Full Description
The conventional approach to law and religion assumes that these are competing domains, which raises questions about the freedom of, and from, religion; alternate commitments of religion and human rights; and respective jurisdictions of civil and religious courts. This volume moves beyond this competitive paradigm to consider law and religion as overlapping and interrelated frameworks that structure the social order, arguing that law and religion share similar properties and have a symbiotic relationship. Moreover, many legal systems exhibit religious characteristics, informing their notions of authority, precedent, rituals and canonical texts, and most religions invoke legal concepts or terminology. The contributors address this blurring of law and religion in the contexts of political theology, secularism, church-state conflicts, and the foundational idea of divine law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Contents
Part I. Sanctification and Secularization: 1. Desanctification of law and the problem of absolutes Jeremy Waldron; 2. The paradox of human rights discourse and the Jewish legal tradition Suzanne Last Stone; 3. Sovereign imaginaries: visualizing the sacred foundation of law's authority Richard K. Sherwin; Part II. Legal-Religious Language: 4. Dat: from law to religion: the transformation of formative term in modern times Abraham Melamed; 5. Law as religion, religion as law: Halakhah from a semiotic point of view Bernard S. Jackson; 6. Canonicity as a defining feature of legal and religious discourse: a programmatic essay Daniel Reifman; Part III. Legal-Theological Roots: 7. Exceptional grace: religion as the sovereign suspension of law Robert Yelle; 8. A bad man theory of religious law (numbers 15:30-31 and its afterlife) David C. Flatto; 9. Soviet law and political religion Dmytro Vovk; 10. International law as evangelism Kevin Crow; Part IV. Religious Conceptions of Law: 11. 'Enjoin them upon your children to keep' (Deuteronomy 32:46): law as commandment and legacy, or, Robert Cover meets Midrash Steven D. Fraade; 12. 'Between man and god' and 'Between man and his fellow': categories in Polemical context Itzhak Brand; 13. Christian feasts and administration of Roman justice in late antiquity Silvia Schiavo; Part V. Law in Formation: Religious Perspectives: 14. Law as a problematic aspect of religion: Paul's skepticism in a broader Jewish context Serge Ruzer; 15. When law meets theology: legality and revelation in the Jewish, Islamic, and Zoroastrian traditions in the Abbasid period Yishai Kiel.
