Priest of the Church or Priest of a Church? The Ecclesiology of Ordained Local Ministry Noel Cox Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, Lanham, MD, 2021, xv + 155 pp (hardback £73), ISBN: 978-1-9787-1185-3 (original) (raw)
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Cambridge University Press, 2016. Edited by Frank Cranmer, Mark Hill, Celia Kenny and Russell Sandberg. Since the early 1990s, politicians, policymakers, the media and academics have increasingly focused on religion, noting the significant increase in the number of cases involving religion. As a result, law and religion has become a specific area of study. The work of Professor Norman Doe at Cardiff University has served as a catalyst for this change, especially through the creation of the LLM in Canon Law in 1991 (the first degree of its type since the time of the Reformation) and the Centre for Law and Religion in 1998 (the first of its kind in the UK). Published to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the LLM in Canon Law and to pay tribute to Professor Doe's achievements so far, this volume reflects upon the interdisciplinary development of law and religion. Table of Contents Foreword Lord Williams of Oystermouth 1. Renaissance and re-engagement: Norman Doe's achievement in the discipline of law and religion Mark Hill, QC Part I. Conceptual Foundations and Historical Development: 2. Law, religion and the curve of reason Celia Kenny 3. Legal authority in canon law: cases from the notebook of a medieval lawyer Richard H. Helmholz 4. Trust and conscience in early English law David Seipp 5. A sociological theory of religious law Russell Sandberg Part II. Government and Ministry: 6. The rise of ecclesiastical quasi-legislation Paul Colton 7. The development and influence of Anglican canon law Anthony Jeremy 8. Ecclesiastical regulation and secular law: a comparative examination Frank Cranmer Part III. Doctrine, Liturgy and Rites: 9. Justice and mercy: canon law and the sacrament of penance Robert Ombres, OP 10. Pardon and peace – rights and responsibilities: persuasion not compulsion Edward Morgan 11. Public law and traditional faith Norman Solomon Part IV. The Interface of Religious Law and Civil Law: 12. Who needs freedom of religion? Silvio Ferrari 13. Religion and human rights: principles and practice Carolyn Evans and Timnah Rachel Baker 14. Coercion, oaths and conscience: conceptual confusion in the right to freedom of religion or belief Alison Mawhinney 15. Religious freedom and the law Brenda Hale Part V. Conclusions: 16. The role of religion in building political communities Linda Hogan 17. The interdisciplinary growth of law and religion John Witte, Jr 18. New directions in the confluence of law and religion Celia Kenny.
Journal of Religious History, 2018
to its translation by Caroline Levine. Helmholz's chapter on local ecclesiastical courts in England (Ch. 10) outlines the jurisdiction of the courts and their interaction with secular courts, ground well trodden in his own previous research. Other contributors will be less well known to non-specialists. Barbara Deimling's Chapter 2 illustrates the crossover between the ecclesiastical and secular, documenting the importance of the church portal as a locus of justice for both religious and secular rulers alike in the medieval community up to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But this situation changed between the thirteenth and fifteenth century, first in Italy, then in Germany, when the church portal was used less and less as the site for law courts, and lay civic institutions grew in their stead (p. 47). Péter Erdö has long specialised on medieval Hungarian canon law, and his chapter on ecclesiastical procedure in eastern central Europe (Ch. 12) is a welcome addition to an area much understudied. Brigide Schwarz's Chapter 6 on the Roman Curia, the papal court at Rome by which the pope himself dispensed ruling and judicial functions from 1090 up until about 1300, brings light to yet another important but obscure institution. This volume is a welcome addition to recent scholarship on medieval canon law, and indispensable reading for anyone working on medieval court records. Its contributors are among the best in the field and the scholarship is first-rate, usefully supplemented by an extensive "selected" bibliography and general index.
The Priesthood of All Citizens: On the Pseudo-Theology of Penitent Privilege
Mississippi Law Journal 93:2, 2023
Priest-penitent privilege did not exist in the English common law. Yet, only a few decades after independence, American states began recognizing a narrow privilege for sacramental confession, because without such a privilege the substantive equality of Roman Catholics seemed impossible. During the twentieth century, a broad therapeutic version of penitent privilege replaced this older sacramental privilege, so much so that most scholars no longer distinguish them. This paper, however, argues that these two privileges share little in common. They diverge in their scopes, their rationales, their history, and their empirical results. Nineteenth-century jurists did not think therapy and spiritual advice were especially valuable. They protected Roman Catholic confession because the sacrament was something more than just counsel. Ironically, the rise of broad penitent privilege is part of the larger process of secularization, removing the church from the public sphere while translating theological doctrines into political ideals. Resolving the theoretical and practical problems that trouble penitent privilege today requires returning to the narrow older privilege and its substantive vision of equality.
Rediscovering spiritual roots: The Judeo‐Christian tradition and criminal justice
The Justice Professional, 1998
The judeo-christian tradition arguably most impacted contemporary Western jurisprudence, leaving mainly a retributive, non-restorative, stamp. The essay discusses three representative points of revision of the tradition: the biblical concept of justice, in particular the idea of «tsedeka», whereby emphasis is placed upon the outcome of justice, one of healing and reintegration; the dynamic of scapegoating by which Western criminal justice systems may be seen as «scapegoating mechanisms» for a violence-prone culture, and the way out of this kind of punitiveness through inclusive forms of justice-making; and forgiveness, which challenges towards a self-transcendence without which victims wallow in unhealthy pathologies. This essay is a look at some aspects of the judeo-christian tradition for a vision of justice that has «healing in its wings», to use biblical imagery. It will begin with consideration of Herman Bianchi's explication of biblically based «tsedeka» justice, then look at the impact of the Jesus story upon the concept of scapegoating as developed in the work of René Girard and many others iii , and finally move to a consideration of forgiveness in the judeochristian tradition. An eye will be kept on the applicability in each case to theory and 1 Northey has been in criminal justice work since 1974. He became the second director in 1977 of the first North American endnotesVictim Offender Reconciliation Project in Kitchener, Canada. He spent ten years on staff with the first and largest prison visitation program in Canada, Man-to-Man/Woman-to-Woman, Christian Volunteers in Corrections, British Columbia. In 1989 he was appointed Director of Victim Offender Ministries for the Mennonite Central Committee Canada, an international relief and development agency of the Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches. He serves as a volunteer mediator, prison visitor, and board member on two local programs doing mediation in crime and prison visitation. He holds an Honours B.A. in French and German, and a Masters in Theological Studies. He is active in a Mennonite church, and has a wife and three children.
‘The Reformation of Religious Law’ (2017) Quaderni di Dritto e Politica Ecclesiastica 97-110
2017
A long-term and significant effect of the English Reformation of the 1530s has been the marginalisation of scholarship on religious law. Although this has begun to change in recent years, very little attention has been afforded to the defining features of religious law and whether it is useful to talk of a category of religious law. This article seeks to begin to redress this by constructing an understanding of religious law as necessarily having both a religious and legal character. It draws upon the work of Robert Alexy and Niklas Luhmann in particular to propose a necessarily interdisciplinary understanding to further stimulate scholarship on religious law.