bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
“The Two Sons of Oil” and the Limits of American Religious Dissent
Authors: Wedgeworth Steven 
Published: February 2016

In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Samuel Brown Wylie, an Irish-Presbyterian minister of a group of Scottish and Scots-Irish Presbyterians known as the Covenanters, and William Findley, a United States Congressman and also a descendant of the Covenanters, debated the Constitution's compatibility with Christianity and the proper bounds of religious uniformity in the newly founded Republic. Their respective views were diametrically opposed, yet each managed to borrow from different aspects of earlier political traditions held in common while also laying the groundwork for contrasting political positions which would more fully develop in the decades to come. And more than a few times their views seem to criss-cross, supporting contrary trajectories from what one might expect.Their narrative, in many ways strange, challenges certain “Christian” understandings of early America and the Constitution, yet it also poses a few problems for attempts at a coherent theory of secularity, natural law, and the common good in our own day.Samuel Brown Wylie is an obscure figure in American history. As a Covenanter, Wylie was forced to immigrate to America due to his involvement in the revolutionary United-Irishmen in Ulster. After finding it impossible to unite with other Presbyterians in Pennsylvania, Wylie became the first minister in the “Reformed Presbyterian Church of the United States,” which would also be called “the Synod of the Reformed Presbyterian Church.” According to his great-grandson, Wylie also went on to become the vice-Provost of the University of Pennsylvania.
The Morality of Human Rights: A Secular Ground
Authors: Byers Dohrman W. 
Published: February 2016

The July 14, 2006, issue of Commonweal carried an article by Michael J. Perry, entitledThe Morality of Human Rights: A Problem for Nonbelievers?. In that article, as in his booksThe Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries, andToward a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts, Perry argues that a plausible nonreligious foundation for the idea of human rights has yet to be articulated—that this idea, therefore, appears to be unavoidably religious. He expresses concern that “the growing marginalization of religious belief in many societies that have taken human rights seriously—in particular, in many liberal democracies… may leave those societies bereft of the intellectual resources to sustain the morality of human rights.”Nicholas Wolterstorff shares Perry's judgment. “It is impossible to develop a secular account of human dignity adequate for grounding human rights. Or to speak more cautiously: given that, after many attempts, no one has succeeded in developing such an account, it seems unlikely that it can be done.”
Church Autonomy in the European Court of Human Rights—Recent Developments in Germany
Authors: Robbers Gerhard 
Published: February 2016

The European Court of Human Rights is currently considering several German cases on the autonomy of religious organizations or churches within secular German labor law and resulting conflict resolution issues that arise within religious communities. In the past, the European Court of Human Rights has consistently underlined the importance of church autonomy, relying on the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms Article 9 guarantees of freedom of thought, conscience and religion:Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.Implementing these provisions in the context of religious autonomy, the Court has critically noted:[T]he autonomous existence of religious communities is indispensable for pluralism in a democratic society and is, thus, an issue at the very heart of the protection which Article 9 affords.… The right [of religious communities] to an autonomous existence is at the very heart of the guarantees in Article 9.
The Enforceability of Arbitration Decisions Made by Muslim Religious Tribunals: examining TheBeth DinPrecedent
Authors: Bambach Lee Ann 
Published: February 2016

The figures of both Moses and Muhammad stand in the United States Supreme Court, included among the great lawgivers of history depicted in two friezes along the North and South walls of the Courtroom. Moses, who is seen carrying the Ten Commandments, is honored as the “prophet, lawgiver, and judge of the Israelites,” with the Supreme Court's tourist information sheet explaining that “Mosaic Law” is “based on the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament.” Muhammad is described as the “Prophet of Islam” and carries both a sword and the Qur'an, the “primary source of Islamic law.”Yet the parallel depictions of these two prophets in the U.S. Supreme Court belie the very different respect that the laws they are associated with have received in the U.S. judicial system. Jewish law or legal principles are generally cited by courts with approval, often to add perceived moral and ethical authority to a court's decision. For example, in the U.S. Supreme Court's well-knownMiranda v. Arizonadecision, the Court declared that the privilege against self-incrimination was an ancient right, with analogues that could be found in the Bible, quoting the great medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides for support: “To sum up the matter, the principle that no man is to be declared guilty on his own admission is a divine decree.”
Catholic Thought and Intellectual Property: Learning from the Ethics of Obligation
Authors: Michael Gabriel J. 
Published: February 2016

The twelfth century canon lawyer Gratian once wrote “Feed the man dying of hunger, because if you have not fed him you have killed him.” If Gratian were alive today, he might take a look at the current state of global health and say, “Succor the woman dying of disease, because if you have not helped her you have killed her.” Both of these statements express an ethical obligation: if I have food, and someone else who is hungry does not, I am obligated to share my food. Likewise, if I have medicine, and someone else who is sick does not, I am obligated to share my medicine.Unfortunately, with regard to medicines and other essential products, modern institutions of intellectual property often fail to enforce or even recognize such ethical obligations. In some ways, these institutions uphold an even harsher attitude toward intellectual property than other types of property. With food, even if the hungry person receives no bread, he is still permitted to produce his own. With medicines, medical technologies, and other types of goods that are protected by institutions of intellectual property, the law can and often does prevent the sick person from producing her own.
Is Talmudic Law a Religious Legal System? A Provisional Analysis
Authors: Ben-Menahem Hanina 
Published: February 2016

The claim that talmudic law is a religious legal system has long been, and continues to be, put forward by both traditional scholars of Jewish law and contemporary academic researchers.The question of whether talmudic law is a religious legal system most certainly did not engage the Sages of the Talmud, but addressing it will help us grasp the nature of talmudic law. Furthermore, juxtaposing talmudic law to Biblical law will help us delineate the concept of religious law, and shed light on certain developments in the evolution of Jewish law.Let us consider what this claim entails. Sometimes the assertion that a given legal system is a religious legal system merely seeks to indicate that it is part of a certain religion or was created within the framework of that religion. Such an assertion does not provide any information about the nature of the said system, just as the phrase “French law” says nothing more than that the system is used in France.
Church and State in the Bahá’í Faith: An Epistemic Approach
Authors: Danesh Roshan 
Published: February 2016

When Mírzá Husayn ‘Ali (1817-92)—the founder of the Bahá’í Faith who was known as Bahá’u’lláh (the “Glory of God”)—died, there was a clear and unambiguous answer about who had the authority to lead his small, but growing, religious community. In his will, Bahá’u’lláh identified his eldest son, ‘Abbás Effendi, known as ‘Abdu'l-Bahá (“Servant of Bahá”) (1844-1921) as his successor and head of the community, as well as the authoritative interpreter of Bahá’u’lláh's writings. When ‘Abdu’l-Bahá assumed the reins of community leadership upon Bahá’u’lláh's death, his claim to authority went largely unchallenged, and he remained in that role until his own death.While this seeming affirmation of a principle of primogeniture would appear to establish a clear pattern for the future organization and structure of the Bahá’í community, it was only one part of the leadership of the community envisioned by Bahá’u’lláh. Equally unambiguous was Bahá’u’lláh's vision of “houses of justice” existing throughout the world, elected bodies that would serve governance functions. In theKitáb-i-Aqdas(the “Most Holy Book”), written by Bahá’u’lláh in 1873, he states that “[t]he Lord hath ordained that in every city a House of Justice shall be established,” whose members are to “take counsel together and to have regard for the interests of the servants of God.…” In that same book, Bahá’u’lláh contemplated an international house of justice, in addition to the local houses of justice.
Lessons Learned from the Implementation of Islamic Shari'ah Criminal Law in Aceh, Indonesia
Authors: Siregar Hasnil Basri 
Published: February 2016

In Indonesia, law reform is one of the important mandates of the national reform agenda, including the restructuring of various legal and political institutions at all levels of government, the regulatory implementation of the 1945 Constitution at the village level, and the ideological renewal necessary to make these changes real in Indonesian society. The policy direction of the People's Consultative Council (MPR) has changed from domination by the central authority toward freedom, autonomy and local government empowerment. Laws that were once imposed from the top now reflect power-sharing with local governments. In particular, the government has granted special (and virtually unlimited) autonomy to the province of Nangroe Aceh Darussalam (NAD, also known as Aceh). This article will explore how that autonomy has been influenced by a more robust adoption of Shari'ah law in Aceh.When the New Order rule fell on May 21, 1998, Indonesia moved from a centralized power to democratization, a process of legal development “from, by and for the people” through a decentralized system. The promulgation of Law 22 (1998) providing for local autonomy (which was amended in 2004 by Law 32) and Law 25 on the respective financial authority of the central and local governments is concrete evidence that decentralization is real in Indonesia.
Aspects of the Lemons Problem as Treated in Jewish Law
Authors: Levine Aaron 
Published: February 2016

Commercial transactions are often characterized by asymmetric information between the buyer and seller: one side of the market, usually the seller, knows more about the quality of the product or service offered than the other side. In his 1970 seminal article, George Akerlof predicted that unless counteracting forces are in place, this asymmetric information phenomenon will cause the volume of transactions in this marketplace to shrink to the point where only the most inferior version of the product, called a lemon, will be traded.Practically speaking, numerous institutions mitigate the asymmetrical information problem so that the marketplace does not deteriorate into a lemons market. These countervailing forces include seller guarantees, brand names, product liability laws, consumer screening, third-party comparisons, and the institution of standards and certification by the government or consumer and industry groups.My purpose here will be to analyze one aspect of the lemons problem from the perspective of an imagined society governed entirely by Jewish law and ethics. I will refer to this society as a Torah society. Specifically, I will show how Jewish warranty law counteracts the lemons problem and compare its solutions to those of American warranty law as well as state lemon laws in the U.S.Warranty law works best to counteract the lemon problem if it operates in an environment of trust. As I will show, Jewish law puts the task of moral education in the hands of parents and teachers with the goal of producing the character trait of trustworthiness.
Oppressive-Exploitative Contracts: A Jewish Law Perspective
Authors: Lifshitz Shahar 
Published: February 2016

The people of the land have used oppression, and exercised robbery, and have wronged the poor and needy, and have oppressed the stranger unlawfully.(Ezekiel22:29)Ezekiel's lament emphasizes that oppression in general, and especially oppression of the needy and the distressed, is always an extremely immoral and illegal act. In the Bible, “oppression” describes the unilateral taking of another person's property or depriving her of her rights. Yet, sometimes even an apparently voluntary agreement might be oppressive. Preventing oppression, therefore, has became one of the declared aims of contractual doctrine, as in the well-known American doctrine of unconscionability.Unconscionability and oppression are broad concepts that describe a wide-ranging array of cases and situations. Not surprisingly, therefore, despite the formidable and complex body of legal writing on the unconscionability doctrine, a great deal of ambiguity remains as to its theoretical basis, as well as its practical content.In this article I seek to enrich the modern Western discussion by analyzing Jewish law doctrine which addresses the issue of oppressive exploitative contracts, an approach which is both unique and to date largely neglected by scholars in the area. This Jewish law doctrine developed in response to a specific kind of oppressive contract, in which a semi-monopolistic party exploits the distress of a needy party in order to demand an above-market price (hereinafter referred to as oppressive-exploitative contracts).
Evangelicals and Politics: A Rethinking
Authors: Gushee David P. 
Published: February 2016

I understand my primary task in this essay to be to take you inside the world of evangelical political reflection and engagement. Though I actually grew up Roman Catholic and attended the liberal Union Theological Seminary in New York, I am by now an evangelical insider, rooted deeply in red state mid-South America, a member of a Southern Baptist church (actually, an ordained minister), a teacher at a Tennessee Baptist university, and a columnist for the flagship Christianity Today magazine. Due to the blue state/red state, liberal/conservative boundary-crossing that has characterized my background, I am often called upon to interpret our divided internal “cultures” one to another. Trained to be fair-minded and judicious in my analysis and judgments (though not always successful in meeting the standards of my training), I seek to help bridge the culture wars divide that is tearing our nation apart.As one deeply invested in American evangelicalism, most of my attention these days now goes to the internal conversation within evangelical life about our identity and mission, especially our social ethics and political engagement. In this essay I will focus extensively on problems I currently see with evangelical political engagement, addressing those from within the theological framework of evangelical Christianity and inviting others to listen in to what I am now saying to my fellow evangelicals.
Church Autonomy is not a Better Path to “Truth”
Authors: Hamilton Marci A. 
Published: February 2016

Kathleen Brady's article, Religious Group Autonomy: Further Reflections About What Is At Stake, is intended to shore up her position that religious organizations deserve extremely broad autonomy from the law. Her thesis is two-fold. First, she believes that the law should not interfere with the internal operations of religious organizations, which is the position she has taken before. Second, she backs off the position apparent in her earlier work that religious organizations do great good, and, therefore, deserve autonomy. Now she posits a new thesis that religious organizations need to be protected from regulation, because they are working out the truth, and society needs the truth. This latter principle rests on the empirical claim that no one can fully know the truth (or even relative harm and benefit), and, therefore, when the law limits religious organizations, it halts the development of truth.There was a time when I would have agreed with her, but I was then taught that my views were not based in reality. The problem posed by religious entities, even when they intend to seek the truth, is that they are run by humans, with the full spectrum of human fallibility. On this score, religious organizations really are no different than large corporations. The whole range of destructive behavior can be seen in both: fraud, extortion, misappropriation of funds, lying, deceit, covering up scandals like child abuse or doctoring financial records for the sake of the organization's image, and the list goes on. If religious actors are not deterred and punished for bad acts, they wreak great wrongs. This inescapable empirical reality plainly undermines Brady's earlier claims that seemed to imply that religious organizations deserve autonomy for the good they do.
Introduction: The Interdisciplinary Program in Law and Religion
Authors: Destro Robert A. 
Published: February 2016

In late 1983, the Columbus School of Law of The Catholic University of America was awarded a three-year program development grant by the Henry Luce Foundation, Inc. for the purpose of developing an interdisciplinary program in law and religion. Since its inception, the purpose of the program has been to encourage the study of law and religion through creative use of the resources of The Catholic University of America to bring together scholars and legal practitioners having an interest in law and religion to collaborate on research, scholarship and education programs.To that end, the Columbus School of Law seeks to serve as a catalyst in developing proposals for funded research and as a clearinghouse for information and ideas on which interdisciplinary research projects can be based. The goal of the program is to draw together the resources and expertise of several disciplines and to focus them on issues of practical or theoretical importance in the development of law or legal policy relating to religion, religious institutions, public morality and ethics.Including the symposium which appears in the pages which follow, the project has sponsored presentations dealing with religion and politics (October, 1984), trends in separation of church and state (February, 1985), as well as co-sponsoring the publication of Peace in a Nuclear Age: The Bishops' Pastoral Letter in Perspective (C. Reid ed. 1986).
Introduction
Authors: Pollard John E. 
Published: February 2016

In 1982 DePaul University announced the establishment of its Center for Church/State Studies. Situated in the College of Law, the Center has an executive board of eighteen distinguished legal scholars and practicing attorneys from a wide variety of religious traditions.Early in 1983, well before the presidential campaign began to develop largely around the issue of religion and politics, the Center's executive board had decided to look carefully at the issue by sponsoring a symposium on the role of the religious leader in the development of public policy. While there was a great deal of political rhetoric on the pages of the nation's daily newspapers and weekly news magazines, very little reflective and responsible research on the proper relationship of religion and politics was available for public consumption. The American Bar Association offered its annual meeting as an appropriate setting for the symposium, which was held on August 4, 1984.The Center invited Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, to present the major paper, “The Role of the Religious Leader in the Development of Public Policy.” Cardinal Bernardin, had chaired the American Catholic Bishops' Committee that prepared the landmark document on nuclear war, “The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response.” His work in that role provided him a particularly appropriate perspective from which to address the more theoretical question at issue in our symposium, namely, the proper involvement of religious leaders in the national public policy discussion.
On the Pope, Cartoons, and Apostates: Shari‘a 2006
Authors: Emon Anver M. 
Published: February 2016

During 2006, controversies concerningShari‘aor Islamic law seemed to dominate media reports. From cartoons to apostasy trials,Shari‘awas deemed to be at the core of controversies that attained international notoriety. Furthermore,Shari‘awas implicitly invoked by the Pope in his now infamous speech at Regensberg, in which he referred to the prophet Muhammad and an early Muslim jurist in order to define Europe as Christian and contrary to all that is Islamic. TheShari‘a-related events of 2006 raised fundamental questions not just about whatShari‘ais, but more fundamentally about the place of Muslims and their religious tradition in the international system. This article attempts to survey the aboveShari‘a-related events from 2006 in order to illustrate how references toShari‘a, whether by Muslims or non-Muslims, were embedded within a larger discourse on identity, community, and difference.This survey will not provide an in-depth analysis and critique of theShari‘adoctrines invoked in each case, as that would be beyond its scope. Rather, this article is intended to review the events in light of how “Shari‘a” was characterized, used, and positioned within a larger legal and political discourse. All of them illuminate similar problems of definition and identity that will generally arise in any critical discussion ofShari‘ain the modern day.Shari‘ahas arguably become more than a system of legal rules that can be subjected to critical legal scrutiny. Rather, it is also a symbol of political identity, such that any suggestion of legal reform may create political fall out amongst those committed to certain conceptions of identity, political and otherwise. The controversies concerningShari‘ain 2006 arguably had less to do with legal doctrine, and more to do with how “Shari‘a” can be used and manipulated to facilitate political ends concerning the definition of identity and thereby the separation (and even marginalization) of communities.