkin's manuscript.” Without missing a beat, Dworkin had delivered his entire lecture from memory.

“We cannot endow people with intelligence. Intelligence fundamentally is this capacity to ask questions, and this capacity is entirely from nature.”

My concern here is the rule of law, in all its operations. I select the unexpected word “operations” in order to telegraph a difference from much other natural law jurisprudence. The rule of law is not just a battery of operations; however, failure to appreciate the place of operations in the rule of law leads to a straw-man rule of law—and we know too well the fate of straw men. It is flesh-and-blood men and women whose operations bring about the rule of law, if a rule of law there is to be.

While the last and most recent of the revealed religions is generally considered to be Islam, religious scholars are gradually recognizing that a religion founded later in the modern era, the Bahā'ī Faith, displays all the characteristics of a universal religion. Whereas scholars working in the field of Islamic Studies tended in the past to treat this religion under the sub-heading “Islamic sects,” and Religious Studies scholars for many years paid little attention to it, more recent research counts the Bahā'ī Faith as one of the world religions.

The present study aims to provide an overview of the revealed law of the Bahā’ī Faith, which is of interest for students of both legal history and religious studies. We are entering virgin territory here, as no attempt has yet been made at a systematic jurisprudence, nor has a tradition of Bahā’ī jurisprudence been established that might compare with the Islamic Usūlu’l-figh. Since the foundations and principles of this law can be understood only within their theological context, and knowledge of this context is rare outside the Bahā’ī community, some basic background information about the faith will be provided first.