Law As Religion, Religion As Law

Description

The conventional approach to law and religion assumes that these are competing domains, which raises questions about the freedom of, and from, religion; alternate commitments of religion and human rights; and respective jurisdictions of civil and religious courts. This volume moves beyond this competitive paradigm to consider law and religion as overlapping and interrelated frameworks that structure the social order, arguing that law and religion share similar properties and have a symbiotic relationship. Moreover, many legal systems exhibit religious characteristics, informing their notions of authority, precedent, rituals and canonical texts, and most religions invoke legal concepts or terminology. The contributors address this blurring of law and religion in the contexts of political theology, secularism, church-state conflicts, and the foundational idea of divine law. Cover Half-title page Title page Copyright page Contents List of Contributors Introduction A | Sanctification and Secularization 1 | Desanctification of Law and the Problem of Absolutes 2 | The Paradox of Human Rights Discourse and the Jewish Legal Tradition 3 | Sovereign Imaginaries: Visualizing the Sacred Foundation of Law’s Authority B | Legal-Religious Language 4 | Dat: From Law to Religion: The Transformation of a Formative Term in Modern Times 5 | Law As Religion, Religion As Law: Halakhah from a Semiotic Point of View 6 | Canonicity As a Defining Feature of Legal and Religious Discourse: A Programmatic Essay C | Legal-Theological Roots 7 | Exceptional Grace: Religion As the Sovereign Suspension of Law 8 | A Bad Man Theory of Religious Law (Numbers 15:30–31 and Its Afterlife) 9 | Soviet Law and Political Religion 10 | International Law as Evangelism D | Religious Conceptions of Law 11 | “Enjoin Them upon Your Children to Keep” (Deuteronomy 32:46): Law as Commandment and Legacy, or, Robert Cover Meets Midrash 12 | “Between Man and God” and “Between Man and His Fellow”: Categories in Polemical Context 13 | Christian Feasts and Administration of Roman Justice in Late Antiquity E | Law in Formation: Religious Perspectives 14 | Law as a Problematic Aspect of Religion: Paul’s Skepticism in a Broader Jewish Context 15 | When Law Meets Theology: Legality and Revelation in the Jewish, Islamic, and Zoroastrian Traditions in the Abbasid Period