Christianity, Law, and Contracts

With all the chatter recently about Sarah Palin and the religious right, and Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright, it's all too easy to charicature the relationship between law and religion in general, and law and Christianity in particular. A splendid new book edited by John Witte and Frank Alexander, Christianity and the Law: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press 2008), seeks to recover the deep and nuanced connections between Christian social theory and Western jurisprudence. Unlike many polemical works written by today's battling theonomists and strict separationists, Christianity and Law doesn't dwell on defining founding myths about America and its original status as either a religious "city on a hill" or a walled garden in which enlightened rationalists could feel safe from the Church. Most of the essays in Christanity and Law dig deeper into the Jewish, Roman and medieval roots of Christian jurisprudence.

Among the many gems uncovered in this excavation is Harold Berman's chapter “The Christian Sources of General Contract Law.” Berman summarizes those roots as follows:

In subsequent centuries, many of the basic principles of the canon law of contract were adopted by secular law and eventually came to be justified on the basis of will-theory and party autonomy. It is important to know, however, that originally they were based on a theory of sin and a theory of equity. Our modern Western contract law did not start form the proposition that every individual has a moral right to dispose of his property by means of making promises, and that in the interest of justice a promise should be legally enforced unless it offends reason or public policy. Our contract law started, on the contrary, from the theory that a promise created an obligation to God, and that for the salvation of souls God instituted the ecclesiastical and secular courts with the task, in part, of enforcing contractual obligations to the extent that such obligations are just. (Christianity and Law, at 132).

This broadly social notion of contracts was modified, Berman notes, during the Puritan era. The Puritans’ strong notion of total depravity made them less willing to place the authority to determine which obligations are “just” in the hands of a magistrate. Moreover, the Puritans’ emphasis on order inclined them to seek the meaning of contractual documents in the literal words of the document rather than in an overarching contractual hermeneutic of justice. However, even for the Puritans, “private” contracts were social obligations within the all-inclusive fabric of God’s covenantal relationships with people. Private contractual relations were not really “private” — they were covenantal relations between people who were also bound in covenantal relation to God. As Berman notes,

the Puritan stress on bargain and on calculability (”order”) should not obscure the fact that the bargain presupposed a strong relationship between the contracting parties within the community. These were not yet the autonomous, self-sufficient individuals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. England under Puritan rule and in the century that followed was intensely communitarian. (Id. at 140).

In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Enlightenment, these theories of contract based on justice and covenant were secularized. Justice and covenant were replaced with “the inherent freedom of each individual to exercise his own autonomous reason and will, subject only to considerations of social utility.” (Id.) These Enlightenment ideas “broke many of the links not only between contract law and moral theology but also between contract law and the comunitarian postulates which had informed both Catholic and Protestant legal traditions.” (Id. at 140-41).

It is a shame, I think, that contemporary Christian legal theory -- at least that which we hear about during major elections -- seems to focus so heavily on notions of individual freedom to contract that are more post-Christian than Christian. Religious people may feel they have only two options: the current prevailing secular legal theory of contracts, which is strictly realist and pragmatic and elides any notion of higher values, and the religious right’s libertarian view of contract, which elevates the individual far above the community. I agree with Berman: ”[w]e may learn from history . . . that there is a third possibility: to build a new and different theory on the foundation of the older ones.” (Id. at 141).

Posted by David Opderbeck at 12:25 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

Intersections of Religion and Governance

I write with the latest in my series: "It's Saturday, so I must be in..."

This Saturday, I'm in Washington, at a conference I helped organize at American University, on Exploring the Intersections of Religion and Governance: Past, Present, and Future.

Over the course of the day yesterday, and continuing today, the discussion has explored historical and comparative perspectives on the relationship of religion and governance, the relevance of religious communities to the pursuit of social and economic development, intersections of religious belief with the regulation of both climate change and corruption, and even the religious dimensions of intellectual property law. Speakers have included Arash Abizadeh, Abduh An-Na'im, Jeremy Gunn, David Hunter, and Layli Miller-Muro. All told - in my admittedly biased assessment - a fasinating conference!

Anyway, for those who may be interested in questions of law and religion, the conference is being webcast, and will also be available in video format for viewing/downloading later this coming week, at http://www.wcl.american.edu/secle/video.cfm.

Posted by Robert Ahdieh at 10:58 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Spike this Heel!

Many thanks for the invitation to join you all in blogging at Concurring Opinions! During my visit I’m looking forward to writing about things that are not necessarily part of my law-and-fashion beat over at Counterfeit Chic, but to start off I can’t resist sharing an image from Paris Fashion Week that touches upon – or, rather, walks all over – both fashion and cultural property.

Take a close look at this sandal from John Galliano’s runway show for Christian Dior. The carved statuette that forms the heel is reportedly a Masai fertility symbol.

 

Even setting aside the awkward juxtaposition of a curvy, pregnant woman with teenage fashion models so thin that they may not even be capable of conceiving (a legal issue for another day), the colonialist image is a disturbing one. Galliano, like many other Western designers, is known to “ransack the world’s closets for inspiration,” as I put it in my first book. Many of the resulting cultural hybrids (to use Naomi Mezey’s term) are extraordinarily beautiful expressions of human creativity that few would wish out of existence, even if greater norms of attribution to source communities should be developed and encouraged. Some uses of others’ cultural products, however, are simply inappropriate. Placing an African religious symbol literally under the heels of predominantly white women on a European runway is one such offensive use. Selling those same shoes to wealthy women around the globe is another.

I’m reminded of an Australian case that I’ve written about and taught, along with Christine Haight Farley and a number of other scholars. Milpurrurru v. Indofurn Pty. Ltd., (1994) F.C.R. 240, involved a rug merchant who appropriated a series of sacred Aboriginal images for his carpets. It happened that in this case the theft was so literal that copyright law provided a remedy. But what about damages for the desecration of the sacred images that had been trodden underfoot? Or the fact that, lengthy as copyright terms are, religious beliefs are likely to outlast them? Or the potential appropriation of religious images that are not the work of a specific living artist but are instead iconic forms, repeated and passed down over time?

To be fair, maybe the admittedly brilliant Galliano or the august fashion house for which he designs consulted authorized Masai representatives and female elders, who freely and without the pressure of economic or other coercion licensed the use of the fertility figure. It could even be their gift to the reproductively challenged pale populations to their north. But I doubt it.

Perhaps the most peaceful resolution of an issue like this one is a demand for mutual inquiry and respect, rather than protective legislation. Moreover, bearing in mind the violent response to Danish editorial cartoons of Mohammed several years ago and the resulting tension between religious demands and freedom of speech, any such legislation would require extraordinarily careful drafting. But if the cultural “owners” of this fertility symbol object to its commercialization, there should be some forum for their concern.

Posted by Susan Scafidi at 02:25 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

The Real Face of Shar'ia

Generally speaking, when Americans hear about shar'ia it conjures up images of bearded and turbaned Taliban executioners gleefully stoning women to death in an Afghan soccer stadium. It is an unfair stereotype of a great legal tradition, and it is also one that misses some of the most important issues that shar'ia raises for the modern world. As usual, if you want to find the real action follow the money.

In a nutshell, there is a lot of money sloshing around the Islamic world. 20 percent of the world's population is Muslim and at least part of the population sits atop oil fields that churn out an enormous amount of cash every day. What is an observant Muslim, one who cares about Islamic strictures against usury to do? Islamic law forbids the taking of interest, but certain transactional structures that allow some return in exchange for tying up capital are allowed. For example, a straight out purchase-money loan with interest secured by a mortgage on a the purchased house would violate Islamic injunctions against usury. On the other hand, if the bank buys the house, leases it to the resident for a period of years, followed by the resident's purchase of the house at the expiration of the lease for a nominal sum, it does not violate the injunction. The game in Islamic finance is to come up with ways of structuring transactions so as to generate an attractive rate of return for investors without running afoul of the strictures of shar'ia. The result has been a cottage industry of banks and lawyers experimenting with various transactional structures and then rushing to find a reputable Islamic legal scholar willing to issue a fatwah validating the deal for Muslim investors.

The Economist just put up a rather good briefing article detailing some of the growing pains that the industry is facing. At least part of this problem is legal. To give one example that interests me, UCC 9-109 states that the Article 9 governs "a transaction, regardless of form, that creates a security interest in personal property . . . by contract." The rule is aimed at precisely the kind of sale-and-lease-back transactions that are used in Islamic finance, a transactional gimmick that has also been tried as a way of avoiding the strictures of the UCC. The result of the rule, however, is that despite their best efforts parties may be forced, legally speaking, into an interest bearing loan. There is also the simple problem of complexity and the associated transaction costs. Still, according to the Economist:

None of these tensions need derail the growth of Islamic finance just yet. There is plenty of demand, whether from oil-rich investors, the faithful Muslim minorities in Western countries or the emerging middle classes in Muslim ones. There is lots of supply, in the form of infrastructure projects that need to be financed, Western borrowers looking for capital and ambitious rulers eager to set up their own Islamic-finance hubs. The industry is innovative; new products keep expanding the range of shar'ia-compliant instruments. And as in conventional finance, the economics of the Islamic kind improve as it gains scale.

If they are right, then Islamic finance is likely to be the real face of shar'ia in the modern world. In 2007, for example, over 150 new Sukuk (essentially a form shar'ia compliant bond) funds were launched with a value of nearly $50 billion. Given the less than inspiring ethical performance of certain aspects of the American lending market of late, a dose of financial puritanism from the desert might not be such a bad thing.

(Image source: Wikipedia)

Posted by Nate Oman at 10:11 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Theodicy in the New Yorker

James Woods' essay on the problem of evil in the New Yorker is an illuminating reflection on the question of how an omnipotent and benevolent God can permit suffering. The essay gives us a sense of how everyday legal categories of restitution and responsibility inform theology (and perhaps should humble lawyers into recognizing how much their own categories owe to religious thought). Though there's much to commend in the essay, I found his closing assessment of Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead most interesting:

Heaven, one of the tenderest verses in the Bible has it, is where God will wipe away all tears from our faces. In her novel “Gilead,” Marilynne Robinson adds, in a line just as tender, if a little sterner, “It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.” Robinson, herself a devout Protestant, means that the immense surge of human suffering in the world will need, and deserves, a great deal of heavenly love and repair; it is as close as her novel comes to righteous complaint. But one could also say, more skeptically, that Christianity needs the concept of Heaven simply to make sense of all the world’s suffering—that, theologically speaking, Heaven is “exactly what will be required.” In the end, Heaven, it seems, is the only tenable response to the problem of evil. It is where God’s mysterious plan will be revealed; it is where the poor and the downtrodden, the sick and the tortured, will be healed; it is where everything that we went through on earth will suddenly seem “worth it.”

But Heaven is also a problem for theodicists who take the freedom to choose between good and evil as paramount. For Heaven must be a place where either our freedom to sin has been abolished or we have been so transfigured that we no longer want to sin: in Heaven, our will miraculously coincides with God’s will. And here the free-will defense unravels, and is unravelled by the very idea of Heaven. If Heaven obviates the great human freedom to sin, why was it ever such a momentous ideal on earth, “worth” all that pain and suffering?

The difficulty can be recast in terms of the continuity of the self. If we will be so differently constituted in Heaven as to be strangers to sin, then no meaningful connection will exist between the person who suffers here and the exalted soul who will enjoy the great system of rewards and promises and tears wiped from faces: our faces there will not be the faces we have here. And, if there were to be real continuity between our earthly selves and our heavenly ones, then Heaven might dangerously begin to resemble earth.

I really enjoyed the novel Gilead, and if I recall it correctly, I think one passage responds to Wood's concern. The narrator of the novel (a preacher), having heard that "95 percent of Americans believe in God" (from a 1948 Ladies Home Journal poll), looks over at his cat, stretching in the sun, and mentions offhand that the cat's sense of the events surrounding it may be analogized to humans' capacity to comprehend the infinite:

The oddness of the phrase "believe in God" brings to my mind that first chapter of Feuerbach, which is really about the awkwardness of language, not about religion at all. Feuerbach doesn't imagine the possibility of an existence beyond this one, by which I mean a reality embracing this one but exceeding it, the way, for example, this world embraces and exceeds Soapy's [the cat's] understanding of it. Soapy might be a victim of ideological conflict right along with the rest of us, if things get out of hand. She would no doubt make some feline appraisal of the situation, which would have nothing to do with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat or the Manhattan Project. The inadequacy of her concepts would have nothing to do with the reality of the situation. . . . [In a similar way,] our human circumstance creates in us a radically limited and peculiar notion of what existence is. (143)

Part of the charm of Robinson's novel is the way in which the philosophical narrator tends to undermine himself; shortly after this passage he notes that "my interest in abstractions, which could have been forgiven first on grounds of youth and then on grounds of eccentricity, is now being forgiven on grounds of senility."

But the point about the limits of our knowledge struck me again as I read two recent books on humanity's response to mortality (Muriel Gillick's The Denial of Aging and Avishai Margalit's Ethics of Memory). Echoing Becker's Denial of Death, Gillick discusses (and dismisses) the biotech heaven of eternal organ replacement that's becoming an increasingly popular form of secular eschatology. Margalit combines an eclectic array of moral and aesthetic value judgments to argue for efforts to remember (and not merely transcend) the past. Both authors echo Robinson's undertone of reconciliation with the human condition--an attitude incompatible with the table-pounding demands made by the book Wood reviews (Bart D. Ehrman’s God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer). In an eloquent bit of theodicy of his own, Robinson's aged narrator notes:

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave--that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. . . . What have I to leave you but the ruins of old courage, and the lore of old gallantry and hope? Well, as I have said, it is all an ember now, and the good Lord will someday breathe it into flame again.

Amen.

Art Credit: Photo of Piotr Uklanski's Untitled (Thing) (2007), from the exhibit "God and Goods: Spirituality and Mass Confusion."

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 03:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"For Every Three Judges, Two Are in the Fire": Richard Posner and the Usul al-Fiqh

I've been reading Richard Posner of late, and it strikes me that there is an odd analogy between the his vision of the pragmatic judge and the position of the judge under the classical usul al-fiqh of Islamic law. It seems to me that ultimately Judge Posner's theory of adjudication rests on a radical rejection of the ex post perspective. On his view all judicial decisions are -- and ought to be -- forward looking, focusing solely on the consequences for the future that will come from deciding one way rather than another. Of course, a concern for future consequences needn't preclude a certain respect for past practices, expectations, and rule of law values, but none of this stuff has any force in and of itself. It only matters in so far as it impacts the future. One of the implications of this theory is that the judge can never hide behind the "the law" as a way of distancing him or herself from moral responsibility for her decisions. The law does not dictate particular results in any case. Rather, it is always a matter of the judge making an individual -- albeit practically constrained -- judgement about what would -- all things considered -- be best. One doesn't get any sense that Judge Posner spends much time thinking about the personal moral status of the judge, but it seems to me his theory makes the judge into a radically responsible moral agent. If the consequences of one of Judge Posner's decisions is really bad, it really is Judge Posner's fault.

Where Judge Posner's theory of law is radically ex ante, the theory of law (usul al-fiqh) proposed by the classical Islamic jurists purported at any rate to be radically ex post. In theory, all human legislation is a denial of the sovereignty of God, a kind of blasphemy. Rather, a righteous society follows God's law. This law, however, is finished and complete, indeed according to the dominant theological approach in Islam it is uncreated, a co-eternal emanation of the divine mind. The task of a jurist is to discover the divine law as revealed in the Qur'an and the example of the Prophet Muhammed. Put in more concrete terms, the classical Islamic jurists claimed that every rule necessary for the proper government of society could be discovered -- not deduced from or promulgated in accordance with -- with the sacred texts of Islam. At this point in their theory, however, the jurists came up against the ultimately unsystematic and ad hoc nature of the Islamic revelation. The Qur'an is not a legal code. Rather it is a collection of "recitations" -- often in the form of religious poetry -- given by God to the Prophet, often in response to concrete questions or problems raised by the early Islamic community. It was only in the generation after his death that these "recitations" were collected into the Qur'an. Not surprisingly, it takes some nimble exegetical gymnastics to transform this religious ur-stuff into a functioning body of substantive law. What haunted the classical jurists was that they might be wrong in their exegesis. As Marshall Hodgson has written, for a Muslim “every person, as such with no exceptions, was summoned in his own person to obey the commands of God: there could be no intermediary, no group responsibility, no evasion of any sort from direct confrontation with the divine will." Hence, there was no sense in which a jurist could hide behind some abstraction like office or "the law" to shield himself from full responsibility for his judicial decisions. He was to apply the law of God, and if he got it wrong he was responsible for that mistake.

According to one Muslim legal aphorism, "For every three judges, two are in the fire." The fire in question here is the hell reserved by God for judges who do not apply His law. Indeed, there are stories of great classical legal scholars who fled from Baghdad at the prospect of being made an actual judge by the Caliph. The reason was that once one moved from exegetical speculation to deciding actual cases, one's eternal soul was on the line. I don't think that Judge Posner is much worried about hell fire, but ironically his radically ex ante approach leaves him in a similar moral position personally to the radically ex post approach of the ulema.

Posted by Nate Oman at 12:37 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Preaching to the Court House and Judging in the Temple

I have put up a couple of posts here on my on-going research on the resolution of civil disputes in ecclesiastical courts.The full version of my research is now up on SSRN for those interested. Here is the abstract:

A number of American religious denominations - Quakers, Baptists, Mormons, and others - have tried with varying degrees of success to opt out of the secular legal system, resolving civil litigation between church members in church courts. Using the story of the rise and fall of the jurisdiction of Mormon courts over ordinary civil disputes, this article provides three key insights into the interaction between law and religion in nineteenth-century America. First, it dramatically illustrates the fluidity of the boundaries between law and religion early in the century and the hardening of those boundaries by its end. The Mormon courts initially arose in a context in which the professional bar had yet to establish a monopoly over adjudication. By century's end, however, the increasing complexity of the legal environment hardened the boundaries around the legal profession's claimed monopoly over adjudication. Second, the decline of the Mormon courts shows how allegiance to the common-law courts became a prerequisite of assimilation into the American mainstream. While hostility to the secular courts had been a hallmark of a major stream of American Protestantism during the colonial period and the first decades of the Republic, by the end of the nineteenth century, Mormons' rejection of those courts marked them off as dangerous outsiders. Part of the price of their acceptance into the national mainstream was the abandonment of legal distinctiveness. Finally, the story of the Mormon courts also illustrates the importance of law for the development of religious beliefs and practices. Other scholars have documented the "public law" side of this story, showing how the federal government's effort to eradicate Mormon polygamy was central to Mormon experience in the last half of the nineteenth century and ultimately forced a revolution in Mormon beliefs and practices. The rise and fall of the Mormon court system, however, shows that private law could exercise no less of a power over the religious imagination.

Dowload it while its hot!

Posted by Nate Oman at 12:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

An Al Smith Moment?

I have an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today on what Romney's "Mormon problem" tells us about American politics. Rather than asking the question of what it would men if a Mormon were elected president, I ask the question of what it would mean if Romney lost because he is a Mormon. In such a case, the correct analogy for Romney would not be Kennedy in 1960 but Al Smith in 1928, who for a generation stood for the rule that a Catholic could not be president. You can read the whole argument here.

Posted by Nate Oman at 08:31 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

A Hope-filled Christmas

It's always difficult to know exactly how to observe a holiday like Christmas on a blog like this. On the one hand, norms of "public reason" tend toward the neutrality of a "happy holidays" approach. On the other hand, I do celebrate Christmas and have a sense that at least some dimensions of Christianity's aesthetic and ethical appeal are universal. So I'll make a brief note of three of that come to mind.

1) The Vatican's increasing environmental awareness was manifest in the Pope's midnight mass today, when Benedict XVI lamented "the abuse of energy and its selfish and reckless exploitation." An eschatological awareness can help us better value a future too easily diminished by standard economic discounting methods.

2) On the aesthetic side, I would trade all the department store carols in the world for a few minutes of Bach's Christmas Oratorio. This podcast organized by the extraordinary Christopher Lydon is a great introduction to Bach's music.

3) Finally, the recently published papal encyclical Spes Salvi has a number of illuminating insights, particularly on the relationship between technology and values:

Science can contribute greatly to making the world and mankind more human. Yet it can also destroy mankind and the world unless it is steered by forces that lie outside it.

**

In the twentieth century, Theodor W. Adorno formulated the problem of faith in progress quite drastically: he said that progress, seen accurately, is progress from the sling to the atom bomb. Now this is certainly an aspect of progress that must not be concealed. To put it another way: the ambiguity of progress becomes evident. Without doubt, it offers new possibilities for good, but it also opens up appalling possibilities for evil—possibilities that formerly did not exist. We have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth . . . then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.

In words that call to mind Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the Pope notes that any overarching "technical" solution to human conflict should always be suspect:

Anyone who promises the better world that is guaranteed to last for ever is making a false promise; he is overlooking human freedom. Freedom must constantly be won over for the cause of good. Free assent to the good never exists simply by itself. If there were structures which could irrevocably guarantee a determined—good—state of the world, man's freedom would be denied, and hence they would not be good structures at all.

***

It is when we attempt to avoid suffering by withdrawing from anything that might involve hurt, when we try to spare ourselves the effort and pain of pursuing truth, love, and goodness, that we drift into a life of emptiness, in which there may be almost no pain, but the dark sensation of meaninglessness and abandonment is all the greater.

These may seem rather dark ideas for an encyclical on hope. But an idea of redemption is a common thread throughout the document; "It is not science that redeems man: man is redeemed by love." Here is to hoping that "progress in man's ethical formation" can begin approaching our technical prowess in 2008.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The Place of Charity

By the way, I don't want to sound (from my last post) as if I am against all charity. I'm very concerned about the plight of those in LDC's, and I've argued that charitable giving should be something of a moral requirement for many of us in the developed world. As this extraordinary program from Krista Tippett's Speaking of Faith shows, charitable giving can help us find a true "moral balance" of sharing, saving, and spending.

Sometimes it is hard to know exactly where one's contribution will do the most good. Over the past three years I have found many good causes through Global Giving, a group now sponsoring a Giving Challenge. Here are some causes I found compelling enough to give to:

--Safe Water and Latrines for Bangladeshi Slum
--Clean Water for DEPDC's Underprivileged Children
--Help Feed 200 Neglected Elderly in Guatemala

I'm also happy to report that GG's president, Mari Kuraishi, recently gave a talk at a conference devoted to figuring out the best ways of assessing the reputation and value of various online entities--including charities. As efforts like these improve, questions about the accountability of charities will become less nagging.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 10:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Questioning the Prosperity Gospel

Recently Republican Senator Charles Grassley has begun to investigate "six televangelists who are part of an evangelical subculture known loosely as Prosperity gospel." For example,

Grassley wanted to know how Kenneth Copeland--who as a church leader pays no taxes but is expected to plow revenue back into the public welfare--got a private plane and whether flights to Hawaii and Fiji qualified as business trips. Grassley sought credit card receipts and the numbers of the church's offshore bank accounts.

The conflict raises some interesting theological questions--for example, what if the religious group sincerely believes that its leaders deserve extraordinary opulence? What if their high spending is not a diversion of resources, but instead is the very point of the religion? As I'm mentioned before regarding The Secret, wealth worship may be working its way into the DNA of American culture. Consider this conflict between Grassley and the Prosperity gospel crowd:

Prosperity adherents believe the right thoughts and speech, along with giving to the church, will prompt divine repayment in this life, with a return as high as $100 on each dollar handed up. On a small scale, Prosperity's positive thinking has sometimes energized the march of the poor into the middle class, but many Christians find it theologically and ethically perverse. Prosperity dominates American religious TV, and millions of adherents send millions of dollars to preachers they have never met. For Grassley, this might be fine if the ministers put all the money back into their mission work. But his now famous question about Meyer's $23,000 commode suggests he questions the destination of her estimated $124 million annual take.

I think the answer has to be that the Prosperity Gospel crowd is itself distorting and ignoring Christian doctrine--even if such an indictment sets up the state as a more authoritative interpreter of the Bible in this case than those it would prosecute.

One need only a passing acquaintance with the Bible to understand that egalitarianism and concern for the poor are two of its central themes. The story of the "widow's mite" says volumes, and as Proverbs 16:8 puts it, "Better is a little with righteousness, than great revenues without right." Matthew 19:23-24 also comments on how difficult it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God.

I think there is one final lesson in this controversy for those who would criticize others for holding "strange" or "exotic" religious beliefs. As inequality skyrockets, the "Prosperity Gospel" may be the most natural and obvious creed one could opt for in today's America. But perhaps we should religious ethics in part to the extent to which they are in tension with the prevailing norms of our commercial society. As much of the collection Preach Liberty suggests, religion can provide moral balance in the present age.

Photo Credit: Micreon.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 09:03 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

A strudel for Lawrence

He can't say he wasn't warned about the strudel, either.

So, Lawrence O'Donnell seems to have an interesting set of beliefs about Mormons and Romney. His discussion is a little disjointed, but as far as I can tell from his interview, his Hewitt interview, and his Huffington Post column, his beliefs can basically be distilled into some major ideas. For example:

1. Early Mormon leaders said some strange things.
2. All of those strange things play an important role in Mormonism today.
3. There are no moderate Mormons. All Mormons fervently believe everything that any prior church leader has ever said, and they accord those statements a very high priority.
3a. Mitt Romney is not a moderate Mormon. (This follows naturally from "there are no moderate Mormons").
4. Therefore, Mitt Romney's worldview is closely linked to any strange thing Brigham Young may have said 150 years ago.
5. Romney's refusal to state this (and to discuss Mormon theology and/or history in detail) makes him a liar.

Let's look at a few of these ideas.

First, O'Donnell points out that early church leaders said some problematic things. And of course, he's right. For instance, Brigham Young spoke publicly on a few occasions against interracial marriage. O'Donnell cites to one of these, a sermon where Brigham Young states, "Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot." Yep, that's a pretty awful thing to say.

Of course, it's not really that surprising of a statement, coming from a mid-19th-century white person. Unfortunately, these kinds of views were rather mainstream at the time. Most contemporaneous whites believed that interracial marriage was wrong. Really! Quick quiz: Which 19th-century figure said this about interracial marriage?

I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

That would be Abraham Lincoln.

Yep, it was the mid-19th Century, and most white people held ugly, racist views. Brigham Young was one of them. His 19th-century views on interracial marriage don't stand up well today; neither do Lincoln's, and neither do the ideas about race held by most 19th-century white elites.

So, why are we worried about what Brigham Young said in the 19th century? In linking this idea to Mitt Romney, or to Mormonism today, O'Donnell implies that these statements have some sort of salience today. That claim is just silly.

Let's start with provenance. The Brigham Young statement cited comes from the Journal of Discourses. The JD, as historians call it, is a 26-volume collection of 1,500 transcribed sermons given by dozens of different church leaders over a 30-year period. It's kinda like the Congressional Record. If anyone said anything, it went into the JD. This is why it's 26 volumes and thousands of pages.

There are huge problems with any suggestion that the JD has much salience today. First, the JD is not church doctrine, and has no binding weight as church doctrine. Church members read the scriptures regularly; many don't even know that the JD exists.

Not only is it not doctrinal -- the JD is also essentially unknown to most church members. I grew up as a church member, and my parents didn't have a copy of the JD in their home. (Why would they? 26 volumes of old talks.) I don't have one in my home now, and I've got well over a hundred church books on my shelves. I do keep thinking that I should get one, but that's because I've been doing some historical reading, and it's interesting as a an old historical relic. No one, except for a real history junkie, has a copy of the JD on their shelves.

The church publishes an official manual called the Teachings of Brigham Young. This is a book-sized official church publication, on every church member's bookcase, and it's one that church members are instructed to teach class out of, every Sunday, for a year. This is what Mormons today actually read, study, follow, out of Brigham Young's teachings. And the line about race isn't part of this collection. (Check for yourself -- the entire manual is available online.)

I've been attending church regularly for over 30 years, and I have never once heard Brigham Young's line about interracial marriage cited in a church setting. Ever.

And I personally know church members who are in interracial marriages -- and no one gets killed or cast out. One member who I personally know, a Black man in an interracial marriage, was the bishop of a ward that I attended for four years.

Present-day church leaders also give highly public sermons about the evils of racism. They make statements like, "God’s second commandment, love thy neighbor, clearly leaves no room for racism" and "I have learned to admire, respect, and love the good people from every race, culture, and nation that I have been privileged to visit. In my experience, no race or class seems superior to any other in spirituality and faithfulness." A lengthy recent statement from church leader Gordon B. Hinckley condemned racism in no uncertain terms:

Racial strife still lifts its ugly head. I am advised that even right here among us there is some of this. I cannot understand how it can be. It seemed to me that we all rejoiced in the 1978 revelation given President Kimball. I was there in the temple at the time that that happened. There was no doubt in my mind or in the minds of my associates that what was revealed was the mind and the will of the Lord.

Now I am told that racial slurs and denigrating remarks are sometimes heard among us. I remind you that no man who makes disparaging remarks concerning those of another race can consider himself a true disciple of Christ. Nor can he consider himself to be in harmony with the teachings of the Church of Christ. How can any man holding the Melchizedek Priesthood arrogantly assume that he is eligible for the priesthood whereas another who lives a righteous life but whose skin is of a different color is ineligible?

Throughout my service as a member of the First Presidency, I have recognized and spoken a number of times on the diversity we see in our society. It is all about us, and we must make an effort to accommodate that diversity.

Let us all recognize that each of us is a son or daughter of our Father in Heaven, who loves all of His children.

Brethren, there is no basis for racial hatred among the priesthood of this Church. If any within the sound of my voice is inclined to indulge in this, then let him go before the Lord and ask for forgiveness and be no more involved in such.

So, let's see:

Brigham Young said some problematic and racist statements. Yep. Those statements were unfortunately pretty consistent with elite white thinking at the time; those statements are essentially unknown to most Mormons today, because they're not doctrinal and the only place anyone could find them is in a musty old collection that nobody reads; those statements set out certain rules (such as prohibiting interracial marriage) that are neither discussed, followed or enforced in the church today. Brigham Young's statement is unfortunate; unsurprising, given the era; unread; unknown; and unenforced.

Now, this isn't to say that there aren't Mormons who are racist jerks. I know some of those, too. That's unfortunate.

And, it isn't to say that racist ideas haven't existed in church. Clearly, racist ideas have existed at various times during church history. At times, racist views seem to have been relatively widespread in the church. (They were pretty widespread out of the church, too.) Brigham Young certainly wasn't the last prominent church member to hold racist beliefs, and other prominent members have made racist statements over time. There have been some interesting studies, such as those by sociologist Armand Mauss, about the place of racist lore in church culture over time.

And many church members, myself included, find the prior racist statements disturbing. There have been some public repudiations of prior racist statements, which is a good development. I'm not the only church member who would be happy if there were more discussion, and further repudiation and apology for past statements. That would be great. No argument there.

Also, the work of dedicated scholars like Margaret Young, Darius Gray, Newell Bringhurst, Armand Mauss, Lester Bush, and others has been instrumental in highlighting the stories of Black Mormons, including some who are relatively unknown. Emphasizing the stories of Black Mormons is a very positive development, that helps counter past racist ideas.

And of course, there's always room for improvement. Some members have racist ideas, and things could always be made better. The church isn't a perfect place, as far as attitudes towards race.

But it's silly to act as though modern church members teach Brigham Young's racist ideas as doctrine (they don't), or that those ideas play a significant role in everyday church membership today.

(Image source: WIkicommons).

Posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger at 07:47 PM | Comments (87) | TrackBack

"Beyond Belief" Videos

Earlier, I posted about this year's Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 conference at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. The event touched on a wide variety of issues related to science, faith, and reason. Videos from that event are now available here.

For those following the Richard Dawkins thread from last week, why monogamously limit yourself to this year's videos when you can also see last year's, including Dawkins himself? See here (he spoke during session 7, but you may have to find a way to fast forward a bit).

Posted by Adam Kolber at 10:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

For my op-ed about Mormonism, I read a book by a mountain-climbing expert!

Maureen Dowd wants you to know that she's read Jon Krakauer's book about Mormonism. She's really proud of this tidbit, and she cites the book -- a lot -- in her Sunday column . By all appearances, this is the only book about Mormonism that she's read so far. But hey, she gets her mileage out of it, quoting Krakauer extensively on topics like polygamy and underwear and Joseph Smith as a hypnotically charming salesman. That was ten dollars well spent at the airport bookstore.

Not that there's anything wrong with Krakauer. Into Thin Air -- Krakauer's bestseller about the fatal Mount Everest climb -- was a great read. And why wouldn't it be? Krakauer has decades of experience as an outdoors writer, he's got an undergraduate degree in environmental studies, and he's written prior, well-received books about survival in the outdoors.

Also, he wrote one book about Mormonism, Under the Banner of Heaven -- and as we now know, Maureen Dowd read that book.

Of course, a skeptic might suggest that Dowd should have considered interviewing other sources. A few of her colleagues even seem to have adopted that approach themselves. David Brooks, in his own article on the Romney speech, cites to established religious scholars like Catholic theologian Richard John Neuhaus, and (careful, he's Mormon!) emeritus Columbia historian Richard Bushman. (Bushman is also a Bancroft prize winner, which cancels out at least 62% of his Mormonness). Meanwhile, over in the NYT Week in Review, writer Laurie Goodstein offers a nuanced and interesting article that quotes from theologian Richard Mouw, President of the (non-Mormon) Fuller Theological Seminary.

Dowd, though, sticks to her guns: She cites Krakauer, and then for confirmation, she interviews Krakauer.

Our skeptic could also argue that Dowd should have checked out a few books in addition to Krakauer's magnum opus. For instance, the highly regarded Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition, by Indiana University historian Jan Shipps, a non-Mormon who has written about Mormon history for forty years. Or perhaps one of the biographies or studies by Richard Bushman (warning: may contain Mormon content), the Bancroft-winner whose status as a Mormon history superstar was again confirmed with his recent appointment to chair a new Mormon Studies program at (non-Mormon) Claremont Graduate University. Or maybe the short bio by (non-Mormon) star Jacksonian-era historian Robert Remini of the University of Illinois. Or even some of the Oxford-published work by (careful, he's Mormon!) University of Richmond prof Terryl Givens. The list goes on, and on; it's not like there is a shortage of really well-researched, well-regarded studies of Mormon history.

But then, those kinds of books -- dry and boring and well-researched -- are probably less likely to contain one-liners like Krakauer's (and now, Dowd's) "[Joseph Smith] could sell a muzzle to a dog."

Hmm. Perhaps that's the point?

Image source: Wikicommons.

Posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger at 02:37 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

A Quick Response to Douthat

Over at Atlantic Monthly, Ross Douthat responds to my post on Mitt Romney and Mormonism, writing:

[Oman's] analysis makes a lot of sense; I only object to note of self-pity at the end. Just because evangelicals (and Catholics, to a lesser extent) are using Mormonism as a marker to legitimize their own theological compromises doesn't mean it isn't a reasonable marker to use. It isn't only about Oman's religion, but it is about it to a great extent: Mormonism is a useful marker of how far ecumenism can go (and how far it can't) precisely because there are much, much deeper theological commonalities between, say, the Vatican and the Southern Baptist Convention than between either body and the the LDS Church. And while it's true that Mormons get more attention, and hostility, than other similarly-heterodox strands of American religion, they're at least partially victims of their own success. If the Jehovah's Witnesses, say, were doing as well as the Mormons are at winning converts, their tenets might be playing the same sort of "here's where the Great Tradition stops" role in debates over ecumenical cooperation. But they aren't, so they don't.

Ross is right to call me on the tone of self-pity that creeps in at the end of my post. (Growing up on tales of anti-Mormon mobs, murdered leaders, and federal prosecutions tends to hardwire a certain persecution complex into the Mormon psyche, I suspect.)

I do, however, think that his response breezes rather quickly to the issue of theological difference and ecumenism. I would be the last to deny that there are real and important theological differences between Mormonism and Protestantism or Catholicism. However, it is not simply these theological differences that account for the strange political salience of Mormonism as an issue for some non-trivial segment of the Republican base. Rather, I think that the fact that the details of Mormon theology matter so intensely as a political issue for some voters comes from their need to assert -- if only to themselves -- their theological integrity in the face of political compromises. It is not Mormon theology but the strange series of historical accidents that pushed conservative evangelical protestants and conservative catholics into alliance that is causing most of Romney's "Mormon problem," a development that Mormonism had very little to do with. Furthermore, the fact that this same non-trivial chunk of the Republican base believes that the theological marker for ecumenism is also a valid reason in principle for rejecting a Mormon candidate is simply a graphic illustration of the problems of conflating ecumenism and political coalition building. It also illustrates that at least for some, Mormonism's status as a religious outsider is sufficient reason to relegate Mormons to the status of outsiders within the political community as well. Supporter of a basically liberal political order (and member of the Mormon tribe) that I am, I find that a bit disquieting.

Posted by Nate Oman at 04:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Saving the planet via polygamy

There's a really bizarre article in today's Washington Post. Under the title, "Divorce Found to Harm the Environment," the article states:

Divorce is not just a family matter. It exacts a serious toll on the environment by boosting the energy and water consumption of those who used to live together, according to a study by two Michigan State University researchers.

The analysis found that cohabiting couples and families around the globe use resources more efficiently than households that have split up. The researchers calculated that in 2005, divorced American households used between 42 and 61 percent more resources per person than before they separated, spending 46 percent more per person on electricity and 56 percent more on water. . . .

Married households use energy and water more efficiently than divorced ones because they share these resources -- including lighting and heating -- among more people, said Jianguo Liu, one of the paper's co-authors. Moreover, the divorced households they surveyed between 1998 and 2002 used up more space, occupying between 33 and 95 percent more rooms per person than in married households.

This is certainly a novel use of statistics, and likely to see much use in intra-family discussions this holiday season. I foresee the use of this statistic as another arrow in the quiver of passive-aggressive matchmaking parents everywhere. ("I don't see why George can't just find a nice girl, settle down, and save the environment.") But really, the stats seem to prove too much, don't they?

First, the environmental loss or gain isn't really coming from marriage, is it? It's coming from shared use of resources. And two people don't have to be married to share resources. Unmarried cohabitation would have exactly the same environmental impact due to shared resource use. It won't just be parents citing this article over Christmas dinner. "I know you're mad that Cindy moved in with me, Mom -- but we're only doing it to help save the planet."

And second, if two-people-cohabitating really creates such great environmental impact -- why stop at two? The benefits of shared resource use can be expanded to greater heights, can't they?

For one thing, this is an incentive for families to keep their kids longer. There will be no more nagging at little Junior to go get his own place now that he's 35. Let's keep him in his old room, and save the planet.

But wait, there's more! What about polygamy? Now you're talking real resource savings. Think Big Love<, or perhaps Brigham Young and 56 wives. That's not just 56 wives -- that's 56 times a 40% reduction in water and electricity use. Wowzers! You may see a problematic patriarchal family system, but I see forward-looking, responsible use of scarce environmental resources.

Of course, removing 56 women from the marriage market skews the gender balance of the dating pool -- so we would need a reverse-Brigham as well, a woman who lived polyandrously with 56 husbands. And viola -- even more resources saved! You never knew it, but what's really destroying the environment these days is monogamy.

I hope Mitt Romney includes this discussion in his speech on Thursday.

Posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger at 03:46 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Thoughts from the Anvil: Mitt, Mormonism, and American Religious Politics

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a conference at Princeton University's Center for the Study of Religion on "Mormonism and American Politics." The big question at that conference was whether or not presidential hopeful Mitt Romney was going to make "The Speech," in which he would deal with "the whole Mormonism issue." At the time, I wanted to post some of my thoughts on Romney's Mormon problem, and since it looks as though Romney has opted for "The Speech," now seems like a good time to put them up.

I suspect that on Thursday Mitt Romney's Mormonism will perform the function that Mormonism has been fulfilling in American politics for a century and a half: It will be an anvil on which this mainly Protestant nation hammers out the place of religion in public life.

In 1856, the Republican Party was founded in opposition to the twin relics of barbarism: polygamy and slavery. By 1862, the GOP had enough political power to start putting some legal muscle behind the campaign slogans, passing the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act. Four successive waves of legislation, prosecutions, and high-stakes litigation followed, until the church issued the Manifesto in 1890 and Utah joined the Union as a state. In the thirty odd years between the first Republican platform and the Manifesto, Protestant America used the Mormons to articulate the limits of religious toleration.

I find it fascinating that religiously motivated abolitionists were at times in the forefront of the anti-polygamy battles. In part, I suspect that the denunciation of Mormonism served an important function for them, namely as a defense to the frequent charges of religious extremism thrown at them by their critics. "We're not the fanatics," they in effect said, "those Mormons are!" Likewise, as Sally Gordon's excellent book has shown, anti-polygamy allowed Protestant opponents of female suffrage, with their sanctified vision of the home that excluded women from the franchise, to say, in effect, "Hey, our religion is not repressing women. That is something only those nasty Mormons do!" In both instances, Mormonism served an important place in Protestant self-definition, and the intense legal pressure directed at the Mormons was as much about defining the identity of the anti-polygamists as it was about changing the identity of the Mormons, although change it the pressure did.

In the first decade of the 20th century, we saw a great aftershock of this battle. Mormonism once more became the anvil on which the rules of the game for religion in American politics were hammered out. Utah elected Reed Smoot (pictured to the right), a monogamous Mormon apostle, to the U.S. Senate. The result was a political firestorm, stoked in the Protestant churches and then played out in years of hearings before the Senate. The price of Reed Smoot's admission to the Senate was a set of public pledges from the church hierarchy promising the final suppression of polygamy and the abandonment of lingering utopian ambitions. As Vanderbilt's Kathleen Flake has compellingly demonstrated, however, Smoot's election forced Protestant America to articulate the rules under which legitimate political participation was to be allowed, and there were specters other than Mormonism that stalked the Senate Committee on Privileges and Immunities. Rules for "Papists" and "Hebrews" were also being hammered out in those hearings.

On Thursday, I think that Romney's speech will serve at least in part as an anvil on which one of the more surprising alliances in American politics will be hammered out: the one between conservative Catholics and Protestants. It wasn't so long ago that the idea of an Evangelical-Catholic alliance would have been anathema to both sides. Indeed, the more conservative the believer the more anathema the alliance would have been. That changed beginning in the 1970s, when conservatives from both traditions decided that the forces of secularism were a greater threat than either Rome or heresy. The alliance, however, is not an entirely easy one. (Witness for example, the furor caused by Francis Beckwith's conversion from Evangelicalism to Catholicism.) I suspect that not too far below the surface of the Religious Right one will find a deep-seated theological ambivalence: Did the religious conservatives sell-out theologically by clasping hands across what had been the ultimate divide in American religious politics?

Part of this tension has been managed by the promotion of "The Great Tradition," a somewhat fictitious creation that, like 'Judeo-Christian culture," provides a coping mechanism for the cognitive dissonance created by the contradictory pulls of politics and theology. In effect, it allows Protestant and Catholic activists to tell themselves, "I didn't sell out my beliefs for control of Congress; after all we both believe in Nicea and Chalcedon." In a world of un-conflicted sectarian competition, I suspect that the Mormon rejection of the creeds didn't matter all that much. Sure, it meant that Mormon theology was wrong, but everyone else's theology was wrong too, so there was no special Mormon problem. Likewise, Mormon rejection of the creeds didn't matter all that much when Ike presided over a culturally self-confident and complacent Protestantism. "Letting Mormons sit at the table," the Protestants in effect told themselves, "doesn't say anything about Protestantism because everyone understands that we wield ultimate control." (Hence, for example, Mormon apostle Ezra Taft Benson -- pictured at his swearing in left -- could serve in Ike's cabinet without the sky falling for Evangelicals.) Not so in a world where Protestant hegemony is challenged by the forces of godlessness.

Hence, I suspect that the reason why many within the Religious Right want to deny Romney (or any other Mormon) the Presidency is because Mormonism is an important theological marker that legitimizes the other theological compromises that have made the coalition possible. "Sure, we'll work with the Papists," the conservative Evangelical subconscious can say to itself, "but the Mormons are one theological compromise too far. I am not a theological sell-out because while I will accept Mormon votes, I will not accept a Mormon leader." Soft-bigotry against Mormons facilitates broader theological cooperation.

As a Mormon, I have to say that living on the anvil where the concerns of others get hammered out can be a bit uncomfortable. On the other hand, I take solace in the fact that much of the time it probably really isn't about Mormonism. Rather, it is about the theological stories that Mormonism allows conservative Protestants and Catholics to tell themselves.

Posted by Nate Oman at 04:47 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Misappropriation of Religion

There have been almost 3000 news stories on the bizarre Teddy Bear affair in Sudan. The AP notes that "Sudan's Islamic government, which has long whipped up anti-Western. . . hard-line sentiment at home, was balancing between fueling outrage over the case of Gillian Gibbons and containing it." Given the diversity of implementations of Sharia law, the case appears to be yet another sad example of religion misappropriated to crass political ends. Law prof Haider Ala Hamoudi makes the following point:

[W]ould a medieval jurist know what a teddy bear even was? Does it matter at all to the conventional wisdom that the crime under Article 125 of the Sudanese criminal code is NOT blasphemy, it is "publicly cursing or insulting, any of the religions or their religious customs or its sacred matters . . . ?" Does anyone believe that medieval jurists actually cared about protecting the "religious customs and sacred matters" of religions other than Islam as this law at least purports to? Would medieval jurists of any religion have phrased anything so ecumenically? Does anyone at all reporting on the shari'a crime of blasphemy care in this absurd case about this actual law, under which this poor actual woman is being judged, instead of some academic construction of what is happening based on sources the Sudanese judges and lawyers aren't reading? . . . . [Given the] disinterest of respected religious scholars in supporting the Sudanese verdict, I tend to conclude nobody thinks the shari'a, as opposed to Sudanese politics, has very much to do with any of this.

In other news, in an upcoming conference on Christian legal theory, "Judge Michael McConnell will deliver an address with the provocative title 'Asking Muslims to be Moderate.'"

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 07:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Enlightenment 2.0 (Updated)

Last week, the New York Times ran this piece by an English professor about the haunted house in which she grew up. The first line is, "The house in which I grew up was haunted by a cloud of cold mist, a mysterious woman in white, and an entity we called 'the conductor,' since he walked around wearing a mourning coat and carrying a baton in one hand."

I get it: it was Halloween. Yet, the story is presented as non-fiction and the author seems quite earnest about her belief in ghosts (though possibly retreating a bit at the end of the story). I doubt that the New York Times would run a similar piece by a person who thinks that he was abducted by space aliens or that George W. Bush orchestrated the attacks on 9/11. Perhaps belief in ghosts receives special license. A 2005 Gallup poll found that 37% of adults in America believe in haunted houses. Even with a biased sample, that's a high number.

The prevalence of supernatural beliefs was a major theme at a conference that I spoke at last week at the Salk Institute entitled, "Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0." The conference was broader in scope than it was last year, presenting a variety of perspectives on the role of reason in the formulation of our beliefs. Participants included Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Pat Churchland, Jonathan Haidt, Jeff Hawkins, V.S. Ramachandran, David Sloan Wilson, and many others. Here's a link to the conference website, where video from the conference should eventually appear.

UPDATE: Here is a link to an article about the event at New Scientist.

Posted by Adam Kolber at 10:27 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Law Talk: Oman on Civil Cases in Church Courts

Last week I attended the annual meetings of the American Society for Legal History in Tempe, Arizona. It was a great conference and compared, say, to the AALS meetings all of the presenters had clearly actually written and thought out their presentations before hopping on the plane. In this week's episode I am broadcasting my own presentation at the conference. In early America many religious denominations tried to move civil disputes between church members into church courts, and lately I have been going through the records of Mormon church courts to see how the dealt with contract cases. As part of that research, I've written a paper that looks at the development of the Mormon judiciary, why Mormons sought to bring civil litigation within the church, and why they abandoned the effort around 1900. (I put up a short, preliminary version of my paper on SSRN.) My ASLH presentation shares some of my conclusions from that paper, which will be sent off to the law reviews this spring.

You can subscribe to "Law Talk" using iTunes or Feedburner. You can also visit the "Law Talk" page at the iTunes store. For previous episodes of Law Talk at Co-Op click here.

Posted by Nate Oman at 12:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Jeffries on SCHIP

My colleague Shavar Jeffries has been a powerful moral voice at BlackProf on a number of issues affecting children, including school vouchers. I found his take on the recent SCHIP debate extraordinarily compelling:

In the third presidential debate in 2004, the President reiterated that "[my] principles are derived from who I am. I believe we ought to love our neighbor like we love ourself . . . . And so my principles that I make decisions on are a part of me. And religion is a part of me."

So I ask: Would Jesus have vetoed the SCHIP bill?

Of the over 43 million Americans lacking health insurance, about eight million are children. Not only does this mean that millions of children are unable to access the care they need to treat debilitating illnesses, it also means they cannot obtain the preventive care and counseling that protects against sickness and promotes wellness.

***

The congressional bill would have added $7 billion to the program in each of the next five years, enabling S-CHIP to cover an additional 4 million children. This, evidently, was too much for the President to bear. He vetoed the bill, claiming that it would cover too many middle-class families, would encourage those with private coverage to switch to S-CHIP, and would represent an unjustifiable step toward government-manage