Law and the SacredStanford University Press, 2007 - 192 Seiten The specter of the sacred always haunts the law, even in the most resolute of contemporary secular democracies. Indeed, the more one considers the question of the relation between law and the sacred, the more it appears that endless debate over the proper relationship of government to religion is only the most quotidian example of a problematic that lies at the heart of law itself. And currently, as some in the United States grapple with the seeming fragility of secular democracy in the face of threatening religious fundamentalisms, the question has gained a particular urgency. This book explores questions about the fundamental role of the sacred in the constitution of law, historically and theoretically. It examines contemporary efforts to separate law from the sacred and asks: How did the division of law and sacred come to be, in what ways, and with what effects? In doing so, it highlights the ambivalent place of the sacred in the self-image of modern states and jurisprudence. For if it is the case that, particularly in the developed West, contemporary law posits a fundamental conceptual divide between sacred and secular, it nevertheless remains true that the assertion of that divide has its own history, one that defines Western modernity itself. |
Inhalt
The Profanity of Law 29 | 29 |
Pragmatic Rule and Personal Sanctification in Islamic Legal Theory 16 | 91 |
Is Reformation Thinkable or Possible? | 109 |
The Ethos of Sovereignty | 135 |
Law Modernity and the Sacred | 155 |
185 | |
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Agamben al-Ghazali al-Shatibi ambivalence American argues Aristotelian authority basic believe biopolitics Cambridge canon law Christian Church civil claim conception Constitution criminal law culture decisions defining democracy democratic Derrida divine law doctrine ethos of sovereignty faith Fraher Freud fundamental Giorgio Agamben halakha History homo sacer Hubert and Mauss human judgments Ibid Ibn Taymiyya ideas institutions intellectual interpretation Islamic Jacques Derrida Jean-Luc Nancy Jewish law Jews judicial supremacy jurisdiction jurisprudence justice Kafka law enforcement Law Review legal systems liberal meaning modern law moral Noahide Law original paradox of sovereignty philosophy pluralism political practical pragmatic premodern procedural profane rabbinic realm reason relation religion religious law rhetoric rule sacrality sacred law sacrifice Sanford Levinson secular law secularist theology sense shari'a Sinaitic and Noahide social sovereign spiritual Stanford strict constructionism Sufi Supreme Court temporal theological secularism theory thought tion Totem and Taboo tradition trans transcendent U.S. Supreme Court University Press York