Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Varieties of Legal Secularism

The desirability of global extension of the rule of law is currently being promoted by political actors across the ideological spectrum. At times, rhetorical evocation of the rule of law takes on a transcendent Utopian glow—as of an entire philosophy and practice sufficient for the peaceful coexistence of humankind. Universal law as the successor, one might say, to universal religion. This is a somewhat startling image for those of us who are lawyers—or who study law—and find it as violent, as historically messy, and as genealogically compromised, as any other human institution. Yet, the rule of law as the very essence of the secular, the a-cultural, the a-political, continues to operate in many places as a stand-in for the last best hope for mankind.

Normative pluralism: Islam, religion and law in the twenty-first century

Abstract Four new books on Islam and law provide the occasion for reflection on legal and religious pluralism. Bringing together a more nuanced and complex understanding of religion — one not determined by Enlightenment ideologies of separation — and of law — one also freed of Enlightenment notions of positivism and secularism — provide opportunities for ways to re-think the cultures of normative pluralism. John Bowen, Islam, Law, and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning (American title: Entangled Commands), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, xviC289 pp.,

Religion Under Bureaucracy: The u.s. Case

70 ISBN 0 521 82482 6. Lawrence Rosen, The Culture of Islam: Changing Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002, xviiC230 pp.,

FORUM: Mark deWolfe Howe, The Garden and the Wilderness Introduction

24 ISBN 0 226 72613 4. W.A.R. Shadid, and P.S. van Koningsveld, eds., Intercultural Relations and Religious Authorities: Muslims in the European Union. Leuven, Peeters, 2002, viiC211 pp., €32 (paperback) ISBN 90 429 1089 5. W.A.R. Shadid, and P.S. van Koningsveld, eds., Religious Freedom and the Neutrality of the State: The Position of Islam in the European Union, Leuven, Peeters, 2002, 242 pp., €32 (paperback) ISBN 90 429 1157 3.

Using Legal Materials in Teaching Religion

This article outlines a shift in u.s. law about religion from constitutionally enforced separation to bureaucratic management of a naturalized religion. Administration of the chaplaincy of the Veterans Administration is used to illustrate this shift. Chaplains hired for government jobs such as those at the va are generally required to have three credentials: the Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree from an accredited institution, a prescribed number of cpe (Clinical Pastoral Education) credits, and an ecclesiastical endorsement. Each of these credentials originated within mostly Protestant institutions but all have adapted over the last half century or so to function in a bureaucratic “multi-faith context.” The new “spiritual governance” exercised through the web of public-private partnerships that administer pastoral care is built on a human anthropology that assumes that humans are naturally spiritual, a governance that might be understood as a new form of religious “establishment.”

Religion, Law and the Construction of Identities

Mark deWolfe Howes classic, The Garden and the Wilderness: Religion and Government in American Constitutional History , was published in 1965. Notwithstanding the many subsequent judicial and scholarly developments in First Amendment religion clause jurisprudence, this slim volume remains among the best efforts to consider seriously the interrelated histories of law and religion in the United States. Beautifully written and economical in its expression, Howes book is often cited but less often carefully read. Unlike many who write about the religion clauses, Howe understood the deeply contingent nature of the dependence of religion and law one upon the other.

Competing Theories of Religion and Law in the Supreme Court of the United States: An Hasidic Case

This note argues for the importance of using primary legal sources, trial transcripts, opinions, law codes, and so forth, in teaching religion. The advantages of using legal documents in the religious studies classroom include: highlighting the importance of church/state issues, the existential givenness of law for religion; serving as mini-ethnographies, a slice-of-life view of religion; and, displaying a range of voices about a particular event, tradition, or idea. The note also describes two possible courses, an introductory course in American religion and a seminar in religion and law, listing recommended sample materials and showing how legal documents could be used in the classroom.

The Impossibility of Religious Freedom

This introduction sets the academic and historical context for the four articles that follow. It considers how the modern legal disestablishment of religion has changed both religion and law and the nature of the interaction between them. It further argues that there has been insufficient academic attention given to the effect of disestablishment on both religion and the discourse about religion in modern secular society.

Prison Religion: Faith-Based Reform and the Constitution

The meaning and application of the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution are currently a matter of intense and increasingly intractable public debate. The academic study of religion can make a positive contribution to this debate by inviting its participants into a conversation about human religion that is already struggling with problems of definition and of language and that wishes to affirm the existence and importance of human religion without establishing a particular definition of religion, without unconsciously theologizing. A close examination of the legal debate can, in turn, serve the purposes of scholars of religion. The politically charged context of First Amendment jurisprudence provides an interesting laboratory in which to test theories of religion.