After Secular Law (The Cultural Lives of Law) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804775362 ISBN 13: 9780804775366

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Many today place great hope in law as a vehicle for the transformation of society and accept that law is autonomous, universal, and above all, secular. Yet recent scholarship has called into question the simplistic narrative of a separation between law and religion and blurred the boundaries between these two categories, enabling new accounts of their relation that do not necessarily either collapse them together or return law to a religious foundation.

This work gives special attention to the secularism of law, exploring how law became secular, the phenomenology of the legal secular, and the challenges that lingering religious formations and other aspects of globalization pose for modern law's self-understanding. Bringing together scholars with a variety of perspectives and orientations, it provides a deeper understanding of the interconnections between law and religion and the unexpected histories and anthropologies of legal secularism in a globalizing modernity.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is Professor of Law and Director of the Law, Religion, and Culture Program at SUNY, Buffalo. Robert A. Yelle is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Memphis. Mateo Taussig-Rubbo is Associate Professor of Law at SUNY, Buffalo.

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is Professor of Law and Director of the Law, Religion, and Culture Program at SUNY, Buffalo. Robert A. Yelle is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Memphis.Mateo Taussig-Rubbo is Associate Professor of Law at SUNY, Buffalo.

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After Secular Law

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7536-6

Contents

Contributors................................................................................................................................xiIntroduction WINNIFRED FALLERS SULLIVAN, ROBERT A. YELLE, AND MATEO TAUSSIG-RUBBO..........................................................11. Moses' Veil: Secularization as Christian Myth ROBERT A. YELLE...........................................................................232. Secular Law and the Realm of False Religion JAKOB DE ROOVER.............................................................................433. Assenting to the Law: Sacrifice and Punishment at the Dawn of Secularism JONATHAN SHEEHAN...............................................624. National Security and Secularization in the English Revolution of 1688 RACHEL WEIL......................................................805. "Intolerance of Intolerance" in the Unitarian Controversy: The Theology of Baker v. Fales STEPHANIE L. PHILLIPS.........................1016. The University and the Advent of the Academic Secular: The State's Management of Public Instruction TOMOKO MASUZAWA.....................1197. Stasiology: Political Theology and the Figure of the Sacrificial Enemy BANU BARGU.......................................................1408. Against Sovereign Impunity: The Political Theology of the International Criminal Court BRUCE ROSENSTOCK.................................1609. Sovereign Power and Secular Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State? HUSSEIN ALI AGRAMA..................................18110. The Ruse of Law: Legal Equality and the Problem of Citizenship in a Multireligious Sudan NOAH SALOMON..................................20011. The Religio-Secular Continuum: Reflections on the Religious Dimensions of Turkish Secularism MARKUS DRESSLER...........................22112. "The Spirits Were Always Watching": Buddhism, Secular Law, and Social Change in Thailand DAVID M. ENGEL................................24213. Secular Speech and Popular Passions: The Antinomies of Indian Secularism THOMAS BLOM HANSEN............................................26114. Courting Culture: Unexpected Relationships between Religion and Law in Contemporary Hawai'i GREG JOHNSON...............................28215. The Peculiar Stake U.S. Protestants Have in the Question of State Recognition of Same-Sex Marriages MARY ANNE CASE.....................30216. Sacred Property: Searching for Value in the Rubble of 9/11 MATEO TAUSSIG-RUBBO.........................................................32217. When Is Religion, Religion, and a Knife, a Knife—and Who Decides?: The Case of Denmark TIM JENSEN................................341Index.......................................................................................................................................365

Chapter One

Moses' Veil

Secularization as Christian Myth

ROBERT A. YELLE

The categorical distinctions between the two kingdoms and spheres, which were handled in a practical way in epochs which recognized the institutions of state and church, do not work any longer.... For the walls collapse and the spaces which were once distinct intermingle and penetrate each other, as in a labyrinthine architecture of light. —Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II

The "Great Separation"

The standard narrative of the birth of our age includes an account of the progressive extrication of the political domain from the clutches of religious fanaticism. Religion, in this narrative, functions as the evil Other, a monster the slaying, or rather taming, of which was one of the defining moments in the birth of the modern, liberal subject as Hero, as the champion of freedom and Enlightenment, in the sense in which Immanuel Kant defined that movement: as "man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity" under the "guidance of another," or "alien guidance." Kant's definition of Enlightenment as maturity or adulthood, as casting off the yoke of servitude to another, exchanging heteronomy for autonomy, parallels the charter myth of modern law, which describes a progressive growth of freedom, above all freedom of and from religion, following the European wars of religion that took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite periodic relapses into barbarism, this narrative affirms an irreversible progress. Never again will we return to the evil old days, when religion oppressed the individual conscience and became the cause of violence and war. According to a frequently repeated formula, secularism and religion are polar opposites, rather than close kin; religion is distinguished from secularism on the basis of its stubborn adherence to outmoded, superstitious, or barbaric practices; and the only possible outcome of this encounter is that eventually, in some bright future more or less distant, we shall all be converted to secularism, which abolishes false distinctions based upon religious particularities.

Mark Lilla has recently advanced his own version of this narrative of secularization, which he calls the "Great Separation," the conclusive severing of the connection between religion and politics supposedly effected by such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Lilla portrays this as a necessary and irrevocable step in the birth of the liberal order, and a precious legacy to be defended. He rejects attempts to reintroduce the consideration of modernity as a "political theology," in which law and politics have only apparently become separate from religion, but actually continue to be dependent on categories inherited from a theological past. Lilla's metaphor resembles Thomas Jefferson's "wall of separation," or even Roger Williams's "Garden and the Wilderness," in which church and state were similarly walled off for mutual protection. Good fences supposedly make good neighbors. The concept of political theology threatens this accommodation, by calling into question the religious neutrality of the secular state. Lilla's recommendation is that we should reinforce and recommit to the "Great Separation."

From my perspective, this would mean clinging more tightly to a historical narrative that has already been exposed as a theological myth. David Kennedy has noted that modern law's self-depiction as "that which has been able to differentiate and defeat religion, by inheritance and banishment ... repeat[s] in a secular key a practice of distinction that, recast as the separation of the sacred and the profane, seems the most central concern of religion itself." Indeed, Christianity arguably created a separation between the religious and political domains with its distinctions between the "Two Kingdoms (Cities, Swords)" and, even earlier, between Christian "grace" and Jewish "law." The original version of the "Great Separation" was the founding narrative of Christianity, which, according to Saint Paul, effected a fundamental break with its own Jewish past. Following Christ's redemptive sacrifice on the Cross, the laws that prescribed sacrifice and other rituals were ineffective as a means of salvation, and were abrogated. Religion was no longer a matter of law, but of grace; no longer of the flesh, but of spirit.

Not all law had been abrogated, of course. Later Christians divided the Mosaic laws into three categories: "moral" or...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804775362
• ISBN 13: 9780804775366
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 381
• Herausgeber: Sullivan Winnifred Fallers, Yelle Robert A., Taussig-rubbo Mateo
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland