bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
High and Late Medieval Scandinavia
Authors: Korpiola Mia
Published: August 2018

The region that later comprised the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden was Christianized between 900 and 1200. A change from oral to written laws apparently took place first in twelfth-century Norway and Iceland, although the surviving legal manuscripts are some centuries later. Danish provincial laws were compiled c.1200–50 and the Swedish provincial laws only later. In all three Scandinavian kingdoms, royal and ecclesiastical statutes preceded the compilation of provincial laws. Precocious legal unification of the realms of Norway and Sweden was reached by nationwide law in 1274 (Norway) and Sweden (c.1350), supplemented in both kingdoms by town laws. In Denmark, the provincial laws remained in force until the 1680s. Roman law influences came mostly through canon law. Continental legal influences were also transmitted from Germany (feudal and town law). The universities of Uppsala and Copenhagen (1470s) had relatively little impact, clerics mostly studying law at Continental universities.
Urban Law
Authors: Lück Heiner
Published: August 2018

The Saxon Mirror and the Magdeburg Law figure among the most important German cultural products in the legal sphere. The Magdeburg Law developed at the end of the twelfth century as the result of an unverifiable tenth-century mercantile law, suitable not only for merchants but also for the urban population. The Saxon Mirror was written between 1220 and 1235 as a fixation of Saxon land law. In complex processes of legal transfer, the Magdeburg Law and the Saxon Mirror merged into countless versions of Saxon-Magdeburg law, which local rulers, scribes, legal practitioners, and jurists adapted to local conditions. The chapter explains how this process occurred in Silesia, Poland, lands of the Teutonic Order, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and in cities such as Kulm, Thorn, Krakow, and Lemberg. In some of these regions of central and east central Europe, the impact of Saxon-Magdeburg law persisted for up to 700 years.
Extra-Legal and Legal Conflict Management among Long-Distance Traders (1250–1650)
Authors: Cordes Albrecht , Höhn Philipp
Published: August 2018

Pre-modern merchants faced the experience of legal pluralism and conflicting legal regimes when they traded over huge distances. This chapter suggests seeing this not as structural deficit as legal historians have done but as an opportunity, which enabled merchants to enforce their interests and shape their strategies. Merchants were often combining different strategies to enforce their interests. In the second part, the chapter focuses on the actors and their interests. Empirically, the assumed tension between legal professionals and economic actors seemed to have few consequences. Furthermore, it is shown that mercantile conflict regulation can only be analysed as a part of the social embeddedness of economics into religious and political frames. Thus, violence and long disputes were also integral for mercantile conflict regulation as for the pre-modern societies in general. By studying this embeddedness, the chapter criticizes current research based on new institutional economics from a historical-anthropological perspective.
Law and the Protestant Reformation
Authors: Witte John
Published: August 2018

The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation revolutionized not only theology and the Church, but also law and the state. Though divided into Lutheran, Anabaptist, Anglican, and Calvinist branches, the Reformation collectively broke the international rule of the medieval Church and its canon law, and permanently splintered Western Christendom into competing nations and regions. The Reformation also triggered a massive shift of power, property, and prerogative from the Church to the state. Protestant states now assumed new jurisdiction over numerous subjects and persons, and they gave new legal form to Protestant teachings. But these new Protestant laws also drew heavily on the medieval ius commune as well as on earlier biblical and Roman jurisprudence. This chapter analyses the new Protestant legal syntheses, with attention to the new laws of Church–state relations, religious and civil freedom, marriage and family law, education law, social welfare law, and accompanying changes in legal and political philosophy.
The Birth of European Legal History
Authors: Lesaffer Randall
Published: August 2018

The chapter explores the emergence of European legal history in the years after the Second World War through an analysis of Paul Koschaker’s seminal work, Europa und das römisches Recht. Whereas the rise of a European discourse of legal history gels with European integration, the chapter argues that its roots are rather to be found in Koschaker’s attempt to salvage the study of Roman private law from the crisis it had fallen into at German law schools during the interbellum. By highlighting the enduring role of the Roman legal experience for the formation of the European legal tradition, he hoped to give Roman law a new relevance for law students. The chapter further surveys the gradual widening of European legal history towards other subjects than Roman private law, in particular during the 1970s and 1980s.
English Law and its Expansion
Authors: MacMillan Ken
Published: August 2018

Early modern England was a legally pluralistic society. The laws of the Crown derived from its royal prerogative rights, which were based on Roman and common law. The Crown’s excessive use of prerogatives often came into conflict with the English Parliament and the royal courts of common law. This conflict resulted in constitutional crises throughout the seventeenth century and, ultimately, in the ‘Westminster system’ of government by 1800. Alongside the common law and its many courts operated several other brands of law, especially criminal, Roman, canon, and equity law, which were designed to adjudicate in areas where the common law proved insufficient, or when non-domestic matters were involved. These various brands of law were transported, by royal and later parliamentary authority, into the English empire. This transfer resulted in legal systems that reflected those used in England, while also respecting the unique character of individual settler societies.
The Law of the Welfare State
Authors: Aguilera-Barchet Bruno
Published: August 2018

The tremendous social inequalities provoked by the laissez-faire model of state led to the advent of the ‘Social Question’ and socialism, and finally to state intervention in social matters. First, during the interbellum period, in Soviet Russia, the Fascist and Nazi regimes, and only after 1945 in democratic states where a consolidated welfare state model developed, until in the 1980s its cost began to grow untenably, and governments started cutting taxes and reducing social spending. The welfare state has impacted European legal systems in crucial aspects like the ‘constitutionalization’ of social rights; the appearance of collective bargaining as a source of law; the creation of specific procedures to solve labour conflicts, as the mixed council of workers and employers or the creation of specific public social jurisdictions; and, finally, scholarly social law, that started in Weimar Germany, and later expanded to the UK and most European law schools.
The Law of Obligations
Authors: Lobban Michael
Published: August 2018

The Anglo-American law of obligations was profoundly reshaped in the two centuries after 1800, driven by social and economic changes, and changes in legal institutions and doctrines. In contract law, nineteenth-century jurists increasingly sought to put the rules of law into a coherent rational framework (inspired by continental models resting on will theory), though they soon found that this theory could not explain many contractual doctrines. In tort law, jurists were also divided over whether unifying principles underlying tort could be uncovered, with formalist efforts to find such principles being challenged by Realists who argued that tort was in effect ‘public law in disguise’. The quest for underlying principles was also pursued by scholars of unjust enrichment, first in the United States and subsequently in England; though as in the other areas of obligations, by the end of the twentieth century, there was no consensus on whether this was possible.
Communism and the Law
Authors: Gorlizki Yoram
Published: August 2018

In the early twentieth century Russia embarked on one of the most radical legal experiments ever undertaken in a modern state. The chapter describes this experiment, paying particular attention to the role of Bolshevik ideology in shaping the new socialist legal order. It then goes on to assess the fit between this legal order and the three institutional pillars of socialism (rule by a Leninist party, a predominance of state ownership of productive property, and a top-down system of bureaucratic coordination), suggesting that it was these pillars that gave Soviet law its most distinctive and enduring characteristic: a tendency for agencies of justice to be subsumed within an overarching system of central management. Finally the chapter considers the transplantation of socialist law to the states of Eastern Europe after the Second World War, examines efforts to reform the socialist legal system and assesses its legacy today.
Early Roman Law And The West
Authors: Monateri Pier Giuseppe
Published: August 2018

The aim of the chapter is to investigate how theories on the early stages of Roman law have been used to support the construction of a unitary Western legal tradition. These theories appear as projects of cultural hegemony through the pursuit of genealogies. The chapter proceeds by reconstructing the historical consciousness of the Western legal tradition, showing the emergence of a model based on the more or less explicit assumptions of Roman legal originalism and supremacy, and of its capacity for survival and renewal. The chapter concludes by jeopardizing these strategies and the project of a cultural dominance of the West in legal matters, and tries to undermine, or at least to raise a strong suspicion about, the standard received approach used to explain Roman institutions.
International Court of Justice
Authors: Ku Charlotte
Published: August 2018

This article traces the development of the International Court of Justice from the establishment of its predecessor in 1919, the Permanent Court of International Justice. The article explores the place of the ICJ in the international settlement of disputes including issues relating to the proliferation of international courts and tribunals; the selection and impartiality of judges; provisional measures; the willingness of states to accept the jurisdiction of the ICJ; compliance with the Court’s rulings; and where the ICJ has seen the greatest success in developing its jurisprudence. Specific attention is paid to the ICJ’s advisory and contentious jurisdictions. The article concludes with an assessment of its contribution to international law.
Secretary-General
Authors: Newman Edward
Published: August 2018

This chapter describes the evolution of the role of the UN Secretary-General in the context of international relations, paying particular attention to the historical origins of the office within the international civil service. It explores the challenges faced by the Secretary-General in seeking to act independently on behalf of the global interest, in a political environment characterized by competing national interests and power politics. It also considers whether the process that resulted in the appointment of António Gutteres in 2016—seen as the most transparent, meritocratic, and inclusive in the history of the UN—might enable the Secretary-General to be more effective in the face of the many pressures upon the office.
Financing
Authors: Laurenti Jeffrey
Published: August 2018

With finances a fundamental metric of power, especially in as weak a political system as the United Nations, political struggles over UN finances pose chronic challenges to the organization’s effectiveness and legitimacy. The system of assessments to pay for core UN functions and for peace operations, increasingly tilted toward the latter, triggers recurrent struggles over assessment scales and the occasional existential crisis. Yet thanks to donor-driven voluntary contributions focused on economic and social development activities—themselves not without controversy—the hybrid UN financing system was channelling close to $50 billion annually to shared global purposes by the world organization’s eighth decade.
Non-governmental Organizations
Authors: Schroeder Mike , Wapner Paul
Published: August 2018

What is the relationship between the United Nations and civil society? Has the relationship changed over time? This chapter demonstrates how both the UN and civil society benefit from sustained interaction. It investigates civil society’s role in the UN’s struggle to gain legitimacy, assert its authority, and carry out its missions. Similarly, it explores how civil society actors engage the UN as they work to garner credibility, support, and governing authority. It argues that the limitations of statism—the overriding power of states in world affairs—inspire the UN to work with civil society and encourage both the UN and civil society to make claims to be representatives of the world’s peoples. It starts by defining civil society and then describes the cooperative and conflictual interactions between the UN and civil society. The chapter concludes by analyzing these interactions in the context of questions of legitimacy, accountability, and good governance.
Peaceful Settlement of Disputes and Conflict Prevention
Authors: Mani Rama , Ponzio Richard
Published: August 2018

The chapter reviews the evolution—both in theory and practice—of the peaceful settlement of disputes and conflict prevention as innovated and practiced over more than seven decades by the United Nations. It considers the legal and historical basis for UN actions related to peacemaking and preventive diplomacy and the challenges faced in operationalizing these pivotal concepts in global affairs. The chapter concludes by foreshadowing the ‘sustaining peace’ agenda of UN Secretary-General António Guterres, with special reference to its emphasis on preventive action and mediating violent conflicts. The UN faces numerous challenges as it seeks to regain public trust in its capacity to prevent conflict and settle disputes. Entrusting women with an enhanced role is one belated, yet essential, first step in preventing conflict and ensuring lasting security with justice.
Political Approaches
Authors: Barnett Michael N. , Finnemore Martha
Published: August 2018

This chapter examines how prominent theories capture the various ways that the UN affects world politics. Different theories of international relations (IR) cast the UN in distinctive roles, which logically lead scholars to identify distinctive kinds of effects. We identify five roles that the UN might have: as an agent of great powers doing their bidding; as a mechanism for interstate cooperation; as a governor of an international society of states; as a constructor of the social world; and as a legitimation forum. Each role has roots in a well-known theory of international politics. In many, perhaps most, real-world political situations, the UN plays more than one of these roles, but these stylized theoretical arguments about the world body’s influence help discipline our thinking. They force us to be explicit about which effects of the world organization we think are important, what is causing them, and why.
International Criminal Court and Ad Hoc Tribunals
Authors: Goldstone Richard
Published: August 2018

This chapter traces the growth of international criminal courts since World War II. The trials of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg in 1944 led, after a lapse of almost half a century, to decisions by the UN Security Council to establish two ad hoc international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (1993) and for Rwanda (1994). UN-mandated courts followed in East Timor, Kosovo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina; and by state-requested courts, so-called ‘mixed’ or ‘hybrid’ criminal tribunals, in partnership with the UN, in Sierra Leone, Cambodia, and Lebanon. In terms of the Rome Statute of 1998, the International Criminal Court became effective in July 2002 and will likely become the only international criminal court.
Women’s Rights and Gender Integration
Authors: Bunch Charlotte
Published: August 2018

This chapter outlines the quest for women’s equality, empowerment, and human rights through the United Nations from its founding to the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. It considers the on-going dilemma in this work of whether, and when, to pursue women’s equality through separate entities and through gender mainstreaming. Describing the evolution of the major UN women-specific institutions, conferences, and standard-setting documents, and the critical role of civil society—especially women’s non-governmental organizations—the chapter argues that these have driven this agenda. Finally, it analyses the progress of gender integration and women’s advancement on UN agendas in the areas of development; health and sexual rights; human rights; and peace and security.
Minorities and Indigenous Peoples
Authors: Lâm Maivân Clech
Published: August 2018

This chapter compares and contrasts the separate UN regimes of rights for minorities and for indigenous peoples: their historical antecedents; the conditions and actors behind the emergence of the present regimes; their foundational texts and enabling mechanisms; their common as well as divergent goals. The chapter highlights minorities’ pursuit of equality and non-discrimination. Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, use the normative tool of self-determination, which they hope will help them maintain or regain their traditional lands, territories, and resources that have sustained their physical and cultural survival but are endangered by globalization. The two sets of goals, while appreciably different, are not mutually exclusive; both assert the rights to be equal to and different or separate from dominant populations.
Human Security
Authors: Penny Christopher K.
Published: August 2018

This chapter examines the role of the United Nations in developing, promoting, and enforcing norms within three broad understandings of human security: basic human rights; rights for those affected by violent conflict (‘freedom from fear’); and, rights for those experiencing severe hardship (‘freedom from want’). After reviewing key theoretical challenges, this chapter details the UN’s achievements within these three overlapping understandings, illustrating its contribution to furthering individual security. The UN has given meaning to the idea that state sovereignty should be limited and that, in some circumstances, individual rights should trump state interests. Despite the UN’s substantial human security accomplishments, this chapter recognizes the major challenges for the full realization of these ideals.
Global Resource Management
Authors: Schrijver Nico
Published: August 2018

This chapter addresses the UN’s pivotal role in global resource management. It discerns eight particular phases in the evolution of the UN’s resource management policies. Thematic issues include resource sovereignty, security of supply, sustainable use, the global commons, the resource curse, and conflict resources. The chapter also discusses the policy-making role and operational activities in the field of natural resources of a number of UN institutions, including FAO, UNCTAD, UNEP, and ICJ. Lastly, it provides an assessment of the conceptual contribution of the United Nations to natural resource management, also relating to maritime resources and ocean management in the context of the new law of the sea.
Climate Change
Authors: Ivanova Maria
Published: August 2018

Climate change surpasses the ability of any state to tackle on their own and requires global collective action. As a universal political body, the United Nations is indispensable to addressing climate change. It provides the arena for member states to discuss, deliberate, and decide; the institutional apparatus to support negotiations; and the platform and incentives for many actors to engage in creating and implementing agreements. UN institutions were critical to the identification of climate change as a global concern and the development of a formal regime adopted and supported by member states. This chapter analyzes the institutional frameworks, discusses core factors for success, and outlines a potential trajectory for climate change within the UN and beyond.
Multilateralism and the Changing World Order
Authors: Acharya Amitava
Published: August 2018

This chapter argues that the traditional conception of multilateralism that underpinned the United Nations at its birth is under serious challenge, which comes from a global shift in power and ideas. The hitherto Western dominance of both is rapidly eroding. But the emerging world order is better termed as a ‘multiplex’ rather than a ‘multipolar’ world. The key drivers of change include the growth of regionalism, the proliferation of non-state actors, the decline of the West, the erosion of US primacy, the rise of non-Western powers, and the increasing fragmentation of traditional UN-based global governance mechanisms. In this world, the UN is not obsolete but has to come to terms with rapid and far-reaching changes that call for a new approach to universalism, one that accommodates the conflicting pressures of cultural and political diversity, on the one hand, and economic and functional interdependence, on the other.
The UN’s Role in a Changing Global Landscape
Authors: Griffin Michèle
Published: August 2018

This chapter describes a fraught global landscape in which the pace and nature of change have outstripped the ability for human beings and their states to manage its downsides or equitably share its upsides. The interconnections are not yet reflected in who sits at the table, what tools are used, or even what problems are on the agenda. Such profound change is testing the UN as never before. However, it could also trigger a renewed sense of common purpose. The ninth Secretary-General can turn this crisis into an opportunity to drive through long-needed reforms and to position the UN as the key platform for collectively managing shared global risks and problems. Success would mean understanding and getting ahead of major global trends, rather than merely reacting to them.
Peacebuilding
Authors: Paris Roland
Published: August 2018

Peacebuilding—helping societies make the transition from civil violence to a durable peace—has been the UN’s principal security activity since the end of the Cold War. Although peacebuilding methods have been refined over years of trial and error, it remains an uncertain science, yielding mixed results. Nevertheless, for all its shortcomings, the international peacebuilding ‘project’ remains one of the most remarkable exercises in collective conflict management the world has ever witnessed. This chapter identifies the principal features of the UN’s peacebuilding operations, examines the record of peacebuilding since the end of the Cold War, and describes some of the main issues and controversies surrounding these missions.
Human Development
Authors: Jolly Richard
Published: August 2018

From its establishment, people and human development have been at the center of the UN’s development work, more clearly than at the World Bank and the IMF that have had a narrower economic focus. This chapter provides clear definitions of human development, drawing on UNDP’s Human Development Report, illustrating the approach with such issues as gender, human security, globalization, and human rights as well as the Human Development Index (HDI). A brief overview of the UN’s development leadership and operational work shows a wide field and is now focused on the SDGs (2016–2030) and formerly on the MDGs (2000–2015). UN expenditures are modest in comparison with funding for the World Bank and the IMF, but arguably more effective. There could be benefits in closer and more balanced collaboration between these global organizations, providing there is learning.
Moral Education
Authors: Nucci Larry P. , Ilten-Gee Robyn
Published: August 2018

This chapter positions moral education as concordant with the moral component of religion, but does not equate moral education with socialization into the particular norms or conventions of any specific faith tradition. Research findings have revealed that deeply religious children and adolescents make a similar set of distinctions between religious conventions and moral prescriptions regarding fairness and the welfare of others. This research forms the basis of a critique of the proposition that religiously devout people maintain a separate “morality of divinity.” The chapter reviews research on moral education designed to stimulate development of these universal moral understandings of fairness and welfare through developmental approaches to classroom rules and discipline together with practices that foster responsive engagement and transactive forms of discourse to stimulate the development of a critical moral perspective. This developmental approach to moral education is compatible with the basic moral core of religious systems but may be viewed as challenging to religious traditions and customs that sustain social inequalities.
Religious Education in the Traditions
Authors: Hicks Mark A.
Published: August 2018

This chapter explores the history, purpose, and aims of religious education in the United States, defined as devotional-based education that promotes religious identity formation. The chapter first differentiates between secular education and religious education in the United States, then considers how issues of theology, social culture, expression of religious freedom, civil rights, personal identity, technology, and demographic shifts shape religious identity formation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how rituals within religious traditions connect the aspirations of a tradition with instructional practices. It examines how religious education, from a devotional perspective, teaches people how to practice a religious way of life and informs their beliefs, behaviors, and acts of belonging. Religious education, the author describes, is an act of learning by which children, youth, and adults are moved toward living the ultimate values of a community of faith. While the nature of that journey varies widely depending on the aims of a particular religious group, religious education is primarily rooted in the hope that the learner can transcend a particular human socialization in order to achieve an aim that is important to their religious tradition.
Religious Education Between the Traditions
Authors: Patel Eboo , Silverman Noah
Published: August 2018

This chapter addresses how the continuity of individual and communal religious identity can be preserved in a modern context characterized by a rapid rise in religious diversity and a concomitant decline in traditional religious association. The chapter discusses various postures that religious communities can take in such a context. The authors advocate an intentional and engaged religious pluralism, achieved through “interfaith education.” This concept is defined and parsed into three activities in which religious communities should engage: developing a theology of interfaith cooperation, nurturing appreciative knowledge of shared values, and engaging in relationship-building activities. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of how North American seminaries have been on the vanguard of adopting interfaith—sometimes referred to as multifaith or inter-religious—education.
Private Religious Schools
Authors: Russo Charles J. , Soules Kate E. , Newman Adina , Douglass Susan L.
Published: August 2018

The first schools in the United States integrated religious material into the curriculum, so from the beginning one could argue there have been faith-related, if not faith-based, schools. This chapter reviews the history and development of faith-based private schools in the United States. Proceeding in essentially historical sequence, the authors trace the development of these schools from Protestant elementary and secondary schools to Roman Catholic, Jewish, and Islamic schools. The authors demonstrate how this nonpublic collection of faith-based educational entities accommodated burgeoning religious and cultural communities. Present and future challenges facing US faith-based private schools are discussed.
Religion and Homeschooling
Authors: Gaither Milton
Published: August 2018

Homeschooling as a self-consciously oppositional political movement emerged in the 1970s and 1980s among counterculturalists on both the left and the right due to a mix of historical trends, including the growth of suburbs, feminism, political polarization, and public school bureaucratization and secularization. In its early stages the movement saw cooperation between Christian conservatives and secular leftists, who worked together to relax homeschooling laws in every US state. By the late 1980s, however, a schism had developed and the much larger group of religious conservatives took control of the movement. Though very conservative Protestants continue to dominate the public face of the movement, in recent years homeschooling has grown increasingly common among a wide range of Americans. The historic antagonism between homeschooling and public education is also fading, as many hybrid forms have emerged that blur the boundaries between home and school.
Religiously Affiliated Charter Schools
Authors: Walker Nathan C.
Published: August 2018

Charter schools have grown significantly since 1991, when Minnesota became the first state to enact charter school legislation. Charter schools are public schools, as defined by federal and state law. Thus, when it comes to issues of religion and education, charter schools are bound by the same laws and legal precedents as public schools. As a result, local developers and state chartering agencies that seek to establish religious or faith-based charter schools are likely to fail in state and federal courts. This chapter examines this legal framework in the larger charter school movement.
Law and Religion in American Education
Authors: Witte John , Kaufman Brian William
Published: August 2018

While American schools are governed by sundry federal, state, and local laws, the most important law on religion and education is the First Amendment guarantee: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This chapter analyzes the major Supreme Court cases on the role of religion in public schools, the role of government in religious schools, and the place of religious rights of students and parents in all schools. It shows how the Court’s religion cases have vacillated between principles of strict separation of church and state and accommodation and equal treatment of religion. It shows how the Court has slowly come to protect and enhance the freedom of parents and students to choose between public and private education. And it shows how the Court has long protected students from being coerced to participate in religion or to abandon their religious practices.
Religion and the Public School Curriculum
Authors: Feinberg Walter
Published: August 2018

This chapter provides background information on the relationship between religion and public schools and then describes the different kinds of religion courses currently offered in some public schools. While the US Supreme Court has banned compulsory devotional religious exercises, it has not banned the nondevotional teaching of religion. The different types of religion courses command different kinds of justifications, and the legal and educational merits of these justifications are presented. The author concludes by proposing a case for teaching religion that is both constitutionally and educationally acceptable. This case rests upon the importance of the development of autonomy to the liberal tradition, and it shows how the teaching of religion as a humanistic study can serve this ideal.
Religion in Mainline and Independent Private Higher Education
Authors: Jacobsen Douglas , Jacobsen Rhonda Hustedt
Published: August 2018

The story of mainline and independent colleges parallels the narrative of American higher education as a whole. Until the twentieth century, these institutions dominated higher education, and religion in general (Protestantism in particular) played a huge role in their early history. During the twentieth century many scholars began to assume that secularization was inevitable, and religion was deemed irrelevant to higher education. Recent cultural shifts have reversed this trend. Globalization reveals the need for religious literacy and interfaith competencies, and the quest for meaning, personal development, and civic engagement that has always been part of the liberal arts is being reframed in ways that are appropriate for traditionally religious, spiritual, and nonreligious students. Religion is being reintegrated into the educational programming of mainline and independent colleges and universities—which still attract more than a quarter of all American college students—in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
Religion and Spirituality in Public Higher Education
Authors: Waggoner Michael D.
Published: August 2018

The place of religion and spirituality in public higher education in the United States continues to grow due to the evolving interpretation of religion and the Constitution. What began as a singular entity comingling public and private resources and religion is now a public institution with more carefully delineated legal parameters governing the use of public funds for religious purposes. Three themes may be traced throughout the history of religion in US public institutions. First is the accommodation of increasing religious diversity and the concomitant dilution of the exclusive dominance of Protestant Christianity and its associated privilege within the public square generally and public higher education particularly. Second is the conscious attention to religion and, more recently, spirituality, and their respective places in the academic and co-curricular life of public higher education. Third is the continuing evolution of US law relating to the use of public resources by religious groups.
Theological Education
Authors: Aelshire Daniel O.
Published: August 2018

Theological education in the United States has developed as a function of religious practice, American culture, and conventions of higher education. It began with the general study of classics in colleges and universities during the colonial period and the early decades of nationhood. It developed through a process of specialization that involved the founding of freestanding theological schools and seminaries and the development of a specialized curriculum and theological disciplines and patterns of scholarly work. By the mid-twentieth century, the education of ministers had developed into a normative form of graduate, professional education for which post-baccalaureate degrees were granted. Because theological education is embedded in religious, cultural, and higher education conventions, it changes as they change, and all three are changing in ways that will impact the future forms and practices of education for ministry.
Teaching Religious Studies
Authors: Gallagher Eugene V.
Published: August 2018

Teaching about religion in American higher education has been shaped by multiple contexts, from the personal and institutional through the national and international. One persistent question concerns the purposes of teaching about religion, from Christian character formation to broad religious literacy as a prerequisite for informed citizenship. As the number of departments grew throughout the twentieth century, fundamental disagreements about the purposes of collegiate study of religion, the ideal curriculum, and the role of the teacher persisted. Contemporary movements, like advocating for religious literacy, “contemplative pedagogy,” and the push for infusing “spirituality” into higher education actually reprise earlier arguments. The field remains divided on several fundamental issues.
Teaching About Religion Outside of Religious Studies
Authors: Nash Robert J.
Published: August 2018

Regardless of major or minor areas of disciplinary concentration, faculty members must think about the role that the study of religion and spirituality plays in the education of students who, in the future, will serve others in a variety of work settings. Educators must think seriously and systematically about the risks and benefits, the disadvantages and advantages, of dealing with such sensitive material. To ignore issues of religion and spirituality is to miss what is vitally important to educators everywhere. All professionals in higher education, as well as in other public service settings, should learn how to talk respectfully and compassionately with one another, and with their constituencies, about a topic that, throughout history, has caused as much pain, suffering, and division as it has comfort, joy, and reconciliation. In today’s complex world of difference, there is simply no other way for us to coexist without destroying one another.
Religious Literacy in American Education
Authors: Marcus Benjamin P.
Published: August 2018

Popular definitions of religious literacy don’t capture the reality of lived religion in a plural age. Using language as a metaphor for religion, this chapter differentiates between religious fluency among co-religionists and the ability to read and interpret the vocabulary of the “language” of the religious other. Whereas advocates for biblical literacy and world religions courses often reinforce an essentialist understanding of religion that presents only the “standard” version of a language, this chapter suggests an alternative 3B Framework that encourages students to consider how the interrelationship of belief, behavior, and belonging creates religious “dialects.” A pedagogy built around the 3B Framework encourages students to compare and contrast the construction of religious languages in a linguistic mode, analyzing the importance of belief, behavior, and belonging for individuals or communities. This framework opens possibilities for inter-religious dialogue between “multilingual linguists” who can engage the most meaningful aspects of interlocutors’ religious identity.
The Bible and American Public Schools
Authors: Chancey Mark A.
Published: August 2018

This chapter charts the historical development of Bible reading and Bible courses in American public schools from the early 1800s to the early 2000s, discussing key events such as nineteenth-century Bible wars, the creation of distinct Bible courses in conjunction with Sunday Schools and Weekday Religious Education, Supreme Court cases like Abington Township School District v. Schempp, and post-Schempp efforts to promote Bible classes. It pays particular attention to the ways Bible reading and Bible courses have often favored some religious perspectives over others and to the efforts of courts, educators, and special interest groups to identify constitutional ways to teach about the Bible. Hitting the legal benchmark of nonsectarianism has proved to be challenging, despite broad support in many quarters for the general project of religious literacy. Putting contemporary practice into historical perspective reveals similarities between ongoing debates about the Bible and public education and past controversies.
Democracy, Religion, and American Education
Authors: Lester Emile
Published: August 2018

The debate over religion in public schools in the United States since the 1960s has pitted two forces of democracy celebrated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract against each other. The Supreme Court’s exclusion of sectarian prayer and Bible reading reflected democracy’s commitment to respect the rights of all. The politically engaged response of evangelical and conservative Christians has drawn upon democracy’s need for robust participation by ordinary citizens. While Rousseau believed that only an agreement upon a civil religion could reconcile these democratic forces, the results of a required world religions course in Modesto, California, suggests otherwise. The course enhanced students’ respect for religious liberty while allowing them to maintain their sectarian beliefs. Modesto’s course did not resolve all the dilemmas of democracy, however. The aversion to open-ended class discussions neglects the value of democratic deliberation that notable democratic theorists like Jurgen Habermas and Amy Gutmann celebrate.
James and Hume
Authors: Inukai Yumiko
Published: August 2018

James contends that the rejection of conjunctive relations in experience leads Hume to the empirically groundless notion of discrete elements of experience, which James takes as the critical point that differentiates his empiricism from Hume’s. In this chapter, I argue that James is not right about this: Hume not only allows but employs experienced conjunctive relations in his explanations for the generation of our naturally held beliefs about the self and the world. There are indeed striking similarities between their accounts: they both use the relations of resemblance, temporal continuity, constancy, coherence, and regularity, and the self. Also, objects are constructed out of basic elements in their systems—pure experience and perceptions, respectively. Although collapsing the inner and outer worlds of the subject and object into one world (of pure experience for James and of perceptions for Hume) may seem unintuitive, this is exactly what allows them to preserve our ordinary sense of our experiences of objects.
Psychology and Philosophy in the Work of William James
Authors: Leary David E.
Published: August 2018

This chapter reviews the relations between psychology and philosophy in the work of William James. Though initially committed to limiting the role of philosophy in his psychological work, James eventually realized that an admixture of philosophy and psychology would not spoil “two good things,” as he had feared, and that it was in any case unavoidable. In fact, many of the basic pillars of his psychology depend upon philosophical distinctions, and many of the premises of his philosophy are drawn from psychological analyses. And while James focused more on psychology in his early years and more on philosophy toward the end of his life, his philosophical interests preceded his study of psychology, and his psychological interests extended throughout his career. An excursus treating James’s views on logic and the nonlogical, toward the end of the chapter, underscores the primacy of experience over analysis in James’s thought, both in psychology and philosophy.
Sparseness and functional data analysis
Authors: James Gareth
Published: August 2018

This article considers two functional data analysis settings where sparsity becomes important: the first involves only measurements at a relatively sparse set of points and the second relates to variable selection in a functional case. It begins with a discussion of two data sets that fall into the ‘sparsely observed’ category, the ‘growth’ data and the ‘nephropathy’ data, both of which are used to illustrate alternative approaches for analysing sparse functional data. It then examines different classes of methods that can be applied to functional data, such as basis functions, mixed-effects models and local smoothing techniques, as well as specific methodologies for dealing with sparse functional data in the principal components, clustering, classification, and regression settings. Finally, it describes two approaches for performing regressions involving a functional predictor and a scalar response: SASDA (sequential algorithm for selecting design automatically) and FLiRTI (Functional Linear Regression That’s Interpretable).
Operator Geometry in Statistics
Authors: Gustafson Karl
Published: August 2018

This article discusses the essentials of operator trigonometry developed by the author as it applies to statistics, with emphasis on key elements such as operator antieigenvalues, operator antieigenvectors, and operator turning angles. Operator trigonometry started out infinite dimensional, and remains infinite dimensional, even for Banach spaces. Thus, it is in principle applicable not only to infinite-dimensional statistics but also to cases involving functional data. The article first considers how operator trigonometry gives new geometrical meaning to statistical efficiency before formalizing it in a more deductive manner. It then explains the essentials of operator trigonometry and summarizes the ensuing developments. It also describes two lemmas that are implicit and essential to operator trigonometry, Antieigenvector Reconstruction Lemma and General Two-Component Lemma, and how operator trigonometry provides new geometry to statistics matrix inequalities and canonical correlations. Finally, it presents new results applying operator trigonometry to prediction theory and to association measures.
Functional Linear Regression
Authors: Cardot Hervé , Sarda Pascal
Published: August 2018

This article presents a selected bibliography on functional linear regression (FLR) and highlights the key contributions from both applied and theoretical points of view. It first defines FLR in the case of a scalar response and shows how its modelization can also be extended to the case of a functional response. It then considers two kinds of estimation procedures for this slope parameter: projection-based estimators in which regularization is performed through dimension reduction, such as functional principal component regression, and penalized least squares estimators that take into account a penalized least squares minimization problem. The article proceeds by discussing the main asymptotic properties separating results on mean square prediction error and results on L2 estimation error. It also describes some related models, including generalized functional linear models and FLR on quantiles, and concludes with a complementary bibliography and some open problems.
Functional Coefficient Models for Economic and Financial Data
Authors: Cai Zongwu
Published: August 2018

This article discusses the use of functional coefficient models for economic and financial data analysis. It first provides an overview of recent developments in the nonparametric estimation and testing of functional coefficient models, with particular emphasis on the kernel local polynomial smoothing method, before considering misspecification testing as an important econometric question when fitting a functional (varying) coefficient model or a trending time-varying coefficient model. It then describes two major real-life applications of functional coefficient models in economics and finance: the first deals with the use of functional coefficient instrumental-variable models to investigate the empirical relation between wages and education in a random sample of young Australian female workers from the 1985 wave of the Australian Longitudinal Survey, and the second is concerned with the use of functional coefficient beta models to analyze the common stock price of Microsoft stock (MSFT) during the year 2000 using the daily closing prices.
Resampling methods for functional data
Authors: McMurry Timothy , Politis Dimitris
Published: August 2018

This article examines the current state of methodological and practical developments for resampling inference techniques in functional data analysis, paying special attention to situations where either the data and/or the parameters being estimated take values in a space of functions. It first provides the basic background and notation before discussing bootstrap results from nonparametric smoothing, taking into account confidence bands in density estimation as well as confidence bands in nonparametric regression and autoregression. It then considers the major results in subsampling and what is known about bootstraps, along with a few recent real-data applications of bootstrapping with functional data. Finally, it highlights possible directions for further research and exploration.