Year: 2019
Type: editorial
Abstract: The four articles in this issue offer different perspectives on a perennial question of law and religion: how do law and religion respond to an ever-changing world?Both law and religion have strong commitments to tradition.Both spend much time looking back-to precedent, revelation, and prior practice-as they attempt to respond to the present.While tradition is central to both law and religion, this issue of JLR highlights the variety of legal and religious responses to change.Yifat Monnickendam examines the legal transplantation of Jewish law into the new religious community of Christianity.Deonnie Moodie describes the clash between changing aesthetics in India's courts and the desire by a local community to maintain traditional practices.Alex Deagon examines the thinking of John Milbank in relation to religious liberty; Milbank, in many ways, challenges the move away from forms of Christian tradition in political and social thought, and Deagon queries how the "new" development of religious liberty would t in Milbank's thought.Charles Reid looks to the history of changing justications for the Catholic Church's ofcial response to same-sex relations to anticipate the possibility of new responses by the church in light of a changing social landscape.Each in their own way, these authors interrogate assumptions about the balance of stasis over change in law and religion.Yifat Monnickendam's "Biblical Law in Greco-Roman Attire: The Case of Levirate Marriage in Late Antique Christian Legal Traditions" addresses the overarching question: What happened to biblical law when transferred to late antique Christianity?Monnickendam aims, in addressing that question, to "provide a paradigm that helps us understand the rise and development of late antique Christian legal traditions"-a "paradigm that elucidates how Christians adopted, adapted, and sometimes rejected their legal heritage, illuminating the overall development of Christian legal discourse." 1 Monnickendam's article thereby "recontextualizes the legal discourse, positioning the Christian approach to levirate marriage as a complex case of legal transplant and adaptation of a legal heritage." 2 At the beginning of "Seeing Blood: Judicial Power versus Divine Desire at a Hindu Temple in West Bengal," Deonnie Moodie reports that "[a]cross India, critiques of animal sacrice have become increasingly strident over the past fteen years." 3 She then proceeds to contextualize and discuss a 2006 decision of the Calcutta High Court concerning a particular practice of animal sac-rice: the daily sacrice of goats to the Hindu goddess Kali at Kalighat, a landmark Hindu pilgrimage site in Kolkata.Although the court did not go so far as to ban the practice, it ruled that the practice must be visually concealed.Professor Moodie suggests, in concluding her commentary, the ironic possibility that "the High Court's ruling may just increase the appeal of [animal] sacrice in the same idiom of the Tantric tradition in which it is rooted."4 In addressing an issue of religious freedom, Moodie's article is of interest well beyond India.1 Yifat
Source: Journal of Law and Religion
DOI: 10.1017/jlr.2019.35
Authors: Michael J. Perry, Silas W. Allard
Institution: Emory University
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4233846115