I am just back from a roundtable conference — the third annual meeting of a five-year project on Christian Jurisprudence — at Emory’s excellent Center for the Study of Law and Religion. It was a great time, and I learned a lot.
In a nutshell, the project convenes two dozen or so scholars — lawyers, historians, theologians, philosophers, and political scientists — from the Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic Christian traditions for meetings and workshops aimed at, eventually, producting two dozen or so new monographs on “the contributions of modern Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox figures to fundamental questions of law, politics, and society.” (Emory’s John Witte is the ringleader for the project. He is, of course, a force of nature.)
I enjoyed very much working and talking with the non-lawyers, particularly those from the other religious traditions. At the same time, I was struck by something, which I have noticed in several other “Law and . . . “-type settings in which the focus is law and things legal: I seems to me that the lawyers were expected by the non-lawyers to know the non-lawyers’ disciplines, arguments, and central texts much better than the non-lawyers were expected to know the lawyers’. (I do not mean this as a criticism, only as an observation.) I’m curious . . . does this ring true with anyone else’s experiences? If so, what does it suggest about the value and future of interdisciplinary work?
In any event, I presented this paper, on the Freedom of the Church, which will — I hope — eventually be part of a book about religious freedom and the separation of church and state, properly understood. It received a helpfully, but quite forcefully, critical response.
Posted by Rick Garnett on November 6, 2006 at 05:32 PM
Comments
Rick,
Thanks for the clarification.
Of course it’s not uncommon to use ‘distinct religious traditions’ in this way, but I prefer to see the various denominations or sects within Christianity as sub-traditions (hence, with Buddhism: Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, etc.; with Islam: Sunni, Shi’i, Sufi; with Hinduism: Vedanta, Saivite, etc.; all sects or sub-tradtions within religious traditions), and save religious traditions proper for the larger religious formations that are more clearly distinguishable from each other: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Sikkhism, etc. That way it helps convey the fact there’s more that unites believers/followers/practitioners within a tradition vis-a-vis other religious traditions than divides them. Simply my pedagogical preference but one I would like to see more widely adopted.
Posted by: Patrick S. O’Donnell | Nov 7, 2006 1:00:34 PM
Patrick, for what it’s worth, the Center operates several other law-and-religion projects that bring together Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars. The one I was discussing focuses specifically on “Christian” Jurisprudence. And, certainly, Protestantism, Orthodoxy, and Catholicism are distinct religious traditions.
Posted by: Rick Garnett | Nov 7, 2006 12:35:11 PM
Re: ‘particularly those from the other religious traditions.’ I thought all the traditions on offer were Christian: were there religious traditions other than the Christian one (e.g., Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist)?
Posted by: Patrick S. O’Donnell | Nov 6, 2006 5:49:44 PM