Law As Religion, Religion As Law

"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. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core." 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 "The problem of absolutes" refers to the difficulty of grounding and defending absolute prohibitions in a legal system that is rationalized on the basis of means-ends rationality. (An example might be the difficulty in identifying an absolute prohibition on torture that is not susceptible to being reinterpreted, read down, or negotiated away.) In the present paper, I associate this difficulty in the first instance with Max Weber's account of the rationalization of law and the distancing of law from any sense of sacred or transcendent obligation. But other developments need to be considered as well. I argue that the problem is as much about morality as it is about law. The two-law and morality-develop together in a complementary way, and the problem of legal absolutes tends to be matched by a corresponding difficulty with moral absolutes, just as the desanctification of law tends to be matched by a desanctification of morality"-- Provided by publisher "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"-- Provided by the publisher