Religion & Law

Aidan O'Neill, Roman Catholicism and the Temptation of Shari'a, Common Knowledge, 15:2 (Duke University Press 2009).  Interesting, informative, provocative.

You may download it here:  Roman_Catholicism_and_the_Temptation_of_Shari'a.

This is how it begins:

Perhaps, even if I have misread his contributions to the present and immediately

preceding issues of Common Knowledge, Alick Isaacs will not take it amiss if I say

they have stimulated the appearance of this essay of mine in the same venue and

context.1 Our efforts have in common, first, that we both are Scots whose religion

is not that of the state-recognized national Church of Scotland: Dr. Isaacs,

as I understand it, is a modern Orthodox Jew, and I am a Roman Catholic. We

share also, and more significantly, a discontent, as citizens of the post-Nuremberg

world order, with elements of our respective orthodoxies ? and I believe we share

also a sense that the authorities of our religions, in reaction against modernity,

have gone astray from their own longer-term traditional principles. Dr. Isaacs

writes, in this milieu, on behalf of peace. It is my intention to write here, in a

complementary fashion, on behalf of democracy, its institutions, and the exercise

of individual conscience. For his part, Dr. Isaacs builds a case on foundational

texts of the talmudic age ? and in turning first to the Christian Gospels, so, in

a sense, do I.