Technological consciousness and libertarian doctrine reduce the material world to an instrument—or better, to an amorphous resource existing solely for those ends which we freely choose. We are trapped in matter without true form or meaning.

Even for the Christian, such reduction has grave consequences. God resides in a distant heaven or in a distant time. Only after years of exile in a nature bereft of divinity can we hope, perhaps, to be rewarded with bodily salvation in a different universe. In the meantime, any spirituality we hold to must be necessarily non-material— founded in a dualistic belief in the presence of the intangible Deity whispering to our own intangible selves. We are put asunder, into godless brains and disembodied souls.

John Milbank's critique of the secular as a violent distortion of Christian theology is well established. Less clear is how Milbank's framework might bear upon secular liberalism as it specifically relates to liberal ideas of religious freedom and public or secular reasons in political contexts. This is especially worthy of investigation since “religious freedom” is part of the liberal framework Milbank so stridently critiques. This article attempts to reconcile Milbank's theological critique of secular liberalism with the idea of religious freedom by applying Milbank's theology and the law of love to liberal notions of public discourse for the purpose of redeeming and transforming that discourse. This redeemed “liberalism” provides a framework for persuasion to the Good by recognizing that all public positions (including secularism) are ultimately faith positions, and advocates a discourse governed by the law of love to produce genuine religious freedom that paradoxically transcends and fulfils the liberal ideals that secular liberalism proclaims but can never attain.

Drawing on a qualitative study conducted with both individuals who have been shunned from the Jehovah’s Witnesses community and those who were in a position to shun others, the authors identify areas of development within the Serious Crime Act 2015 and propose that there is scope to interpret the law broadly to include instances of people shunned from the Jehovah’s Witnesses community.

James Baldwin’s autobiographical essay “Equal in Paris” is a perceptive and often amusing account of the American writer’s first visit to Paris. An aspiring novelist who left America in rage over his experience of the country’s injustice and contempt toward Black Americans, Baldwin is acutely aware of racial prejudice in majority white societies. He tells of his experience of staying in a dilapidated hotel, of being wrongly accused of theft and then imprisoned in a Paris jail for more than a week over Christmas. Baldwin’s astute observations of Parisian life and its institutions, show how as a Black American, he struggles to understand this new cultural environment which like most Western societies, has its own form of racism. But this is also a story of an artist’s search for a new intellectual home where he can breathe freely and write. His new friendships with other artists and observations about cosmopolitan European life, allow him to assess what it means to be an American in Paris. This includes exploring those social attitudes that divide America and Europe and those that are universal.

The article challenges the fashionable but finally unsupportable opinion in political and academic circles that there exists no compelling, unitary, universally resonant moral and legal justification of human rights. The argument is intimated by two overlooked passages in the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that presuppose the right of self-defense against arbitrary force, understood as both a moral and legal concept, and as relevant both to personal and collective life. It shows how the logic of defensive force underlies the three formative human rights instruments: the UDHR, and the two covenants on political, legal, economic, social, and cultural rights. The underlying claim is that good reasons of a particular kind are required to justify any use of force, a claim that makes perfect sense against the backdrop of the atrocities committed by the German fascists and their allies in the mid-twentieth century. The article also refers to compelling, if preliminary, evidence of the widespread cross-cultural acceptance of the moral and legal right of self-defense, suggesting a basis for the worldwide comprehensibility and appeal of human-rights language.

Through a number of profound studies the Honorable John T. Noonan Jr. (on Scholastic Analysis of Usury, on Contraception. A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and the Canonists, on Abortion and marriage tribunals) has made visible how relevant the study of the historical context is for any scientific approach to burning issues of “natural law.” What was said by Christian churches on ethical questions makes sense for us only if we give full attention to the historical context. This is also a principle for the study of ethical questions in the Bible. While the biblical scholars concentrate mainly on what a teaching meant in illo tempore hermeneutics turns its main attention to the present contest of reflexions.

The role of sharing experience and reflexion so central in natural law questions, as Noonan sees it, is also central for the worldwide ecumenical learning community of all Christian churches. And this is for the Christian churches an absolute condition for their dialogue with all people of our time; for Christians a prerequisite for their becoming light for the world, salt for the earth.

Filiation among Muslims in India is governed by Muslim personal law, a largely uncodified corpus of key Islamic legal treatises that has subsequently been interpreted and applied through the Common Law frame of British colonial courts and the post-Independence Indian judicial system by virtue of the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act 1937. Muslim personal law recognizes only legitimate filiation resulting from a valid or irregular marriage, barring illegitimate children from maintenance and intestate succession and prohibiting adoption. However, a number of legislative enactments have modified key aspects of the law of filiation among Muslims: shifting the presumption of legitimacy arising from a valid marriage to the time of the wedding, rather than the time of conception; invalidating the doctrine of dormant fetus; and lifting certain disabilities incurred from illegitimacy. Further, although adoption based on customary law is somewhat common in India and has been recognized by courts, its effect among Muslims has tended only to lift the bar to paternal succession and seldom creates filiation with the adoptive family. Notwithstanding, following the enactment of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2000 and its subsequent amendments, an optional secular legal framework for adoption is now available to Muslim prospective parents. The procedure set forth by the Act is nonetheless unwieldly and implementation faces the very practical difficulties of the state in managing and protecting the vast number of destitute and abandoned children in India, for the most part with an unknown filiation.

What is the role of the constitutional promise of freedom of religion in late twentieth century America? As we enter the third century of life under the Constitution, the answer to this question is not clear, for the place of religion in the American polity has yet to be clearly demarcated. Consider a seemingly simple case. Mrs. Frances Quaring, a Nebraska farm housewife, believes that the Second Commandment prohibits her from having her photograph taken or from carrying or using photographs. The state of Nebraska, however, requires that applicants for a driver's license have their photographs taken and affixed to the license. The state prohibits driving without a valid driver's license. Thus, by state law Mrs. Quaring is denied that primary instrument of freedom and mobility in modern America— use of the automobile—because of her religious beliefs. Is Mrs. Quaring's mobility protected by the Constitutional guaranty of freedom of religion? The Supreme Court doesn't know. Five years ago it split four to four, and was thus unable to decide the case.

When I was a child my family had a cabin in the southern Sierra Nevadas. A rocky, snow-fed creek ran at the edge of the property and often, when it wasn't warm enough yet to wade, my brother and I would guide board boats down the small cascade above our “beach,” trying to find a path through the rapids that wouldn't capsize our crafts. To do so, we had to learn the easiest paths through the white water, but also had to judge the hidden turbulence under the seemingly still waters in the various pools and eddies along the way. To me, this childhood practice provides a perfect metaphor for the genealogical work of Michel Foucault, work that enriches our understanding of the modern world by following, not the mainstream of historical landmarks, but rather the hidden textual currents that only reveal the full force of their power much further down the stream of time.

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports … let it simply be asked where is the security for prosperity, for reputation, for life— if the sense of religious obligation desert … and let us with caution indulge the proposition that morality can be maintained without religion. George Washington—Farewell Address

There is often a message in a title. The title chosen for the Symposium, “The Religious Foundations of Civil Rights Law,” is no exception. Though the initial impression of its meaning will vary in accordance with the interests of the individual reader, the basic message of the Symposium is a simple one: law and religion are fundamentally related.

With the publication of After Virtue in 1981, Alasdair Maclntyre revolutionized the study of post-Enlightenment moral philosophy by insisting that it repent of its current pretensions to a view from eternity and confess its temporal roots in the long and motley history of human reflection about the good life. Almost a quarter of a century earlier, John T. Noonan, Jr., a young Harvard-trained legal scholar who possessed a doctorate in philosophy from Catholic University, had waged a similar battle against the widespread misconception of the medieval concept of usury as monolithic, self-contained, and immutable.

Working with medieval authors who were themselves largely insensitive to the idea of historicity, writing in the context of a pre-Vatican II Catholicism still imbued with the abstract and ahistorical spirit of nineteenth century neo-Thomism, Noonan demonstrated in his first book that the concept of usury was in fact a fusion of concrete theological, ethical, economic, and legal concerns which were not stagnant, but organically developing. In so doing, he gave Catholic Christianity a more adequate conception of its past. More than that, he gestured optimistically toward its future. Tracing how the absolute prohibition of usury, defined as any lending of money at interest, was circumscribed, attenuated, and finally abandoned by succeeding generations of moral theologians and canon lawyers, Noonan underscored that the Church could and did change its mind about important moral issues which were held to implicate unalterable strictures of the natural law. Revealing that an increased willingness on the part of moralists to acknowledge that moral experience of Christians professionally involved in the practices of commerce and banking had fueled the evolution of the usury doctrine in past centuries, Noonan nourished the hope for a stronger voice of lay experience in ecclesial discussions of moral issues throughout the years to come.