This article analyzes the relation between Confucianism and Chinese politics in the history, actuality, and future. The focus is on the special relationship between Confucianism and Chinese politics. First, the author provides a brief historical reflection on the relationship between Confucianism and Chinese traditional politics and develops three dimensions for such an interpretation. Second, the author explains the need for a Confucian renaissance in contemporary Chinese politics. The article then turns to the contemporary controversy about Confucianism and Chinese politics in mainland China. Jiang Qing's conception of Confucianism as state religion is then juxtaposed with Chen Ming's articulation of Confucianism as civil religion. In conclusion, the author argues that Confucianism should serve as an ethical resource for the state constitution, as well as a resource for social governance and cultivation.

Women’s political leadership is one of the abiding controversial issues among Muslim scholars. The question of whether a Muslim woman can lead in her country is generally answered negatively by Muslim scholars, but some modern scholars explicitly support women’s political leadership without any restriction. Where the scholars stand on the issue is influenced by their social context. With the intent of examining the interaction between social context and Islamic legal methodologies in fatwās—Isalmic legal opinions—related to women, the author discusses as exemplary texts the fatwās issued by two well-known religious institutions, the Dār al-Iftā’ in Saudi Arabia and the Diyanet in Turkey. The institutions function in different social contexts: Saudi Arabia is a theocratic monarchy that applies Islamic law; Turkey is a democratic country whose legal system is based on a secular law. Through a detailed analysis of the spatio-temporal fatwās regarding women’s political leadership, the author provides insight into the influence of contextual elements during the process of issuing fatwās, suggesting that these differences of opinion among Muslim scholars and religious institutions will continue.

This article pursues an immanent critique of a scholarly movement and mood that I call “the new genealogy of religious freedom” and sketches an alternative proposal. The new genealogy of religious freedom claims that religious freedom is incoherent, systemically biased, oppressive, ideological—and necessarily so. Its critique deploys a methodology inherited from Nietzsche and targets a vision of religious freedom associated with “foundationalists” like Kant and Rawls. This article calls both the methodology and the vision into question. The version of genealogy that this movement promotes proves self-destructive and incoherent, veering toward nihilism and unable to account for its own status as critique. Its attack on foundationalist religious freedom is effective, but it presupposes—and targets—conceptions of freedom, neutrality, and power that we need not endorse. For foundationalists and genealogists alike, these assumptions define religious freedom. This article rejects those assumptions and that vision of religious freedom. It sketches a pragmatist, dialectical vision of religious freedom rooted in alternate conceptions of power, freedom, and neutrality and a corresponding strategy for legally defining “religion,” inheriting the strengths of genealogy and foundationalism while avoiding their weaknesses.

Thomas Shaffer once observed: “[I]t is better to bear the discomfort of trying to be a [believer] and a lawyer at the same time than it is to pretend that the symbols of faith have nothing to do with law offices, law schools, or courts.”

I am among the many who have been instructed and moved by Professor Shaffer's example and am, therefore, among those who know something of the contagious discomfort of being a believer and a lawyer at the same time. It is a condition out of keeping with the times. But those whose vocation is faithfulness at the same time that their profession is law or politics have no choice. “Divine discontent” it is sometimes called.

I make no claim for my remarks except that they arise out of this discomfort. Specifically, I am troubled by American law's systemic injustice—i.e., its capacity for victimization, its fallenness. My way of responding to the discomfort, of trying to do something about it, is the act of rethinking which Karl Barth described as “the ‘primary’ ethical action.” The “transformation of thought,” he said, “is the key to the problem of ethics, for it is the place where the turning about takes place by which men are directed to a new behavior.”

Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England is arguably the single most influential work of jurisprudence in American history. Written in the late eighteenth century, it regularly appeared in American law school classrooms up until the early part of the twentieth century, when ridiculing Blackstone and the Commentaries became a part of legal academic orthodoxy and the influence of the Commentaries waned. Blackstone eventually became the poster child for everything that the realists and their descendants thought was wrong with American law—formalism, natural rights and plutocracy.

Both Blackstone's admirers and his detractors have devoted significant attention to his famous account of judging, which holds that judges find (or declare) law rather than make law. In the introduction to the Commentaries, Blackstone states that the judge's job is to determine the law “not according to his own private judgment, but according to the known laws and customs of the land;” the judge is “not delegated to pronounce a new law, but to maintain and expound the old one.” One reason Blackstone's account has been attractive in some quarters is because it supplies apparent answers to a number of problems raised by the idea of judge-made law. If judges merely find and apply authoritative law, their decisions presumptively carry the authority of the law they are applying. Because the law pre-exists the decision, the specter of retroactive liability disappears.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of academic and popular writings on the relationship among Islam, secularism, and democracy. Often, this topic is approached through the question of compatibility: Is Islam compatible or incompatible with secular democracy? Regardless of whether one answers this question with a yes or with a no, such an approach does little to help one in achieving a more nuanced understanding of Islam or secular democracy as discursive traditions. The two works under review here do not follow this pattern. Though distinct in their disciplinary persuasions and in their questions and objects of research, both works offer critical insights into the interaction between Islam and the conditions and structures of secular modernity.

Since the mid-1990s the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools has acquired new life, largely as a result of a new generation of critics of evolution. In comparison to their predecessors, today's critics are better credentialed, have published works with respected academic and university presses and periodicals including peer-reviewed ones, and offer much more sophisticated arguments. The purpose of this essay, however, is not to engage the scientific merits of the arguments offered by these maverick scholars. Rather, the purpose of this essay is to explore a problem of jurisprudence, raised by philosopher Alvin Plantinga and responded to by philosopher of science Robert T. Pennock, whose resolution has relevance to the constitutional question of whether the teaching of evolution along with the works of its critics is permissible in a society whose citizens embrace contrary philosophical and religious points of view.

Does the First Amendment afford religious organizations special protection when government regulation interferes with their internal activities or affairs? Nearly all scholars would agree that relief is appropriate where government regulation is designed to impede a group's religious mission or otherwise unfairly discriminate against religion, but such cases are rare. The more difficult cases involve neutral, generally applicable laws that are not intended to burden the internal operations of religious groups but, nevertheless, have that effect. Does the First Amendment provide any relief in such situations and, if so, what is the justification for this protection?

In Employment Division v. Smith, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment does not excuse individuals from compliance with neutral, generally applicable laws that burden religious practice. Legislatures may choose to grant relief in such situations, but if they choose not to do so, the First Amendment does not require any special accommodations or exemptions. However, Smith did not address protections for religious groups, and, indeed, the Court has never directly addressed the scope of First Amendment protections where neutral government regulation interferes with the internal operations of religious organizations. Scholars who have debated this question have advocated a variety of positions.

In 1977, the Israeli parliament (Knesset) changed the section on abortion in the colonial criminal code which Israel inherited from the British mandate in Palestine. Like most other Western countries who relaxed their laws on abortion in the 1960s-80s, Israel made abortion legal for almost all women who seek it. Nonetheless, the Israeli law on abortion differs substantially from other nations' laws. In no stage of pregnancy does the woman have an absolute right to abort—she always needs an approval from a special committee; yet, the woman's stage of pregnancy is nowhere a relevant legal criterion for permitting or forbidding abortion. The law does not explicitly grant the fetus any value either, as the law speaks only of “termination of pregnancy.” Indeed, Israel has one of the highest rates of late abortions among the developed countries and one of the most liberal laws on the regulation of infertility treatments and research on extra-corporeal embryos.

Jewish religious law (Halakhah) ignores both questions central to the modern ethical, political and legal debate on abortion: the status of the fetus and the autonomy of women. Furthermore, Halakhah is not expressed in the language of rights, such as the rights to life and privacy, but rather in the language of obligations and limitations on action. A rich symbolic world of values and virtues complements halakhic positivist formalism by inspiring and demonstrating desirable ways of life and modes of valuing human action. Regarding abortion, the dialectics between Jewish law (the formal law, which delineates right from wrong) and morality (which inspires and portrays ideal modes of action as part of a largely oral tradition of private counseling and synagogue preaching) reach a powerful climax. The religious law prohibiting abortion is one of the most liberal among human legal systems, but the values of procreation and preservation of human life that inform the moral discussion are fundamental.

In this article I argue that an accommodationist approach to Church-State relations provides the most appropriate interpretation of the Irish Constitution. This accommodationist interpretation is however incompatible with Ireland's system of almost exclusively denominational education, in which denominational schools of all the Churches are funded.

To present all the details of this argument requires a lengthy, at times detailed, at other times an only too brief summary of features of Irish law and the educational establishment. The key points to bear in mind during this presentation are the following.

The schools which educate most children until the age of 18 are usually owned by different religious bodies, and have a particular denominational ethos. In Ireland we term these “denominational” schools. Only a small number of schools are multi-denominational or non-denominational. All schools, provided they have adequate local support, and adhere to national curricula and standards, receive State funding on a non-discriminatory basis. Even though they are owned by private bodies, there is massive State involvement. The State pays for almost all of the current running costs of these schools, and makes a significant contribution to the capital costs. The State also plays a major role in designing curricula and syllabi for the courses.

This educational system, which has developed along these lines ever since 1831, has only recently come under sustained legal scrutiny. The 1937 Irish Constitution provides for judicial review and our judges have often been active in using constitutional rights and principles to correct public policy, which strays from the constitutional path. However it offers no clear answer to the obvious moral issues raised by the educational system: the text recognises the right to education, the right to religious freedom, the principle of non-endowment of religion. However it also endorses state deference to parental wishes in the field of education, and explicitly sanctions state aid for denominational schools.

One of the more beautiful and impressive structures in Washington, D.C., is the neo-classical Supreme Court building, located just east of the Capitol. Upon entering the marble columned courtroom, a hallowed place where notions of law and justice have been defined for more than sixty years, one's eyes are inevitably drawn to the frieze that borders the ceiling some fifty feet above. Encircling the courtroom from a lofty perch, as if symbolizing a heavenly host, are the carved images of eighteen great law-givers, ranging from Hammurabi and Justinian to Blackstone. In the very center of the relief, high over the seat of the Chief Justice, is a symbolic figure balancing a rounded tablet containing ten Roman numerals. The image is as unmistakable as the message it portrays: the Ten Commandments, a religious document central to Jewish and Christian faiths, is being offered as a primary source of American law.

It is axiomatic that many of the principles contained in the Ten Commandments are fundamental to the Western legal tradition. Prohibitions on murder, theft, and perjury are found in nearly every legal code. Notions of respect for one's parents and admonitions against adultery are also implicit, if not explicit, in the quasi-legal realm of normative rules that order many societies. Few people, if any, would dispute that the Ten Commandments—and its parallels from other ancient cultures—as well as other directives contained in the Pentateuch of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, inform our notions of right and wrong and, as such, have influenced the development of Western law of which the American legal system is part.

The liberal principle of reciprocity requires that states maintain neutrality with respect to their citizens’ competing comprehensive worldviews (both religious and secular) while officially justifying the law and while adjudicating under it. But the very possibility of such liberal neutrality has come under attack in a post-Enlightenment world in which even foundational arguments for the principle of reciprocity itself are no longer taken for granted. This article offers a pragmatist path to the resolution of this liberal dilemma. It recommends a “default and challenge” model for legal justification and legitimation that is rooted in social-linguistic practice. By rooting justification and legitimation in practice, it is argued liberal neutrality can be preserved without need for appeals to controversial foundational commitments at any level of public political justification. The article closes with a fictional case study concerning abortion to show how politicians and courts can apply this method to preserve liberal neutrality while addressing even the most controversial issues.

Reproductive politics is the locus classicus for studying the entanglement of religion with politics and lawmaking processes in the Philippines. Although 25 percent of the total population participates in the Pentecostal movement, there is virtually no comprehensive work that studies this movement's attitudes about reproductive health. In this article I analyze Pentecostals’ attitude on reproductive health vis-à-vis recent studies that depict the movement as religious populism. I investigate the interests and exclusions that Pentecostals’ keywords and narratives, as well as recent scholarship on Pentecostalism, conceal. I first provide a genealogical reconstruction of the debate on reproductive health in the Philippines. Second, I provide an overview of the religious landscape and discuss Pentecostal's attitudes toward reproductive health while demonstrating that their rhetorical positions cannot be understood apart from hegemonic struggles and their entanglement with local and global discourse. Third, I draw theoretical and methodological implications for the study of Pentecostalism, politics, and lawmaking processes in the Philippines. Finally, I conclude by showing the relationship between Pentecostalism in the Philippines and the broader study of religion and politics, including making and implementing law.

In June of 1995, the Chief Reporter for the Secretary of State for Scotland, Miss Gillian Pain, completed a Public Inquiry for an application for a coastal superquarry on the Western Isles of Scotland. The company, Redland Aggregates Limited, proposed to extract and transport by sea upward of five million and less than 12 million tons of rock a year. The rock, a feldspar called anorthosite, would be sold as road aggregate throughout Europe. At a national level, the proposal became the Scottish test case for Agenda 21, the blueprint for sustainable development arising from the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in June of 1992. At a local level, this Public Inquiry highlighted and defined community concerns about the development, of which religion was primary. The significance of the religious dimension of the superquarry debate extended from the local to the national and international spheres.

To place the testimonies presented by Mr. Mcintosh, Professor MacLeod, and Chief Sulian Stone Eagle Herney in perspective, it is necessary to understand the role religion plays in daily life on Harris and in the superquarry proposal process. On first appearance, a proposal for one of the world's largest coastal superquarries seems devoid of any religious implications. However, much of the local debate before and during the Inquiry revolved around religious and theological issues. In the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain, where the separation of church and state is inconceivable, the Western Isles of Scotland stand out as a place where religion is still one of the most fundamental guides to policy decision-making. The people of Harris share with the Mi'kmaq of Canada a set of expectations about the role of religion in politics.

This paper explores the ethical and legal pedagogy of the current debates on “reforming” Muslim societies, whether they claim to reform social and legal systems, reform educational institutions, or liberate Muslim women. Since these debates claim to achieve balance in global or domestic conflicts, I address the foundations of these debates by answering three questions:

1. Are the rationales for American and/or European governments' interventions justified?;

2. Can the discipline of civil law help in rethinking Islam for Muslims; and

3. Are Muslims themselves ready to critically address the use and misuse of Islam's primary sources (the Qur'an and particularly the Hadith) in their rethinking of Islam?

I argue that rather than seeking to “reform others,” in this case Muslims with an elitist attitude and sometimes violent interventions, we scholars of law and religion, scholars of Islam, policy-makers, and social justice researchers would be better off if:

1. we thought of Islam as a religio-moral rational worldview, rather than a set of laws,

2. we recognized Muslims as subject to historical transformation, like any other religious groups, and understood how they developed their present views of Islam, and

3. we considered our own real responsibilities to address the forms of global injustices as powerful shapers of world politics, particularly the politics of difference—the view that the “other” is inferior, and women's role as mostly complementary to men.

On the grounds of an (essentially) Roman Catholic moral theology and political philosophy, Michael J. Perry states and argues for positions that vindicate the accent of recent popes on human rights as both a matter of faith and of reason—positions I believe to be largely valid and that could gain even stronger support from a Reformed Christian philosophical theology. This should not be surprising, for the Catholic tradition was the common tradition for centuries, it deeply stamped the legal structure of the West that gave rise to “rights talk,” and those strands which led to human rights in its modern form were implicitly in it, even if they were strengthened by the struggles of Protestants to establish a right to convert and, later, to advocate the freedom of religion on spiritual, intellectual, and organization grounds. Perry knows, as most Catholic and Protestants believe, that social morality is unavoidably linked to religion, that these matters can be discussed in public discourse, and that it is fateful for politics, law, social well-being and international relationships to do so. These matters are made clear not only in this book, but also in his earlier Love and Power: The Role of Religion and Morality in American Politics, The Constitution and the Courts: Law or Politics and Religion in Politics: Constitutional and Moral Perspectives. In the present book, as in the other remarkable products of this decade, we find Perry engaged not only with contemporary political philosophy and jurisprudence, which are largely secular in outlook, but with a number of scholars who are concerned with what David Tracy has called “public theology,” a term which several Protestants as well as Catholics have adopted—although in somewhat different ways.

On the Sunday following the attacks of September 11, 2001, millions of Americans crowded into churches, synagogues and mosques around the country. They came in record numbers, seeking consolation, reassurance and understanding—a framework for processing what was for most a ghastly, unprecedented and utterly incomprehensible event. The religious leaders that greeted them that Sunday would play a seminal role as mediators—strategically situated between the political and media-dominated reactions to the attacks and congregants desperately seeking clarity amidst the smoke, rubble and devastation of that day.

In the weeks following 911, my family and I visited one such Protestant church, the kind of Black church that sociologists of Black religion now call the Mega-Church, located in one of America's most thriving metropolitan areas and boasting a congregation of well over 10,000 members. The sanctuary was a scaled down version of a large arena with balcony and mezzanine seating. Flanking each side of the stage/pulpit were cinematic screens projecting images of an American flag swaying gently in the wind and a choir singing its “Mormon Tabernacle” rendition of “America the Beautiful.”

We live in a world in which four fifths of its population live in frustration while the other fifth lives in fear. The United Nations, our world's “figleaf,” does not hide the shame of humanity but rather scandalizes humanity's malaise. It is troubling that the League of Nations and the United Nations were born after two world wars. Humanity's unity should come as a natural birth and not as the result of a caesarian section, i.e., through violent global wars. This is reminiscent of the ages of epidemics. Then, because of ignorance about the causes behind these illnesses, plagues swept through communities, leaving millions of dead behind. Yet, after technology made it possible for us to see smaller forms of life and medicine brought us a better understanding of germs, communities became better equipped to halt disease and heal the sufferers. If a country now is devastated by an epidemic, we blame it on the lack of sufficient hygiene. So too, the wars that erupt here and there are caused by ignorance of the intellectual organisms that infect communities with hate and influence people to commit atrocities. In today's world, relying on science, we concern ourselves with preventing germ warfare while sheltering the intellectual viruses that destroy us: our intellectual foods are still polluted. We cannot afford to continue to be confused or ignorant about these invasive germs.