Agape Justice And Law

In a provocative essay, philosopher Jeffrie G. Murphy asks: 'what would law be like if we organized it around the value of Christian love, and if we thought about and criticized law in terms of that value?'. This book brings together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to address that question. Scholars have given surprisingly little attention to assessing how the central Christian ethical category of love - agape - might impact the way we understand law. This book aims to fill that gap by investigating the relationship between agape and law in Scripture, theology, and jurisprudence, as well as applying these insights to contemporary debates in criminal law, tort law, elder law, immigration law, corporate law, intellectual property, and international relations. At a time when the discourse between Christian and other world views is more likely to be filled with hate than love, the implications of agape for law are crucial.

This book addresses key contemporary legal debates from the perspective of the central Christian ethical category of love, agape.

This book addresses key contemporary legal debates from the perspective of the central Christian ethical category of love, agape

Increasingly, the modern neo-liberal world marginalises any notion of religion or spirituality, leaving little or no room for the sacred in the public sphere. While this process advances, the conservative and harmful behaviours associated with some religions and their adherents exacerbate this marginalisation by driving out those who remain religious or spiritual. And all of this is seen through the lens of social science, which seems to agree that religion remains important, if not in spiritual sense, at least as a source of folklore and a means of identification: religions remain rooted in the societies from which they emerged, and the legal systems of many of those societies emerged from religious sources, even if those societies remain unwilling to admit that fact. In the modern materialistic world of conformity, religion is less a source of guidance than a label of identification. The world therefore faces two issues. First, the decreasing level of spirituality in the ‘West’ widens the gap between worshippers and those who have left their faith (eg agnostics and atheists, or those who look at religion as a matter of ‘picking and choosing’ from a range of options). And, second, the strong connections to religion which remain in many nations, but which are often misused in the secular public sphere (both in the West and internationally). In such divided worlds, both religious and secular forces tend to lock themselves into closed groupings of ‘pure truth’ and in so doing increase the level of disagreement, in turn producing radicalism. In short, the modern world is divided in two ways: between religious and non-religious (although some have argued that the non-religious secular is itself a form of civil religion), and between those subscribing to divergent understandings of the same religious tradition. While hyperbolic and histrionic, the term ‘culture wars’ nonetheless best captures what we see happening in the public sphere today. The question emerges, then: how best to accommodate the democratic principle which posits that the majority should feel that it lives in a society of its own with the human rights principle, holding that is necessary to ensure the full protection of the minority’s rights? How to balance these seemingly opposed principles? We are very familiar with the differences that appear between secular and sacred in the modern world; yet, what of the similarities amongst scriptures and laws which seek to encourage mutual understanding, cooperation and even cohabitation? Because religion itself is a source of law, a set of exhortations or commands as much as a set of rights, every major religion offers an approach to encountering ‘the Other’ in a positive, constructive, affirming way; and it is here that religions reveal much that they have in common. This book draws together the work of scholars engaged in exploring the possibilities for a ‘utopian’ world in the sense fostered by St Thomas More. The essays explore those dimensions of religious and civil law where ‘love’ – however that is defined by relevant texts – fosters and encourages acceptance of ‘the Other’ and will offer perspectives on the ways in which religious or civil/state law command one to act in the spirit of ‘love’.

What is the place of Christian love in a pluralistic society dedicated to liberty and justice for all ? What would it mean to take both Jesus Christ and Abraham Lincoln seriously and attempt to translate love of God and neighbor into every quarter of life, including law and politics? Timothy Jackson addresses such questions in Political Agape: Prophetic Christianity and Liberal Democracy. Jackson argues that love of God and neighbor is the perilously neglected civil virtue of our time and that it must be considered even before justice in structuring political principles and policies. To indicate the specific implications of civic agapism, he looks at such issues as the death penalty, Christian complicity in the Holocaust, the case for same-sex marriage, and the morality of adoption. The book concludes with Jackson s reflections on Martin Luther King Jr. as a Christian hero.

Explores how Martin Luther King, Jr built his advocacy on moral claims of love, justice and human nature.

Contemporary worship music shapes the way evangelical Christians understand worship itself. Author Monique M. Ingalls argues that participatory worship music performances have brought into being new religious social constellations, or "modes of congregating". Through exploration of five of these modes--concert, conference, church, public, and networked congregations--Singing the Congregation reinvigorates the analytic categories of "congregation" and "congregational music." Drawing from theoretical models in ethnomusicology and congregational studies, Singing the Congregation reconceives the congregation as a fluid, contingent social constellation that is actively performed into being through communal practice--in this case, the musically-structured participatory activity known as "worship." "Congregational music-making" is thereby recast as a practice capable of weaving together a religious community both inside and outside local institutional churches. Congregational music-making is not only a means of expressing local concerns and constituting the local religious community; it is also a powerful way to identify with far-flung individuals, institutions, and networks that comprise this global religious community. The interactions among the congregations reveal widespread conflicts over religious authority, carrying far-ranging implications for how evangelicals position themselves relative to other groups in North America and beyond.