Since 1982, the Center for the Study of Law and Religion's publications in multiple languages have been the Center's most visible and enduring contribution to the global conversation about law and religion. CSLR now edits three book series and an international journal, and its faculty and research projects have produced more than 300 books published by leading university and trade presses. CSLR faculty, scholars, and students also publish widely in journals of law, the humanities, and social sciences, and have edited several journal symposia on discrete law and religion themes.
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The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism
John Witte Jr.
John Calvin developed arresting new teachings on rights and liberties, church and state, and religion and politics that shaped the law of Protestant lands. Calvin's original teachings were periodically challenged by major crises - the French Wars of Religion, Dutch Revolt, the English Civil War, American colonization, and American Revolution. In each such crisis moment, a major Calvinist figure emerged - Theodore Beza, Johannes Althusius, John Milton, John Winthrop, John Adams, and others - who
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The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy
John Witte Jr.
For more than 2,500 years, the Western tradition has embraced monogamous marriage as an essential institution for the flourishing of men and women, parents and children, society and the state. At the same time, polygamy has been considered a serious crime that harms wives and children, correlates with sundry other crimes and abuses, and threatens good citizenship and political stability. The West has thus long punished all manner of plural marriages and denounced the polygamous
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Justice in Love
Nicholas Wolterstorff
Love and justice have long been prominent themes in the moral culture of the West, yet they are often considered to be deeply at odds with one another. In this book acclaimed Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that the commonly perceived tension between justice and love reveals something faulty in our understanding of each.
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What is an American Muslim?: Embracing Faith and Citizenship
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im
Abdullah An-na'im offers a pioneering exploration of American Muslim citizenship and identity, arguing against the prevalent emphasis on majority-minority politics and instead promoting a shared citizenship that both accommodates and transcends religious identity. Many scholars and community leaders have called on American Muslims to engage with or integrate into mainstream American culture. Such calls tend to assume that there is a distinctive, monolithic, minority religious identity for American Muslims. Rejecting the closed categories that determine
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The Codification of Jewish Law and an Introduction to the Jurisprudence of the "Mishna Berura"
Michael J. Broyde and Ira Bedzow
The Mishna Berura is, without a doubt, Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan's greatest and most complex contribution to the canon of Orthodox Jewish Law; it is a singular work that synthesizes Jewish traditions, laws, and mores into a practical halakhic guide to daily religious life. For all of his traditionalism, Rabbi Kagan was an iconoclast, and the Mishna Berura broke from many of the traditional approaches of deciding halakhic directives. Instead, he favored studying, engaging, and
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Secular Government, Religious People
Ira C. Lupu and Robert W. Tuttle
In this book Ira Lupu and Robert Tuttle break through the unproductive American debate over competing religious rights. They present an original theory that makes the secular character of the American government, rather than a set of individual rights, the centerpiece of religious liberty in the United States. Through a comprehensive treatment of relevant constitutional themes and through their attention to both historical concerns and contemporary controversies — including issues often in the news —
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Divine Covenants and Moral Order: A Biblical Theology of Natural Law
David VanDrunen
This book addresses the old question of natural law in its contemporary context. David VanDrunen draws on both his Reformed theological heritage and the broader Christian natural law tradition to develop a constructive theology of natural law through a thorough study of Scripture. The biblical covenants organize VanDrunen's study. Part 1 addresses the covenant of creation and the covenant with Noah, exploring how these covenants provide a foundation for understanding God's governance of the whole
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Law and Language: Effective Symbols of Community
Harold J. Berman and John Witte Jr.
Completed in 1964, Harold J. Berman's long-lost tract shows how properly negotiated, translated and formalised legal language is essential to fostering peace and understanding within local and international communities. Exemplifying interdisciplinary and comparative legal scholarship long before they were fashionable, it is a fascinating prequel to Berman's monumental Law and Revolution series. It also anticipates many of the main themes of the modern movements of law, language and ethics. In his Introduction, John Witte, Jr,
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Blessing Same-Sex Unions: The Perils of Queer Romance and the Confusions of Christian Marriage
Mark D. Jordan
At most church weddings, the person presiding over the ritual is not a priest or a pastor, but the wedding planner, followed by the photographer, the florist, and the caterer. And in this day and age, more wedding theology is supplied by Modern Bride magazine or reality television than by any of the Christian treatises on holy matrimony. Indeed, church weddings have strayed long and far from distinctly Christian aspirations. The costumes and gestures might
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Human Rights in the Constitutional Law of the United States
Michael J. Perry
In the period since the end of the Second World War, there has emerged what never before existed: a truly global morality. Some of that morality - the morality of human rights - has become entrenched in the constitutional law of the United States. This book explicates the morality of human rights and elaborates three internationally recognized human rights that are embedded in US constitutional law: the right not to be subjected to cruel, inhuman
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No Establishment of Religion: America's Original Contribution to Religious Liberty
T. Jeremy Gunn and John Witte Jr.
America's most original legal invention may be the First Amendment guarantee that ''Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.'' This constitutional provision rejected the millennium-old Western policy of supporting one form of Christianity in each nation and subjugating all other faiths. It was both original and deeply challenging. The new nation encountered difficulty removing the traditional laws that controlled religious doctrine, liturgy, and church life and that discriminated against unpopular religions, and
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The Ascent of Christian Law
John McGuckin
This work asks the question: "What did Christianity do to build a civilization"? In the present age, law has been used energetically to micro-manage human societies, values, and aspirations. But did law work that way in antiquity? This little book is some form of answer. It is a book on law and legal thought as it emerged in its formative ages of the Christian past; it asks what the ancient writers and theorists did with
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The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy
Aristotle Papanikolaou
Theosis, or the principle of divine-human communion, sparks the theological imagination of Orthodox Christians and has been historically important to questions of political theology. In The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy, Aristotle Papanikolaou argues that a political theology grounded in the principle of divine-human communion must be one that unequivocally endorses a political community that is democratic in a way that structures itself around the modern liberal principles of freedom of religion, the
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The Bible and the Pursuit of Happiness: What the Old and New Testaments Teach Us about the Good Life
Brent A. Strawn
This book investigates the meaning of happiness in light of biblical scholarship and developments in the study of happiness, especially via positive psychology. Nine chapters that focus on the Bible (five on the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, four on the New Testament) are accompanied by three that evaluate the theme and the biblical chapters via the disciplines of systematic theology, practical theology, and counselling psychology. An introduction frames the project in terms of the meaning (often
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Conciliarism: A History of Decision-Making in the Church
Paul Valliere
Conciliarism is one of the oldest and most essential means of decision-making in the history of the Christian Church. Indeed, as a leading Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann states, 'Before we understand the place and the function of the council in the Church, we must, therefore, see the Church herself as a council.'
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From Sacrament to Contract, Second Edition: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition
John Witte Jr.
This newly revised and enlarged edition of John Witte's authoritative historical study explores the interplay of law, theology, and marriage in the Western tradition. Witte uncovers the core beliefs that formed the theological genetic code of Western marriage and family law. He explores the systematic models of marriage developed by Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, and Enlightenment thinkers, and the transformative influence of each model on Western marriage law. In addition, he traces the millennium-long reduction
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The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology
Nicholas Wolterstorff
For a century or more political theology has been in decline. Recent years, however, have seen increasing interest not only in how church and state should be related, but in the relation between divine authority and political authority, and in what religion has to say about the limits of state authority and the grounds of political obedience. In this book, Nicholas Wolterstorff addresses this whole complex of issues. He takes account of traditional answers to
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Children and Childhood in World Religions
Don S. Browning and Marcia J. Bunge
While children figure prominently in religious traditions, few books have directly explored the complex relationships between children and religion. This is the first book to examine the theme of children in major religions of the world. Each of six chapters, edited by world-class scholars, focuses on one religious tradition and includes an introduction and a selection of primary texts ranging from legal to liturgical and from the ancient to the contemporary. Through both the scholarly
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Contending with Catastrophe: Jewish Perspectives on September 11th
Michael J. Broyde
The tragic events of September 11th, 2001 shook the world, permanently changing the lives of millions of people. Jews are sadly familiar with vicious terrorist attacks yet we continue to be moved by the horror of modern warfare. Over the past decade, in the wake of 9/11, the Jewish community has looked to its tradition for guidance on how to react to these horrific attacks, both intellectually and in practice. Contending with Catastrophe: Jewish Perspectives
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The Best Love of the Child: Being Loved and Being Taught to Love as the First Human Right
Timothy P. Jackson
Much has been written about the rights owed to children: the right to live, the right to be nurtured and cared for, the right to an ample measure of health and happiness - and, especially, the right to be loved.