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RESPONSE TO THE REVIEWERS - Church, State, and Family: Reconciling Traditional Teachings and Modern Liberties. By John Witte Jr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 454. $130.00 (cloth). ISBN: 9781316882542.

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Church, State, and Family: Reconciling Traditional Teachings and Modern Liberties. By John Witte Jr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 454. $130.00 (cloth). ISBN: 9781316882542.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2020

John Witte Jr.
John Witte Jr.*
Affiliation:
Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, McDonald Distinguished Professor of Religion, and Director, Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University
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Keywords

Marriagefamilychildrennatural lawnatural rightschildren's rightsreligious arbitrationprivate orderingpolitical theorychurch-state relations
Type
Book Review Symposium: John Witte, Jr., Church, State, and Family: Reconciling Traditional Teachings and Modern Liberties
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , December 2019 , pp. 520 - 528
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 2020

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References

1 My first article in the field was John Witte, Jr., The Reformation of Marriage Law in Martin Luther's Germany: Its Significance Then and Now, 4 Journal of Law and Religion 293–352 (1987). My main monographs on point since are John Witte, Jr. From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion and Law in the Western Tradition (1997; 2d ed. 2012); John Witte, Jr., God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition 295–449 (2006); John Witte, Jr., The Sins of the Fathers: The Law and Theology of Illegitimacy Reconsidered (2009); John Witte, Jr. and Robert M. Kingdon, Sex, Marriage and Family in John Calvin's Geneva (2005); and John Witte, Jr., The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy (2015). There are also several anthologies and several dozen articles. See https://www.johnwittejr.com/.

2 Forthcoming still is John Witte, Jr. and Robert M. Kingdon, Sex, Marriage and Family in John Calvin's Geneva 2: The Christian Household.

3 See especially Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (1997); Mark D. Jordan, The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (2000); Mark D. Jordan, The Ethics of Sex (2001); Mark D. Jordan, Blessing Same-Sex Unions: The Perils of Queer Romance and the Confusions of Christian Marriage (2005); Mark D. Jordan, Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech (2005); Authorizing Marriage: Canon, Tradition, and Critique in the Blessing of Same–Sex Unions (Mark D. Jordan, Meghan T. Sweeney, and David M. Mellon eds., 2006).

4 See, e.g., Mark D. Jordan, The Care of Souls and the Rhetoric of Moral Teachings in Bonaventure and Aquinas (1993); Mark D. Jordan, Ordering Wisdom: The Hierarchy of Philosophical Discourses in Aquinas (1996); Mark D. Jordan, Teaching Bodies: Moral Formation in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas (2017).

5 Mark D. Jordan, Pedagogies of Natural Law, 34 Journal of Law and Religion (2019) (in this issue).

6 Quoted and discussed in Bernard Chapais, Primeval Kinship: How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society 10–11, 194 (2008).

7 Reconceiving the Family: Critique on the American Law Institute's Principles of Family Dissolution (Robin F. Wilson, ed. 2006); Same Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty: Emerging Conflicts (Douglas Laycock, Anthony R. Picarello, and Robin Fretwell Wilson eds., 2008); The Contested Place of Religion in Family Law (Robin F. Wilson ed., 2018); Religious Freedom, LGBT Rights, and the Prospects for Common Ground (Robin Fretwell Wilson and William F. Eskridge eds., 2019).

8 321 U.S. 159 (1944); see further John Witte, Jr. and Joel A. Nichols, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment 135 (4th ed. 2016).

9 391 U.S. 69 (1968); see further John Witte, Jr., The Sins of the Fathers: The Law and Theology of Illegitimacy Reconsidered 157–60 (2008).

10 See sources and discussion in Robin Fretwell Wilson and Shaakirrah Sanders, By Faith Alone: When Religion and Child Welfare Collide, in The Contested Place of Religion, supra note 7, 308–46. See also her related concerns about the abuses of autonomous religious family law systems in Wilson, Robin Fretwell, The Perils of Privatized Marriage, in Marriage and Divorce in a Multi-Cultural Context: Multi-Tiered Marriage and the Boundaries of Civil Law and Religion 253–83 (Joel A. Nichols ed., 2012)Google Scholar.

11 Robin Fretwell Wilson, Family Law Isolationism and “Church, State, and Family” 34 Journal of Law and Religion (2019) (in this issue).

12 For a recent summary of this large literature, see Bernadette Saunders, Ending the Physical Punishment of Children in the English-Speaking World: The Impact of Language, Tradition, and Law, in The Future of Children's Rights 151–77 (Michael D. A. Freeman ed., 2014).

13 This common aphorism is based on Proverbs 13:24: “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him” (Revised Standard Version).

14 See, e.g., sources and discussion in Kathleen Marshall and P.M. Parvis, Honouring Children: The Human Rights of the Child in Christian Perspective (2004).

15 See also a nice summary and update in Michael J. Broyde, Faith-Based Arbitration Evaluated: The Policy Arguments for and against Religious Arbitration in America, 33 Journal of Law and Religion 340–89 (2018).

16 See, e.g., Brian H. Bix, Private Ordering and Family Law, 23 Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers 249–85 (2010); Brian H. Bix, Pluralism and Decentralization in Marriage Regulation, in Marriage and Divorce in a Multi-Cultural Context, supra note 10, at 60–77; Brian H. Bix, Agreements in American Family, 4 International Journal of the Jurisprudence of the Family 115–31 (2013); Brian H. Bix, Marriage Agreements and Religion, 2016 University of Illinois Law Review 1665–78 (2016).

17 Brian H. Bix, Default Rules and Private Alterations, 34 Journal of Law and Religion (2019) (in this issue).

18 See discussion of sexual child abuse by priests and teachers in John Witte, Jr., Church, State, and Sex Crimes: What Place for Traditional Sexual Morality in Modern Liberal Societies? 68 Emory Law Journal 837–65, 842–44, 863–65 (2019).

19 The term is from Jean-François Gaudreault-DesBiens, Religious Courts, Personal Federalism, and Legal Transplants, in Shari'a in the West 159–80 (Rex Ahdar and Nicholas Aroney eds., 2010).

20 See especially Jonathan Chaplin, Herman Dooyeweerd: Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society (2016); Jonathan Chaplin, God and the EU: Faith in the European Project (2016); Jonathan Chaplin, God and the Global Order (2010); Jonathan Chaplin, Talking God: The Legitimacy of Religious Public Reasoning (2008); Politics and Christian Vision: Essays in Memory of Bernard Zylstra (Jonathan Chaplin ed., 1994).

21 This is the main thesis of John Witte, Jr., The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (2007), that takes up the sixteenth to the eighteenth century story. I am now working on the sequel, “A New Reformation of Rights: Calvinist Contributions to Modern Human Rights.”

22 Jonathan Chaplin, The Role of the State in Regulating the Marital Family, 34 Journal of Law and Religion (2019) (in this issue).

23 Id.

24 This is how my colleague Justin Latterell describes this method.