This chapter explores issues of religious freedom and religious persecution faced by Christian minorities around the world. It describes the nature and scope of religious rights and analyzes various forms of religious persecution against prevailing international human rights instruments. It also provides case studies of recent persecution of…[Read more]

Welsh jurist and Anglican theologian Norman Doe has pioneered the modern study of comparative “Christian law” – analyzing the wide variety of internal religious legal systems governing Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches worldwide. For him, law is a fundamental but underutilized instrument of Christian identity, denominationalism, and e…[Read more]

The Lutheran Reformation transformed not only theology and the church but also law and the state. Despite his early rebuke of law in favor of the Gospel, Martin Luther eventually joined up with various jurists and political leaders to craft ambitious legal reforms of church, state, and society on the strength of Luther’s new theology, p…[Read more]

Legal historian Charles Donahue mastered the method of reading historical legal texts in full interdisciplinary context. He applied his method most fully to medieval church courts, especially dealing with marriage and family questions, but also to other legal texts of Roman law and civilian jurisprudence, and Anglo-American common law. This…[Read more]

Already in Anglo-Saxon times, England condemned polygamy as a serious moral offense. But until 1604, it was left to church courts to punish polygamists using spiritual punishments. In 1604, however, Parliament enacted the Polygamy Act that made polygamy a capital crime, punishable by secular courts. Both individual victims of desertion or double…[Read more]

This brief response highlights parts of the Western story of monogamy versus polygamy that still need to be told, and responds to the reviewers’ question whether the legalization of same sex marriage will lead necessarily to the legalization of polygamous marriages.

This brief Foreword evaluates the innovative new theory of law, religion, and state by Catholic jurist, Rafael Domingo, and shows some of its antecedents in the natural law theory of Dutch Protestant jurist, Hugo Grotius.

This Article challenges the criticisms of religious freedom that have emerged among recent academics and politicians, and the growing subordination of religious freedom to sexual freedom claims. In particular, we analyze recent critical scholarship that claims that religious liberty was not important to the American founders and that calls for the…[Read more]

The Lutheran Reformation revolutionized both church and state, theology and law. This brief essay sketches the legal influence of the Reformation, building on Luther’s opening call for religious freedom and his more complex theory of the two kingdoms.

Genevan Reformer John Calvin produced a half dozen catechisms during his tenure in the city from 1536 to 1538 and 1541 to 1564. While not nearly so well-known as his Institutes of the Christian Religion or Geneva Bible, and not nearly so heavily used today as the later Reformed catechisms of Heidelberg or Westminster, Calvin’s catechisms were i…[Read more]

The interaction of law and Christianity has been a perennial topic of study over the past two millennia. In recent years, however, this topic has taken on new importance in legal education as scholars have wrestled with the contributions that Christian ideas, institutions, methods, and practices can make to state law. Both biblical and traditional…[Read more]

This essay traces David Little’s pioneering work on religion, human rights, and
religious freedom over the past half century, and its distillation in a recent collection of
his essays and a Festschrift in his honor.

Seventeenth-century English jurist and legal historian John Selden integrated the three classic schools of jurisprudence — natural law theory, legal positivism, and historical jurisprudence. He defined natural law as a set of fundamental legal principles commanded by God for the creation of a just legal order. He defined positive laws as those…[Read more]

The Lutheran Reformation transformed not only theology and the church but law and the state as well. Beginning in the 1520s, Luther joined up with various jurists and political leaders to craft ambitious legal reforms of church, state, and society on the strength of the new Protestant theology. These legal reforms were defined and defended in…[Read more]

The Western tradition has always cherished the family as an essential foundation of a just and orderly society, and thus accorded it special legal and religious protection. Christianity embraced this teaching from the start, and helped to shape many of the basics of Western family law using its theologies of nature, sacrament, and covenant. This…[Read more]

Former Augustinian monk Martin Luther (1483-1546) rejected the canon law rules of clerical and monastic celibacy as a dangerous denial of God’s soothing gift of marriage to remedy lust. He rejected the church’s sacramental theology of marriage as a self-serving biblical fiction, and instead called marriage a social estate of earthy life, open to…[Read more]

Swiss theologian Emil Brunner (1899-1966) developed a liberal Protestant theology of the family, contrary to the more traditional biblical views of his compatriot Karl Barth. Brunner treated the family as a natural order of creation, alongside the state and economy. The family has a natural monogamous structure and a built-in set of spousal and…[Read more]

Our contemporary debates about the nature of sex, marriage, and family life are not new. A half millennium ago, the Protestant Reformation set off a comparably tumultuous sexual revolution that bitterly divided the Catholic and Protestant worlds. Over the next cen- tury, jurists and theologians used various natural law theories to de- velop a…[Read more]

En este artículo, el autor analiza los cuatro distintos modelos de libertad religiosa que se pueden distinguir en la época fundacional estadounidense: el modelo puritano, el evangélico, el ilustrado y el cívico-republicano. Los exponents de estos cuatro modelos a menudo defendieron causas communes y utilizaron un mismo lenguaje, par…[Read more]

This chapter explores the role of metaphors in shaping our thought and language in general, and in the fields of law and religion in particular. Drawing on modern cognitive theorists like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, the article distinguishes and illustrates the roles of “orientation,” “structural,” and “ontological” metaphors in everyday li…[Read more]