WHAT HATH FAITH WROUGHT (original) (raw)

Faith and the Lawyer\u27s Practice Symposium: Law Religion and the Public Good

2001

If there is a religious way to read, is there a religious way to be a lawyer? More and more lawyers, judges and scholars are answering yes to that question. We heard earlier from Cardinal Bevilacqua about the history of the Religious Lawyering Movement, which blossomed in the 1990s. There was writing about the law and religion before that time. We can date religious lawyering as a body of work in mainstream legal literature, as Cardinal Bevilacqua did, to the work of Professor Thomas Shaffer in the 1980s.Why did this movement take off in the 1990s? Again, what accounts for the growth of the Religious Lawyering Movement? A renewed interest in religion across society as a whole is one reason. Related to that, lawyers, like others, are engaged in a search for meaning in their work. In the past, many lawyers would have found this meaning in professionalism, but during today\u27s crisis of professionalism, lawyers are unable to find a satisfactory way to reconcile their personal aspirati...

Symposium Introduction: The Competing Claims of Law and Religion: Who Should Influence Whom?

2012

Abstract: This introduction provides a preface to the Pepperdine Law Review symposium from the Third Annual Religious Legal Theory Conference on" The Competing Claims of Law & Religion: Who Should Influence Whom." As the introduction notes, the relationship between law and religion is both fraught with tension but also provides great opportunity. In so doing, the introduction sketches some of the varied responses to conflicts between law and religion, providing a brief overview of the papers included in the symposium issue.

Why religion is different: Five contradictions of religion in law

Immanent Frame Blog, 2019

In this online review essay I argue that religion poses special challenges as a category of law; and these challenges arise not simply because religion is difficult, if not impossible, to define nor because legal agents deploy the category in strategic, prejudicial, or inconsistent ways. Religion is a uniquely thorny category of law, I will insist, because the use of that category—in legislatures, courtrooms, and mediascapes—evokes (at least) five distinct discursive contradictions, opposing ways of representing and understanding those things that are supposed to be protected or regulated by law: contradictions of communality, authority, acquisition, imagination, and independence.

The Study of Law and Religion in the United States: An Interim Report

Ecclesiastical Law Journal, 2012

The study of law and religion has exploded around the world. This article, prepared in celebration of the silver anniversary of the Ecclesiastical Law Society, traces the development of law and religion study in the United States. Despite its long tradition of strict separation of church and state and despite its long allegiance to legal positivism and intellectual secularization, the United States has emerged as a world leader of the new interdisciplinary field of law and religion. Hundreds of American scholars, from different confessions and professions, are now at work in this field, and two dozen major research centers and journals have been established at American law schools. After canvassing some of the main themes and trends in American law and religion scholarship today, this article concludes with a brief reflection on some of the main challenges before Christian scholars who work in the field of ecclesiastical law.

RELIGION INTERFACING WITH LAW AND POLITICS: THREE TIRED IDEAS IN THE JURISPRUDENCE OF RELIGION

LOGOS: A JOURNAL OF CATHOLIC THOUGHT AND CULTURE, 2007

The Religion Clauses of the First Amendment comprise the American citizen’s first freedoms. The Supreme Court’s interpretation of these freedoms is in a state of hopeless confusion. The reasons for the confusion have to do with three ideas – separationism, neutrality, and coercion – which have no content independent of the political proclivities of the jurist. This generally ignored fact points to the need to re-cast the jurisprudence of religion in a fashion that competing political visions are clearly and straightforwardly considered by judges and citizens alike. Religion, law, and politics are finally inseparable, leave no room for neutral ground, and will constrain (or “coerce”) those who disagree with the adopted regime.