This article examines anti-mask protests in the United States in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, I look at the cultural (mis)appropriation of slogans by anti-mask protestors, such as “I can’t breathe” and “My body, my choice.” Noting that this is at first glance a bit of a puzzling phenomenon, I show that there is a relationship between the anti-mask protest, white Christian grievance politics, and the disintegration of the public sphere. Drawing on the work of Bonnie Honig, I argue that the anti-mask protests represent a mode of opting out of public engagement, hence opting out of the practice of using rational argumentation to explain why things ought to be a certain way, as well as listening to the reasons of others. Insofar as this has become a popular mode of engagement among a significant number of Americans, it needs to be understood in the language of foregoing responsibility for others in US pluralistic democracy. Indeed, further explication of the relationship between responsibility and freedom is absolutely necessary. I maintain that opting out is ethically untenable because of the nature of interdependence with others and the necessity of adhering to the rule of law. An ethic of reciprocity properly grounds an understanding of embodied freedom, resisting the extremes of grievance politics.

“Legal theology” must mean more than theological reflection on legal topics just as “feminist theology” means more than theological reflection on “women's issues.” This is no simple application procedure, but a dynamic interaction between two fields of play, each with an internal variety of methods, considerations, and arguments. Amidst the varieties of Christian theology, Christian feminist theology has distinct methodological features that reflect experiences of subjugation and political commitments to equality and mutuality. Similarly, Christian legal theology—should it in fact develop—cannot claim to represent all Christian reflection as though Christian theology is monolithic and neutrally applied to a stagnant list of legal topics. Rather, Christian legal theology would reflect a distinctive way of doing theology in light of experiences, commitments, and practices within the “world of law.” Given the variety internal to Christian theology and the world of law, the configurations for Christian legal theology are indeed myriad.

In her essay “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote, “Nobody had been aware that mankind, for so long a time considered under the image of a family of nations, had reached the state where whoever was thrown out of one of these tightly organized closed communities found himself thrown out of the family of nations altogether.” Surveying the aftermath of the world wars, the same aftermath that eventually led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Arendt found that a person had to be emplaced—the subject of a political space—in the state-oriented order of geopolitics to be cognizable as a subject of human rights. The stateless, being displaced, were excluded from such a regime of rights and from the global political community. Bare humanity, Arendt argued, was an insufficiently binding political identity. As she wrote in her arresting language, “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”

The place of the nonhuman animal within Christian doctrine is a topic of increasing interest, as more theologians seek to describe where nonhuman animals fit on the theological stage. One area where there seems great potential, yet which has been relatively untouched, is God's covenantal relationship with nonhuman animals as described within the Bible. This article is an attempt to use the idea of God's covenantal relationship with nonhuman creatures to build a case for understanding them as creatures of value, with a corresponding human calling to treat them in ways suitable to their value. This case is made in two sections. In the first, the fact that God covenants with nonhuman animals, and calls humans into covenant with them, will be shown through examining Genesis 9 and Hosea 2. Given such a reality, what it means to be involved in a covenant will be examined, and ultimately two main implications will be put forward. First, that nonhuman animals are worthy of covenantal care and protection, and second that humans have a calling to exist in a covenantal relationship with them. Following this, this article then turns to its second section, where it examines the ways in which the Christian tradition has (or has not) intentionally chosen to live out such a covenantal theology with nonhuman animals. The doctrines of two contemporary Christian denominations (Anglican and Roman Catholic) as described in significant denominational documents are examined, as are two groups from these respective traditions which choose to pay close attention to the welfare of nonhuman animals to address the manner in which the covenantal relationship shared between human and nonhuman animals is recognised and understood in the church today. While the groups focused on nonhuman animal welfare continually call for the church to recognise the value of all creatures as described in the covenantal relationship all animals are involved in, their respective denominations often fail to live out such ethical implications. In light of the significance of the covenantal relationship, it is suggested that the church is called to engage in deeper acts of moral discernment on matters of animal ethics.

This book comprises a Christian apologia for nationalism in general and for Scottish separatist nationalism in particular. It is only fair that the reader should know that its reviewer is an Anglo-Scottish unionist.