Abstract Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1930–2019) was one of Germany’s foremost postwar legal scholars. He coined or popularized key terms and ideas that have left their mark on postwar German political debate to an extent matched by only few, from the chain of legitimation to the concept of the constitution as an ordering frame, the importance of the idea of subsidiarity in the European Union’s political competency, and his insistence that society must continuously work toward agreement on the things that cannot be voted on: the ultimate agreements in society that lie beyond the ballot box. Böckenförde was a lifelong commentator on Catholic affairs in Germany and involved in several important inner-Catholic reform initiatives. At the age of thirty-one, he became known to a wider German public with an article that presented a critical historical appraisal of the role of the Catholic Church under National Socialism. While still a postdoc, he co-authored a widely publicized critique of Jesuit Gustav Gundlach’s justification on theological grounds of a war of nuclear deterrence. In 1968, he was the first to publish a German edition of De Libertate Religiosa, the final declaration of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), and provided an authoritative commentary.
{"title":"Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde: Scholar of Law, Religion, and Democracy","authors":"M. Künkler, Tine Stein","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2022.43","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2022.43","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1930–2019) was one of Germany’s foremost postwar legal scholars. He coined or popularized key terms and ideas that have left their mark on postwar German political debate to an extent matched by only few, from the chain of legitimation to the concept of the constitution as an ordering frame, the importance of the idea of subsidiarity in the European Union’s political competency, and his insistence that society must continuously work toward agreement on the things that cannot be voted on: the ultimate agreements in society that lie beyond the ballot box. Böckenförde was a lifelong commentator on Catholic affairs in Germany and involved in several important inner-Catholic reform initiatives. At the age of thirty-one, he became known to a wider German public with an article that presented a critical historical appraisal of the role of the Catholic Church under National Socialism. While still a postdoc, he co-authored a widely publicized critique of Jesuit Gustav Gundlach’s justification on theological grounds of a war of nuclear deterrence. In 1968, he was the first to publish a German edition of De Libertate Religiosa, the final declaration of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), and provided an authoritative commentary.","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"7 1","pages":"501 - 507"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85995957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"JLR volume 37 issue 3 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2022.54","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2022.54","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"10 1","pages":"f1 - f5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72622668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract As a former diplomat currently engaged in praxis-oriented research and teaching, I examine Böckenförde’s importance in the broad context of the debate on the future of Europe. First, I trace some of Böckenförde’s specific thoughts on the development of the European Union, notably concerning trends that impact on the shared “sense of belonging” that underpins deliberative democracy. Second, accepting Böckenförde’s crucial distinction between the granular provisions of the law and an underlying ethos or sense of direction, I argue that the Böckenförde paradox is strongly supported at the roots of our culture by ancient Greek political thought, in ways that can help us develop our thinking in new directions—involving Aristotelian conceptions of orientation, community (koinōnia), and discernment. Finally, I address the challenges currently facing the European Union, taking as my point of departure President Emmanuel Macron’s evocation of the “contribution which a living Europe can bring to civilisation.” The political thought of Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, illuminated by conceptions of orientation, community, and discernment, can help to prepare us for a future intercultural dialogue in the service of peace.
{"title":"The Böckenförde Dictum, Aristotle’s Koinōnia, and the Debate on the Future of Europe","authors":"P. McDonagh","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2022.40","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2022.40","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract As a former diplomat currently engaged in praxis-oriented research and teaching, I examine Böckenförde’s importance in the broad context of the debate on the future of Europe. First, I trace some of Böckenförde’s specific thoughts on the development of the European Union, notably concerning trends that impact on the shared “sense of belonging” that underpins deliberative democracy. Second, accepting Böckenförde’s crucial distinction between the granular provisions of the law and an underlying ethos or sense of direction, I argue that the Böckenförde paradox is strongly supported at the roots of our culture by ancient Greek political thought, in ways that can help us develop our thinking in new directions—involving Aristotelian conceptions of orientation, community (koinōnia), and discernment. Finally, I address the challenges currently facing the European Union, taking as my point of departure President Emmanuel Macron’s evocation of the “contribution which a living Europe can bring to civilisation.” The political thought of Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, illuminated by conceptions of orientation, community, and discernment, can help to prepare us for a future intercultural dialogue in the service of peace.","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"1 1","pages":"547 - 559"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78606515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
’ s excellent Modern Protestantism and Positive Law: The Contours of a Continental Theological Tradition introduces anglophone audiences to the theological and ethical reflections onlaw ofeight Germanand Swiss Protestant theologians: KarlBarth, Brunner, Ellul, Erik Wolf, Thielicke, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Wolfgang Huber, and Hartmut Kreß. Some of these thinkers — Barth, Brunner, Ellul, Thielicke, and Pannenberg — will be familiar in some degree to anglophone scholars interested in law, ethics, and theology, while others whose works appear mostly in German will be less well known.
{"title":"Modern Protestantism and Positive Law: The Contours of a Continental Theological Tradition. By Bradley Shingleton. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2019. Pp. 274. $53.00 (cloth); $33.00 (paper); $33.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781498245036.","authors":"D. Opderbeck","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2022.32","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2022.32","url":null,"abstract":"’ s excellent Modern Protestantism and Positive Law: The Contours of a Continental Theological Tradition introduces anglophone audiences to the theological and ethical reflections onlaw ofeight Germanand Swiss Protestant theologians: KarlBarth, Brunner, Ellul, Erik Wolf, Thielicke, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Wolfgang Huber, and Hartmut Kreß. Some of these thinkers — Barth, Brunner, Ellul, Thielicke, and Pannenberg — will be familiar in some degree to anglophone scholars interested in law, ethics, and theology, while others whose works appear mostly in German will be less well known.","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"1 1","pages":"576 - 579"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73181448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
For the past hundred years, many Americans have thought of laws primarily as statutes passed by legislatures. As Andrew Forsyth demonstrates in his wonderful book, Common Law and Natural Law in America: From the Puritans to the Legal Realists, this has not always been the case. Formost of this nation’s history, students and practitioners of lawhave been interested in the natural law and the common law, both of which were understood to be grounded in Christianity. Forsyth’s volume provides a sweeping history of common law and natural law in America from the Puritans to the legal realists. He ably shows that until the twentieth century, most attorneys took natural law and the common law seriously, although he recognizes that the ways that each type of law is understood has shifted throughout the nation’s history. By “common law,” Forsythmeans “the system of laws in England and the United States in which laws—whatever their seeming source in a constitution, statutes, orders, or cases—are made explicit through interpretations by judges; judicial decision in individual cases expounded and develop the law... . Far from the creation of judges, in our seventeenththrough early twentieth-century story, America common law was understood as deeper rooted: the custom of the people perhaps, or even nothing less than common reason” (xi–xii). The common law was discovered, not created, by judges, and it was intimately connected to natural law. The latter is “universal morality naturally accessible to all rational people[,]”which “is grounded in—variously—the mind or will of God, nature, or human reason” (xi, Forsyth’s emphasis). In America, this tradition was almost always understood in a Christian context. Forsyth’s opening chapter, on Puritan natural law, is probably the volume’s most important contribution to contemporary academic debates. Far too many scholars continue to accept the caricature of the Puritans as narrow-minded, anti-intellectual religious zealots who rejected the authority of reason and natural law and who viewed all truth as emanating from the Bible. Forsyth acknowledges that the Puritans did not embrace a Scholastic version of natural law, but he argues that they accepted a Protestant version of natural law. The Puritans believed that humans are created in the image of God, and they understood “rationality as the content of the imago Dei” (3–4, Forsyth’s emphasis). They taught about the
{"title":"Common Law and Natural Law in America: From the Puritans to the Legal Realists.By Andrew Forsyth. Pp. 156. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. $116.00 (cloth); $29.99 (paper); $88.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781108476973.","authors":"M. Hall","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2022.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2022.30","url":null,"abstract":"For the past hundred years, many Americans have thought of laws primarily as statutes passed by legislatures. As Andrew Forsyth demonstrates in his wonderful book, Common Law and Natural Law in America: From the Puritans to the Legal Realists, this has not always been the case. Formost of this nation’s history, students and practitioners of lawhave been interested in the natural law and the common law, both of which were understood to be grounded in Christianity. Forsyth’s volume provides a sweeping history of common law and natural law in America from the Puritans to the legal realists. He ably shows that until the twentieth century, most attorneys took natural law and the common law seriously, although he recognizes that the ways that each type of law is understood has shifted throughout the nation’s history. By “common law,” Forsythmeans “the system of laws in England and the United States in which laws—whatever their seeming source in a constitution, statutes, orders, or cases—are made explicit through interpretations by judges; judicial decision in individual cases expounded and develop the law... . Far from the creation of judges, in our seventeenththrough early twentieth-century story, America common law was understood as deeper rooted: the custom of the people perhaps, or even nothing less than common reason” (xi–xii). The common law was discovered, not created, by judges, and it was intimately connected to natural law. The latter is “universal morality naturally accessible to all rational people[,]”which “is grounded in—variously—the mind or will of God, nature, or human reason” (xi, Forsyth’s emphasis). In America, this tradition was almost always understood in a Christian context. Forsyth’s opening chapter, on Puritan natural law, is probably the volume’s most important contribution to contemporary academic debates. Far too many scholars continue to accept the caricature of the Puritans as narrow-minded, anti-intellectual religious zealots who rejected the authority of reason and natural law and who viewed all truth as emanating from the Bible. Forsyth acknowledges that the Puritans did not embrace a Scholastic version of natural law, but he argues that they accepted a Protestant version of natural law. The Puritans believed that humans are created in the image of God, and they understood “rationality as the content of the imago Dei” (3–4, Forsyth’s emphasis). They taught about the","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"29 1","pages":"569 - 572"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81097859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The history and influence of the School of Salamanca is attracting the attention of researchers from very different branches of knowledge and from a very wide variety of countries around the world. Broaching this subject invites one to reflect on both the unity of knowledge and the important role that theology plays in a secularized world. In this short essay, I discuss four recently published works that show the global scope of interest in Spanish Scholasticism in general and the School of Salamanca in particular. The first, The School of Salamanca: A Case of Global Knowledge, was edited by Thomas Duve, Jose Luis Egío, and Christiane Birr in coordination of the Max Planck Institute (2021). The second work, ¿Qué es la Escuela de Salamanca?, was edited by Simona Langella and Rafael Ramis-Barceló (2021). The third work is a recent thematic compendium on Spanish Scholasticism edited by Harald E. Braun, Erik De Bom, and Paolo Astorri (2022). Finally, I discuss David Lantigua’s monograph, Infidels and Empires in a New World Order: Early Modern Spanish Contributions to International Legal Thought (2020).
{"title":"Rethinking the School of Salamanca","authors":"R. Domingo","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2022.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2022.28","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The history and influence of the School of Salamanca is attracting the attention of researchers from very different branches of knowledge and from a very wide variety of countries around the world. Broaching this subject invites one to reflect on both the unity of knowledge and the important role that theology plays in a secularized world. In this short essay, I discuss four recently published works that show the global scope of interest in Spanish Scholasticism in general and the School of Salamanca in particular. The first, The School of Salamanca: A Case of Global Knowledge, was edited by Thomas Duve, Jose Luis Egío, and Christiane Birr in coordination of the Max Planck Institute (2021). The second work, ¿Qué es la Escuela de Salamanca?, was edited by Simona Langella and Rafael Ramis-Barceló (2021). The third work is a recent thematic compendium on Spanish Scholasticism edited by Harald E. Braun, Erik De Bom, and Paolo Astorri (2022). Finally, I discuss David Lantigua’s monograph, Infidels and Empires in a New World Order: Early Modern Spanish Contributions to International Legal Thought (2020).","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"14 1","pages":"560 - 568"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86913446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How is the sovereignty of God to be achieved in an era of mass politics? This question haunted the leading thinkers of political Islam as the nation-state and popular sovereignty replaced the ancient pairing of king and priest. Andrew March ’ s The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought is an incisive examination of the intellectual feats of three major Islamists as they grappled with this problem: Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903 – 1979), who founded the Jama ‘ at-i Islami in British India and set the tone for Islamist politics in South Asia and beyond; Sayyid Qutb (1906 – 1966), a radicalized ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt who was tortured and executed by Gamal Abd al-Nasser; and Rashid al-Ghannushi of Tunisia (1941 – ), co-founder of the Ennahdha Party that led the drafting of Tunisia ’ s post-Arab Spring constitution in 2014. With secular liberalism in their crosshairs, these three men set out to define a perfectionist mass politics of Islam, an amalgam of divine and popular sovereignty that March aptly calls “ high utopian Islamism ” (75). This was “ the caliphate of man ” of March ’ s title, a rule of the pious masses animated by an “ aspiration to deep legality ” (222). He locates brief but forceful articulation of Islamist politics that was perfectionist yet inclusive 1). Space seemed to open, for a heady moment at not for God and the people, but also for believers and others. March ’ s counterintuitive argument: the late twentieth-century of and the of democratic
在大众政治的时代，上帝的主权如何实现?随着民族国家和人民主权取代了古老的国王和牧师组合，这个问题困扰着政治伊斯兰教的主要思想家。安德鲁·马奇(Andrew March)的《人类的哈里发:现代伊斯兰思想中的人民主权》(The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought)对三位主要伊斯兰主义者在解决这一问题时的知识成就进行了深刻的考察:阿布·阿拉·毛杜迪(Abul Ala Mawdudi, 1903 - 1979)，他在英属印度创立了Jama ' at-i Islami，为南亚及其他地区的伊斯兰政治定下了基调;赛义德·库特布(Sayyid Qutb, 1906 - 1966)，埃及穆斯林兄弟会的激进理论家，被纳赛尔拷打并处决;Rashid al-Ghannushi，突尼斯人(1941 -)，复兴运动党(Ennahdha Party)联合创始人，该党在2014年领导起草了突尼斯后阿拉伯之春宪法。在世俗自由主义的瞄准下，这三个人开始定义一种完美主义的伊斯兰大众政治，一种神圣主权和人民主权的混合体，被March恰当地称为“高度乌托邦伊斯兰主义”(75)。这就是三月所称的“人类的哈里发国”，是一种由“对深度合法性的渴望”所激励的虔诚群众的统治(222)。他找到了简短而有力的伊斯兰政治表达，既完美主义又包容。在一个令人兴奋的时刻，空间似乎是开放的，不仅为上帝和人民，也为信徒和其他人。马奇反直觉的论点:二十世纪晚期的民主主义和民主主义
{"title":"The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought. By Andrew F. March. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. 272. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN: 9780674987838.","authors":"A. Moin","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2022.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2022.29","url":null,"abstract":"How is the sovereignty of God to be achieved in an era of mass politics? This question haunted the leading thinkers of political Islam as the nation-state and popular sovereignty replaced the ancient pairing of king and priest. Andrew March ’ s The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought is an incisive examination of the intellectual feats of three major Islamists as they grappled with this problem: Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903 – 1979), who founded the Jama ‘ at-i Islami in British India and set the tone for Islamist politics in South Asia and beyond; Sayyid Qutb (1906 – 1966), a radicalized ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt who was tortured and executed by Gamal Abd al-Nasser; and Rashid al-Ghannushi of Tunisia (1941 – ), co-founder of the Ennahdha Party that led the drafting of Tunisia ’ s post-Arab Spring constitution in 2014. With secular liberalism in their crosshairs, these three men set out to define a perfectionist mass politics of Islam, an amalgam of divine and popular sovereignty that March aptly calls “ high utopian Islamism ” (75). This was “ the caliphate of man ” of March ’ s title, a rule of the pious masses animated by an “ aspiration to deep legality ” (222). He locates brief but forceful articulation of Islamist politics that was perfectionist yet inclusive 1). Space seemed to open, for a heady moment at not for God and the people, but also for believers and others. March ’ s counterintuitive argument: the late twentieth-century of and the of democratic","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"23 1","pages":"573 - 575"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90891032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Athens and Jerusalem: God, Humans, and Nature. By David Novak. Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 2019. Pp. 392. $129.00 (cloth); $51.00 (paper); $51.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781487506179.","authors":"David R. Blumenthal","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2022.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2022.8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"8 1","pages":"401 - 404"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80230428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract As one of the world’s only constitutions to recognize Theravada Buddhism as the state religion yet not include a religious exemption to the universal franchise for its monastic community, Cambodia’s Constitution stands out as an anomaly. This article traces the ways in which the realities of this remarkably inorganic approach to religion—enshrined in Cambodia’s Constitution in 1993, pursuant to a heavily internationalized peace process—have subsequently been shaped by debates occurring within Cambodia’s Buddhist institutions, rather than judicial ones. Drawing on data derived from archival research and a series of ethnographic interviews conducted during 2017 and 2018, I home in on decades-old debates about the voting rights of Cambodian monks to show how individual monks justify their participation in electoral politics through a mixture of both secular and religious arguments. The on-the-ground reality of the extension of the franchise to the Buddhist clergy in Cambodia, in other words, is ultimately shaped by an ongoing contestation within the sangha, with proponents and opponents of a religious exception grounding their arguments simultaneously in constitutional and theological vocabularies. The article sheds light on a singular constitutional arrangement—a unique relationship between religious and state institutions that has so far received relatively little scholarly attention—and highlights an instance of constitutional practice that occurs beyond the reach of both judicial and other state institutions.
{"title":"Saffron Suffrage: Buddhist Monks and Constitutional Politics in Cambodia","authors":"B. Lawrence","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2022.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2022.16","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract As one of the world’s only constitutions to recognize Theravada Buddhism as the state religion yet not include a religious exemption to the universal franchise for its monastic community, Cambodia’s Constitution stands out as an anomaly. This article traces the ways in which the realities of this remarkably inorganic approach to religion—enshrined in Cambodia’s Constitution in 1993, pursuant to a heavily internationalized peace process—have subsequently been shaped by debates occurring within Cambodia’s Buddhist institutions, rather than judicial ones. Drawing on data derived from archival research and a series of ethnographic interviews conducted during 2017 and 2018, I home in on decades-old debates about the voting rights of Cambodian monks to show how individual monks justify their participation in electoral politics through a mixture of both secular and religious arguments. The on-the-ground reality of the extension of the franchise to the Buddhist clergy in Cambodia, in other words, is ultimately shaped by an ongoing contestation within the sangha, with proponents and opponents of a religious exception grounding their arguments simultaneously in constitutional and theological vocabularies. The article sheds light on a singular constitutional arrangement—a unique relationship between religious and state institutions that has so far received relatively little scholarly attention—and highlights an instance of constitutional practice that occurs beyond the reach of both judicial and other state institutions.","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"17 1","pages":"261 - 285"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82651631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging Joseph David offers an erudite and duly nuanced analysis of Judaism as the faith of a people bound by kinship and a faith grounded in religious law, of consanguineous and spiritual belonging. In the premodern period and prior to the onset of secularization, the relation of kinship and spiritual belonging was determined by religious law in dialogue with evolving social realities. With the eclipse of religious authority, as David astutely notes, the traditional codes of Jewish belonging were desacralized, allowing for competing ethical and social values, and visions of the good. To remedy the consequent fracturing of Jewish affiliation, David calls for a revalorization of Jewish kinship, focused on familial affection and mutual regard, which he celebrates as an ethos of care. To cast the ethos of care in purely phenomenological terms, however, courts a blurring of the ethical and axiological boundaries between ideological communities—Left and Right—that offer bonds of mutual care, solidarity, and distinctive visions of the good. Moreover, as regards Judaism, one might find contemporary institutional expressions of Jewish kinship, religious or otherwise, to be incompatible with one’s understanding of the tradition’s teachings and values and choose not to belong.
{"title":"A Gentle Caveat: The Slippery Slope of Familial Belonging","authors":"P. Mendes-Flohr","doi":"10.1017/jlr.2022.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2022.5","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging Joseph David offers an erudite and duly nuanced analysis of Judaism as the faith of a people bound by kinship and a faith grounded in religious law, of consanguineous and spiritual belonging. In the premodern period and prior to the onset of secularization, the relation of kinship and spiritual belonging was determined by religious law in dialogue with evolving social realities. With the eclipse of religious authority, as David astutely notes, the traditional codes of Jewish belonging were desacralized, allowing for competing ethical and social values, and visions of the good. To remedy the consequent fracturing of Jewish affiliation, David calls for a revalorization of Jewish kinship, focused on familial affection and mutual regard, which he celebrates as an ethos of care. To cast the ethos of care in purely phenomenological terms, however, courts a blurring of the ethical and axiological boundaries between ideological communities—Left and Right—that offer bonds of mutual care, solidarity, and distinctive visions of the good. Moreover, as regards Judaism, one might find contemporary institutional expressions of Jewish kinship, religious or otherwise, to be incompatible with one’s understanding of the tradition’s teachings and values and choose not to belong.","PeriodicalId":44042,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Law and Religion","volume":"60 1","pages":"390 - 392"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89301032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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