 This program is brought to you by Emory University. The time has come for us now to commence our concluding session. As our concluding session is not meant at all to end the dialogue, but simply to begin to pull it together. To moderate this final session, we have back to Emory, President Rebecca Chop. Rebecca was on the faculty here at Emory, faculty and administration for 15 years from 1986 to 2001. She came in 86 as a professor at Candler School of Theology, became the Candler Professor of Theology, then was seduced into academic leadership, became interim provost, provost and executive vice president of the university. We lost her in part from the classroom during those years, but we benefited tremendously from her leadership. During her 15 years here at Emory, President Chop played a critical role in the formation of what is now the Center for the Study of Law and Religion. We're indebted to you, Professor Chop, for all of your guidance in that area. She left us to head to the Divinity School at Yale and then on to become president in 2002 of Colgate University. A prolific scholar in her own right, Professor Chop's, President Chop's books include The Power to Speak, Feminism, Language and God, and Differing Horizons, Feminist Theology. In many ways, we could have had President Chop guide us throughout these last two days in all of our discussions. But what I hope is that we're going to be able to talk President Chop into being back here at Emory on a regular basis and continuing to participate with us in the work of the Law and Religion Program. But for now, I turn it over to President Chop as the moderator of the concluding session. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, Frank. It is a pleasure and an honor to be able to introduce this last session. First of all, I want to recognize that this session is the Al McDonald Lectures. Al is one of my very favorite Emory people, and it's great to be able to introduce his session, which of course is our capstone event in this conference. And what a great capstone it is. I am so thrilled that we have Bella and Marty together on the stage. This is so exciting to have both of them. I was convinced it was the first time this amazing event had happened. But then they started reminiscing about the times they've been together at other places. But we're very glad to have them here at our capstone event. Robert N. Bella is Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Bella is the author and editor of several essays and books. His two most influential articles are Civil Religion in America, 1967, and Religious Evolution, 1964, the latter of which he is transforming into a book. His books include Beyond Belief, The Broken Covenant, The New Religious Consciousness, and Varieties of Civil Religion and Uncivil Religion. In 1985, the University of California Press published the widely discussed Habits of the Heart, Individualism and Commitment in American Life, a cultural analysis of American society, which I'm sure that many of us in this room talk many, many times. Professor Bella wrote in collaboration with Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, and Swidler, and our own Stephen Tipton. In 1991, Knopf published The Good Society, written by the same five authors as Habits of the Heart. Some of us got to be interviewed for that one. In 1996, the University of California Press published a new paperback edition of Habits of the Heart with the new introduction by the authors entitled A House Divided. Professor Bella is the holder of many awards and many degrees. Of course, one of the most important is the United States National Humanities Medal. I can't wait to hear him speak on the topic. Can we imagine a global civil religion? Professor Bella? Well, thank you, Rebecca. I'm very happy that there are people left after this heavy couple of days, and that stunning session that just preceded us. I want to express, in spite of redundancy, my profound gratitude to the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, and particularly for the global thrust. And what initially was primarily Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, has now stretched out to include all the great world religions. And it seems to me that that's really what I want to talk about today. And what Professor Waldron, my immediate predecessor, was talking about, the need for solidarity beyond the nation-state. And that seems to me the work of the Center is very much moving in directions that will help build that solidarity. But I want to start by commenting on my somewhat provocative title and remembering that in my essay Civil Religion in America, first published in Daedalus in 1967, exactly 40 years ago, which unfortunately quite a few people think is the only thing I ever wrote, I did discuss toward the end the possibility of what I called a world civil religion. Naive, though it may sound today, the idea of a world civil religion as expressing what I wrote at the time, the attainment of some kind of viable and coherent world order was the imagined resolution of what I then called America's third time of trial, an idea later developed in my book The Broken Covenant. The first time of trial was concerned with the question of independence and the second with the issue of slavery, but the third, as I then put it, was concerned with America's place in the world and indeed the kind of world it would have a place in. That quote viable and coherent world order, unquote for which I hoped would I believe require, quote, a major new set of symbolic forms. I argued the flickering flame of the United Nations burns too low to the focus of a cult, but the emergence of a genuine transnational sovereignty would certainly change this. So much in 67. A genuinely transnational sovereignty? This utopian idea is something we will have to think about later. But though the idea of a world civil religion would, I argued in one sense, be the fulfillment of, quote, the eschatological hope of American civil religion and for Gene Elstein's sake I can remind her that I centrally mentioned Lincoln in that article. Nonetheless, quote, it obviously would draw on religious traditions beyond the sphere of biblical religion alone. This extraordinary vision might make it seem that my essay of 40 years ago was hopelessly out of touch with reality. The resolution of the third time of trial being no closer today than it was then, perhaps even further away. Unless one realizes that much of the actual text of that essay was a severe criticism of an America that had gone badly astray and was not helping the world toward a viable and coherent world order at all. I included a long quotation from Senator J. William Fulbright about, quote, the arrogance of power. And I went on to recall Robinson Jeffers, whose poetry I said, quote, seems more apt now than when it was written. Alas, today those words are once again remarkably apt. Jeffers wrote, unhappy country, what wings you have. Weep, it is frequent in human affairs. Weep for the terrible magnificence of the means, the ridiculous incompetence of the reasons, the bloody and shabby pathos of the result. 1967, 2007, where are we? In my own life do I have to go through this twice? I must admit on occasion to saying Vietnam when I mean Iraq. I envy those of you who have no actual memory of the Vietnam War since you will not have to go through the experience of seeing your country make the same catastrophic mistake twice in less than 50 years. Still, we can hope. Perhaps hope is all we have. Times of trial in human history have often been protracted, have lasted a hundred years or more, and if ours seems to have no end in sight, we can still imagine the possibility, even the necessity of a viable and coherent world order if our catastrophe, ecological, political, economic is not to become total. One thing I learned from the complex discussion of the 1967 essays is that for many particularly religious believers, but also secularists, the idea of a civil religion was viewed as a threat, one religion competing with and threatening to displace other religions, even as being established. And many of my critics quoted the kind of things that Jeremy Gunn cited at length in his talk, although that wasn't what my original paper was about. It was the prophetic side of civil religion, but nonetheless civil religion is certainly a vexed and complex tradition at best. All my Durkheimian arguments that any really existing social group necessarily has a religious dimension never quelled the opposition to the point where by about 1980 I stopped using the term civil religion and talked about the same issues using other language, languages that did not involve me in endless futile discussions of definition. And thank God the term doesn't appear in Habits of the Heart, so I never had to fight that battle again. So if American civil religion is a bad idea, a global civil religion can only be worse, and I can answer the question in my title, which as I said was meant to provoke as much as to describe a negative. No, a global civil religion is not possible. But for the creation of a viable and coherent world order, a world civil society is surely an essential precondition. And dare I say it, any actual civil society will have a religious dimension, will need not only a legal and an ethical framework, but some notion that it conforms to the nature of ultimate reality. The biggest immediate problem is the strengthening of global civil society, and it is on that that I want to focus this afternoon, but I will have some hints and suggestions that perhaps the religious communities of the world may have something to contribute to that global civil society, and indeed that their participation may be essential for its success. But first I think I have to raise a serious question, not one on the table in 1967, as to whether we don't already have a global civil religion. Harvey Cox raised this issue starkly in his essay, quote, Mammon and the Culture of the Market, in his Contribution to My Festift, published in 2002. In his first paragraph, Cox says, my thesis is that the emerging global market culture, despite those who do not or choose not to see it, is generating an identifiable, value-laden, religious world view. The market, Cox argues, is not seen as a human creation, but as a power beyond human control. In this view, the market is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. All we have to do as individuals or nations is to bow down to it. Its demands are beyond question. Cox calls for a Christian theological critique of this God who is no God and reminds us of Jesus' words, you cannot serve God and Mammon. Luke 16-13, the New Testament doesn't translate the Arabic Mammon into Greek, probably because it sounded like a pagan deity, which it is, that the RSV translates it as unfortunate, but the other group have that argument elsewhere. Although many are suffering under the rule of this deity, those who celebrate it can be found all over the world in China and India as well as in the West, and for the moment they seem to be without serious opposition. But if the worship of Mammon is the new global religion, it is not one that can create a viable and coherent world order or a global civil society that might make that possible. On the contrary, it seems to make our grave problems, environmental catastrophe, the greatest inequality in human history worse, not better. Can we understand what is happening and can we see any alternative? I want to use some statements of Michael Walzer as a foil for my argument. I have learned much from him, I have taught some of his books, so it was with some surprise that I found myself raising serious questions about his book, Thick and Thin, Moral Argument at Home and Abroad. I was amazed to learn from him that humanity in effect does not exist. He writes, societies are necessarily particular because they have members with memories not only of their own but of their common life. Humanity by contrast, Walzer says, has members but no memory, it has no history, no culture, no customary practices, no familiar life ways, no festivals, no shared understanding of social goods. It is human to have such things, but there is no singular way of having them. And later in the book he writes, our common humanity will never make us members of a single universal tribe. The crucial commonality of the human race is particularism. We participate all of us in thick cultures that are our own, unquote. This is especially news to me since I have spent much of my life, particularly the last 10 years writing the history of humanity in a book tentatively entitled Religion and Human Evolution. What I would question in Walzer's position is the idea that the global and the particular are mutually exclusive. That one lives in one and only one community, which were a true, which surely made the idea of membership in a single universal tribe impossible. I would argue on the contrary that humans have never lived in one and only one community. And that we almost always and in modern times necessarily always live in many overlapping communities. And under the rule of Mammon, none of them are particularly thick. To affirm that humanity has no memory, no history, and no culture seems to be remarkable at a time when there is widespread popular interest in human origins and human evolution, and since the pioneering work of William McNeil in world history. And if the Olympic Games and for much of the world cup aren't global festivals, what are they? According to the Wikipedia, 715 million people watched the 2006 World Cup. Now, Harold Berman has eloquently argued for the existence of world law, which necessarily implies at least the beginnings of world politics and world civil society. While we have no world state and wouldn't want one, the beginnings of world governance, which is not the same thing as a world state, we certainly have. A remarkable example is the fact that air traffic control and the rules for landing and taking off at airports are the same all over the world. Even more obviously, our global economy would be impossible where they're not a plethora of rules, some legal, some customary governing global trade and capital transfers. That world society doesn't exist, and each of us is stuck in his or her particularistic tribe, as Waltz's firm seems to be remarkably far from the truth. World culture can be traced all the way back. The bow and arrow, for example, has been adopted by every place on Earth, except Australia, long before history. Stiff Thompson traced motifs in folklore that can be found in every continent. I have news for you. There are many stories in the Bible that are shared by people all over the world. You may not know that, but if you study, you will find that there is more sharing going on through history than we ever dreamed. Even the nation's state is a cultural form that has been transmitted with remarkable fidelity over the entire world since the 19th century as the work of John Meyer and his associates have abundantly shown. Global culture, which I would insist is a deep feature of human history, is not the same thing as global civil society or global governance. Civil society is a relatively late idea, only emerging for the first time in the West in the 18th century. It is worth noting that world trade, often the carrier of world culture, can be traced back into the deepest recesses of human history, but was growing in importance since classical times when China and India were linked in a variety of ways with the Middle East and Europe. After the European discovery of the new world trade truly became global. The principled independence of the market from state and guild monopolies was a feature of the early modern period pioneered in Britain, but rapidly diffusing to other societies and making possible the emergence of modern capitalism. Developing only slightly later, but overlapping the disembedding of the economy, was the emergence of civil society or the public sphere, a realm of thought, argument, and association independent of the state, but leading to the formation of what came to be called public opinion, which politicians could ignore at their peril. I will use civil society as virtually synonymous with public sphere. I know there's a lot of argument about terminology, but for the sake of this talk, in a way that has become common in recent writings, to refer to forms of communication and association that have been disembedded from the state and are not directly controlled by the market. In the 18th century the main problem was to achieve independence from the state and the institutionalization of human rights was the essential precondition for the independence of civil society. The First Amendment to the American Constitution guaranteeing freedom of religion, speech, and assembly is the legal basis that makes civil society possible in our country and similar developments have followed, not without much struggle and backsliding elsewhere ever since. Even where such rights are included in constitutions are consistently violated in practice. This again suggests that culture and even law have spread where institutions and practices have not yet fully developed. Civil society, though oriented to the discussion and advocacy of political issues, lacks the capacity to make binding decisions. However, it is closely related to another 18th century idea, the sovereignty of the people. It was Robespierre who first gave the idea of democracy a positive meaning after centuries during which it was usually a pejorative term. Democracy as a way of exercising the sovereignty of the people gave civil society the right not to make political decisions but to elect those who would. This idea has now achieved global legitimacy even where it is often honored in the breach. Most writing about civil society has taken the nation state as a basic frame of reference, and of late there has been quite a bit of discussion of global civil society. Alejandro Colas has made the useful point that civil society was international virtually from the beginning. Though it may have originated in Britain in the 18th century, it was already disseminated to the American colonists whose actions in turn were widely influential on the continent as were British practices. In fact, all the great modern ideologies, liberalism, nationalism, socialism, in our time, feminism, environmentalism have been international and involve not only cross-national communication of a variety of sorts but many international associations. We may think of nationalism as antithetical to globalism but nationalism has always been an international phenomenon. Colas cites the interesting example of Giuseppe Mazzini, the most important theorist of Italian nationalism in the 19th century, who established in 1847 the People's International League whose objectives he defined as to disseminate the principles of national freedom and progress to embody and manifest an efficient public opinion in favor of the right of every people to self-government and the maintenance of their own nationality to promote a good understanding between the peoples of every country. I'm not saying that much of the subsequent nationalism would ever have appealed to Mazzini who was a liberal, a Democrat, a profoundly humane person. Once the cat got out of the box we know horrible things happened but the original idea was itself humane and it was certainly international. Mass communications but particularly the Internet have made possible the organization of global public opinion to a degree unimaginable only a few years ago. Adam Lupelle has described a remarkable event. On 15 February 2003 across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia as many as 30 million people took to the city streets to express opposition to the planned invasion of Iraq. It seemed an extraordinary moment for global civil society perhaps for the first time living up to its name. The anti-war movement appeared to accomplish in a day what four years of transnational activism against neoliberal globalization could not. It brought together constituencies from east and west, north and south into a broad based movement with a common clear objective stop the US led drive to war. The next week saw what was a pyrrhic victory for global civil society. The protests no doubt contributed to the Bush administration's defeat in the UN Security Council but in the end they also contributed to the heightened sense that the United States and global civil society the United Nations and global civil society were impotent next to the hegemonic power of the United States. Global public opinion Loupel goes on to say as best it could be determined was overwhelmingly opposed to the war and yet by most accounts war seemed inevitable from the very start. For all the advances in international communications and the spread of international law in the 20th century there remains no institutional mechanism to effectively channel the transnational communication communicative power of an emerging global civil society. Using this example in both its positive and negative aspects as a starting point we can ask where are we? Granted that there is a global economy, global culture, global law, global civil society, even global festivals why are global institutions both so promising and so weak? I will turn to Jurgen Habermas Europe's leading social philosopher for help. In his remarkable essay of 1998 The Post-National Constellation in the Future of Democracy Habermas organizes his discussion around the tension between two central facts in our present situation. The nation-state is the largest form of society that has been able to create a sense of common membership powerful enough to convince a majority of the citizens that they have a responsibility for all including the least advantaged thus giving rise to significant redistribution in what we have come to call the welfare state and to the rise of the global neoliberal market ideology and practice as everywhere threatened the capacity of nation-states to carry out the responsibilities inherent in the notion of common membership. What Habermas is describing is a double disparity between economics and politics. Economics is seen as the realm of the natural, not the social whereas politics is the sphere of intentional social choice but when nations are the sole locations of effective politics and the economy has become global then the disparity in power between global economy and even the strongest state means that it is the economy that will determine outcomes in the end. In this situation Habermas asks whether we can have a politics that can catch up with global markets in order to revert the natural disaster that an uninhibited market economy seems to entail that we know from history has always entailed. Another way he puts it is to stress the need of quote, a world domestic policy because we are now living in a world not in nation-states alone and the world market requires such a policy. As a practical example though one with implications for larger forms of political cooperation he takes the European Union and the difficulties it has faced in becoming more effective than simply a currency union. Habermas uses the example of what he calls the modern state as a constitutional republic no longer a nation in the sense of a particular ethnic group but including people of various ethnic, religious and linguistic backgrounds united in what he calls an abstract constitutional patriotism such that its members can still identify with each other and even sacrifice some of their own advantages for the common welfare. He points out that an effective European Union would require quote that Swedes and Portuguese are willing to take responsibility for one another to the degree that the EU has given special advantage to its poorer members this has actually begun to happen with apparent public support well not without some opposition but he points out that the neoliberal economy not only pressures all nations to lower wages and decreased benefits but also to lower taxes to the point where the state no longer has the resources to carry out social programs. A really effective EU would be able to stop or reverse this tendency by setting minimum wages and higher taxes across the Union Ultimately, of course, a global Union would be necessary to reverse the neoliberal drive to the bottom. The most fundamental question that Habermas is raising is whether a global civil society and some forms of global governance are possible. A civil society and governance that would not replace nation states but would place some limits on their autonomy as the global economy already does and here there is a question of what kind of people we are Could we as Americans accept the notion of common global membership such that we would be willing to give up something of ours for the sake of Somalians or Vietnamese is at this point that I think we have to ask what are the cultural resources for thinking of global citizenship that would go along with global economics and moderate its excesses. Is abstract constitutional patriotism enough? It is here that we have to consider philosophical and religious resources for thinking about membership in global civil society membership that would entail at least short term sacrifice. Since we actually have since the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its subsequent elaborations something that can be called a global ethic sometimes referred to as the human rights regime we can ask how much help we can derive from this consensus one that is not simply an ideal but that has significant legal weight though by far not enforceable everywhere not even in the original home of the legal human rights the United States and we can ask whether the questions raised by non-western and non-Christian thinkers about the adequacy of an exclusive emphasis on human rights can be answered as well as the question whether an exclusive focus on human rights may not be part of the problem however much in the end it is surely part of the solution. Since human rights emancipation and enlightenment are a part of the modern project ethically construed they are shared by significant actors all over the world they are not the concerns of westerners as opposed to non-westerners indeed they have western as well as non-western opponents nor are they limited to the modern seen as a finite and completed period in human history as the post-modernists argue to the extent that human rights as we understand them have significant Christian historical roots something many supporters of human rights may not be aware of or care to be aware of it is also worth remembering that Christianity is now a global phenomenon Webb King in his powerful new book Christian Moderns that at the beginning of the 21st century one third of the world is now Christian and that one third of those Christians live in former colonies I used to think that the Christian century for which Marty writes and which I read faithfully was foolishly named at the end of the 19th century the 20th century was the Christian century ah tell me about it ah as King points out many of the leaders of non-western countries including formerly leaders of independence movements were educated in missionary schools even though they were not converts and one could add that reform movements in Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam have been to more than a small degree a response to Christian particularly Protestant examples so if there is a relation between Christianity modernity and human rights it has for some time been global it is no longer western I wonder if Habermas's abstract constitutional patriotism will ever be enough it is one thing to believe in abstract principles it is another to mobilize the motivation to put those principles into institutional practice Hans Joas has recently pointed out following the pioneering work of Georg Yelenech that Max Weber picked up that though ideas about human rights go way back in western history and include classical, Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist thinking it was only when the American sectarian Protestants in the 18th century mainly the Baptists and Quakers were willing to fight for them that they got included in the American Constitution religious fervor is always problematic because it has so often been used for evil as well as good purposes but it may be that only such a powerful motivation could make human rights genuinely practical and though Christianity has a big contribution to make it is surely not alone Confucians hold on the basis of the analects of Confucius that all within the foresees are brothers Buddhists identify not only with all human beings but with all beings in the universe natural as well as human for millennia these deep commitments have been held but never effectively institutionalized can the world's religions now mobilize their commitments so that they can at least have genuine institutional at last have genuine institutional force what the world requires now must go on at many levels religious, ideological, political on the global, national and local levels but one thing Habermas' scenario requires is very evident however difficult to achieve we must now turn the idea of being citizens of the world into a practical citizenship willing to be responsible for the world of which we are citizens and here Jeremy Waldron's point that human beings which in different ways all the great religions hold have warrant in ultimate reality for their being are not limited to any nation-state and if we respect them and hope that the respect for them will be institutionalized such institutions must transcend the nation-state I truly believe that there are millions of citizens of the world today in every country willing to make the necessary commitments when I see what the Scandinavian countries spend on aid to the poorest of the poor percentage of GNP many many many many many times higher than our home I wonder if those countries are not already a majority citizens of the world whether they are in the majority or not the problem is politicians will continue to pander to short-term interests until their constituents force them to do otherwise what we need is to turn a growing minority into an effective majority for those of us in the United States a classical example might be instructive as far as I know the first usage of the idea of being citizens of the world originated with the stoic philosophers in the ancient Mediterranean they thought of themselves as kosmopoliti literally citizens of the world but for us it is worth remembering that even the Roman stoics who tended to write in Greek actually Marcus Aurelius meditations are in Greek if you don't remember there is no Latin translation Sheldon Pollock speculates following Avid that this was because the Romans thought that their task was to transform the cosmos into their polis or rather to transform to use their own language the orbes into their orbs the vast world into their own city if one looks at George Bush's national security strategy of September 2002 one can see that he claims the oversight of the entire world for the United States which might explain why Americans have been hesitant to become citizens of the world because I see neoliberalism as the source of our deepest global problems it might be thought that I am opposed to it all together that would be as foolish at this point in history as to be opposed to capitalism altogether what I worry about is the destructive consequences of the naturalization of neoliberalism so that it has no effective challenge I agree with Habermas the world politics needs to catch up with the world economy so that an effective structure of regulation can be created that will protect the environment and the vulnerable of the earth who are paying the price while only a few are reaping the benefits if this is a political challenge it is also a religious challenge I am convinced that religious motivation is a necessary factor to transform the growing moral consensus and the significant beginnings of world law into an effective form of global solidarity and global governance thank you thank you professor Bella 30 years ago I graduated from seminary and got sent to two small rural churches in Kansas the bishop didn't quite know where to send me I was one of the first women he had to send out so he sent me to one church America's Kansas that was charismatic and another church called Calvary that was dying a young minister should never be sent to churches named Calvary and my world was interesting but a little bit crazy here I had attended this wonderful little seminary got in this great liberal Protestant education was all of a sudden driving seven miles between one church that was completely charismatic speaking in tongues praising the Lord and another church that was pretty angry and upset I was also a new mother it was a little crazy the sanity every week came when I got the Christian century I can't tell you what was in that except Martin Marty's articles he was my anchor but also my bridge builder and for 30 years Martin Marty has been an intellectual anchor and a bridge builder for me as well as I imagine for many of you in this room a PhD from the University of Chicago he is the second Robert W. Woodward visiting professor of interdisciplinary religious studies at Emory University and Fairfax M. Cohn distinguished professor emeritus of the University of Chicago Marty is a renowned church historian and author he's been in residence at Emory for the 2000 and 2004 2003-2004 academic year where he co-directed the Center for the Study of Law and Religion he focused on the child in law, religion and society project and he hosted the Center's Family Forum series he taught for 35 years at the University of Chicago where I was one of his students many others in this room where the Martin Marty Center has been founded to promote public religion endeavors Time Magazine called him the most influential interpreter of religion in the nation he is the author of more than 50 books including most recently The Mystery of the Child today I think his title suggests that he is again helping anchor our thought as well as bridge build the religious future of law the legal future of religion Martin Marty Dear friends, Abraham Lincoln said if we could first know where we are and whether we are tending we might know what to do and how to do it with that sentence I provided the text for the evening meditation and paid my debts so that I can operate congenially with my colleague Gene Bethke Elstein who would like to have Abraham Lincoln mentioned exactly is the thrill to be here if I had a billboard I'd put there all my debts to it I've talked to several people here who would like to model from this conference and this place extensions of this and we heard many people talking about that along the way I use that Lincoln quote because I'm going to talk about the future it's my assignment I know that you know that I know that we don't know anything about the future anything that's interesting at least all the things in my life that I'd use as markers the Second Vatican Council who prophesied it a day before it was called the fall of the Soviet Union the rise of jihad language into our life multiculturalism, globalization the DNA, AIDS, etc there's a certain day when you see that little headline and it grows into something that alters our life entirely and so a lot of us are a little bit irreverent about talking about the future usually it's an intellectual like Yogi Berra who gets quoted I have seen the future and it is very much like the present only longer or prediction is real easy unless it's about the future and a historian my job is the past one deals sub-spatiae pateritorum we have nothing to say really as historians until something's happened then we can usually explain why it had to happen just the way it did and we would have foreseen it had we foreseen it but but we didn't present and past Lincoln again, if we could first know where we are and whether we are tending we might know what to do and how to do it and I think every paper at this conference has been an assessment of some feature of the present with some projection in hope in planning with use of intellect and maybe spiritual force to move in that direction so the future of law most obvious thing to say is it's going to be more of it Professor Bell has just neatly outlined all of the implications for a global economy and global interaction and law will be a part of all of that law gets ever more complex in our own society I don't know any place where one escapes the reach of law totalitarian societies totally misuse it because they have only a law of control at the opposite end I've always been amused that we think anarchists don't have laws my basic source book on it is called patterns of anarchy well, that's kind of archie isn't it if you have patterns and if you've ever dealt with people who conceived themselves as anarchists I did some during the free university movement and I'd sit somewhere and say that's not where you sit that's where so and so sits because they'd been there a year earlier an informal set of laws there's no place to escape it and there are plenty of reasons to fear a future in which the totalitarian impulse will grow and there's an anarchic impulse and between them is that very broad spectrum to which great numbers of hundreds of millions of people live under some version of a rule of law and I think what all of them all of us who are religious know is that in all polities law religion is subordinate to law it is in our constitution too it doesn't mean you have to be supine if you're religious but the state doesn't come to the church and ask to be let out of its stewardship campaign the church goes to the state and asks can we have tax exemption etc so the law is an overarching theme with which we have to work and we will do so more and more similarly with religion more that's more of a surprise I suppose and we should spend at least a moment discussing the definitions I know my time is short so I'll give you my usual definition that is quite accurate but people don't think it is I was one of the editors of a 16 volume book called the Encyclopedia of Religion and I define religion as the kind of stuff you write about in a book like that and if you think about it that's about it it has the entire expansion from invisible religion individualized religion historic religions to overarching religions but there are many debates in the academy especially among us who teach religion in academy some say there is no such thing as religion that's something you put on other kinds of realities but H. L. Menken in his book we say there is an Americanism called get religion you got religion so there must be something there that we touch and we know what we're talking about and what do you do with it for some you try to minimize the impact positive and negative of religion by alternatives that today usually go by the word spiritual every religious tradition I know honors the spiritual and they better it's a very big thing sometimes it becomes a surrogate my former colleague W. Sullivan was asked to define spirituality as it's around in our culture first you take everything religion is and then you take out everything that you don't like and what's left you call spirituality that usually means you take out the institutions and the common life and the sacrifice and the works that go there I don't want to knock the individual spirituality it is aesthetically beautiful it can ennoble an individual life we talked about law and religion in the future of each we have to know that for the vast majority of the people who are in any way spiritual they're going to be my classic definitions religious so what else can you do with it well you can kill it off if you want we hear a great deal these days about the new atheists and they're all best sellers that's an interesting cultural phenomenon and to make a best seller book you have to run into a few thousand at least but I think that they're all together they're upper middle class books highly literate people probably all of whom could be stuffed into the Baptist churches of Dallas on a Sunday morning not that the thing is to be decided that way but I'm trying to get the point across you are not going to get religion, religion you're not going to you can decide to kill it off and religion will be indifferent to your effort to kill it off indifference can kill it much more than but religion is growing and Robert Beller gave us some of those statistics if one third of the people in the world are Christian as they were a century ago in the midst of all this upheaval at mid-century why every seventh person in the world was Muslim at the turn of the century every fifth person was and Buddhism and Hinduism have come back and new and often very aggressive forms so going to be more law, more religion and more to talk about and deal with in the future and it's a bifocal thing now again I'm building on Robert Beller's theme what globalization has done you can no longer have the luxury of discussing law and religion inside the boundaries of your law office your church office your precinct, your parish your nation these things are being determined by us very far away and the edge that I described is very often an aggressive and assertive dimension to both law and to religion would be part of it so we need a framework for it and I'm going to use a framework that I always use for a framework once you find a framework you just have a framework so here's my framework it was published the same year that Robert Beller published the civil religion essay I don't know if I published anything but I read a book it's Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener the year 2000 it may be hard for people to believe but in the 1960s people couldn't wait for the year 2000 and there was a commission on the year 2000 you were probably on one of the subcommittees I was on the subcommittee on values and we disbanded almost instantly because we had the faintest idea what the values of 66 were to project into the future but Herman Kahn, Anthony Wiener wrote the year 2000 a framework for speculation on the next 33 years and I think it gives us a good framework now for determining how to deal with future of law and the future of religion the two of them devoted almost the entire book to the first of these but a page and a half to the second and I'm going to try to say in the subsequent 40 years that page and a half has swollen into equal shape here's the one this is right at the beginning of the book and its caption is table one basic long term multi-fold trend and they mentioned it could be increasing universality of the multi-fold trend it wasn't going to remain just western now I'm going to string these adjectives together and if you think about them ask yourself isn't this what the world was in 67 and isn't it more so now the word from pterum sorokin the sensate word you can forget about because they described it the world would be increasingly sensate meaning empirical look in the future going to be more so testing testing testing this worldly it's an awful lot of that running around secular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contractual humanistic and the like I don't know whether you remember Robert we were at the Vatican conference together that's the other Vatican Rome and Atlanta this is our new power center but we were at the conference on the culture of unbelief I think he had a paper I had a response there were six translators and I was to describe the world around us and I said well it's going to be more and more empirical this worldly secular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contracts Epicurean he's like and they came sputtering out of the translation books like tonight you buy the wine except for the German it was really easy I just changed all your xt now I tell a story that way so it'll stamp in your mind that was I think a very accurate picture of a mainstream basic long-term multi-fold trend and they elaborate on that in many kinds of ways but they were not stupid people and they wanted to give some weight to other things that are going on and gave a great deal of weight to it along the way on that little page and a half after they finished all the talk about that we were probably in what they call late-sensate culture still projected but still powerful something new was likely to come along and they quoted Sorokin and they said almost all of the 19th and 20th century philosophers of history seemed to believe it likely that this kind of religious stage will follow a termination of the sensate culture and they spelled out some versions of this new stage this stage could be spiritual and intellectual rather than a rising out of technology and again I've just tried to document that some of that is there there is a great deal of new intellectual energy being given to all the religions and their great spiritual burstings your charismatic congregation in Kansas I don't know whether it's your fault or not it's what's it's what's growing by the tens of millions every week every year in Africa 18,000 new Christians per day in sub-Saharan Africa and most of them are Pentecostal so there's a spiritual envisioning that they said every major philosopher of history of the past century and a half said it was coming secondly they said it could be properly religious a simple development of Christianity or Islam or whatever and we've seen that often back to the basics fundamentalisms, evangelicalisms traditionalisms reaching back for something that you can use to project into the future or it could be a new synthesis of East and West and I think there's a good deal of that going on never neat and easily but something's there or it could be completely different but say the authors in any case this is the key thing of early new religiosity all these philosophers of history argue that there will be quote some unpleasant events between the late sensate chaos and the new religiosity and I think that's exactly where we've been living in these recent years Realke has in one of his poems each torpid turn of the world has such children to whom no longer what's been and not yet what's here appears we can see the growth of both of these things at the same time often in the same nation in the same religious bodies maybe in ourselves the authors described what the philosophers history thought would be the basic attitudes in late sensate culture and this I'll leave up to you to decide whether this is what's going on but the mood would be and I didn't inflict this on the Vatican translators cynical, disillusioned nihilistic, chaotic patient, superficial weary, sophistic formalistic, atheistic trivial, changeable, meaningless alienated absolutely relative we won't have to handle them today except to say that that's their description of the mood in the time of the unpleasant events where these two worlds come together most macro historians quoting Conwayner hold with Farokin civilization will not continue along the multi-fold or any other trend but will either be terminated or have a more or less painful rebirth following this time of chaos, anarchy, nihilism and irrationality well as somebody who really does love rationality and order I don't want to say goodbye to any of that along the way and I don't think we have to say goodbye to it but we have to ask how are we going to deal with it when it comes to the focal points of what this means for a law and what it means for religion chaos law says order anarchy the law says archy monarchy or any other kind of archy nihilism versus commitment irrationality versus the rational our late colleague Paul Recour once said the modern world is constantly growing increasing in ever greater rationality and absurdity now if I'm assigning law mainly rationality there are plenty of legal scholars in the room that aren't so sure it's all that rational and if you think I'm going to assign religion to irrationality I hope you don't but he's pointing to the fact that these apparently contradictory forces can both be growing at the same time and it isn't that half the human race is doing one and half is doing the other it is that insofar as law represents one set of things and religion represents another and their interests constantly coincide you keep bumping into both along the way that's it so that's my assessment based on a 40 year old document that I can't shake and it's even more true every year Abram Lincoln if we could first know where we are and whether we are tending if there's anything to this theory that they're both happening then he says that we might know what to do and how to do it and I think Bella sketched out a good way in which some of the economic and political and religious themes could do it but nobody has a hold on the whole thing I think you start where you are in your nation, your academy or whatever let's think of the center at which we're apart isn't that really what it's been trying to do in studying the chaos of what's come in the life of the family and can there be order on law but it may have covenant along the way think of the destructive forces on the lives of children and yet the children so eager to be I'd say spiritual by the way the first review my book came out in library journal every author wants that one because that's when the libraries decide mystery of the child it starts out now that he is well into old age Martin Marty is starting to write about children well it's a very clear design you really want to change things you're going to work with education you're going to work with children, you're going to work with the nurseries that's where this all starts and so we have a center devoted to these kinds of topics and that big fat illustrated bibliography shows how much has happened in 25 years that you can study law and religion together in their intellectual and their spiritual and their practical dimensions now even to single this out it all might sound as if I'm captive just because I've had such wonderful years here Thomas Merton looking back on his conversion and his then moving to get some money monastery in Kentucky in one of his books said well America doesn't know this but get some money is the soul of America it's what holds it all together it doesn't know it but what we're doing there and our praying and that does it provincial cuss until I read on he said America has many places and many soul and gendering things and I think you have to think of that along the way here so four dimensions I think of what has to go on at a center in the next 25 years building on what's been here I do think that it serves the culture and law and religion well by continuing and maybe increasing in the self-critical dimension what we learn is how hard it is for us to look at ourselves and then the mirror is held often by somebody who has a somewhat different concept we heard some wonderful papers on the concept of sharia law and for most US citizens that is such a very different concept it's on page one almost every day and our patterns of law are almost on theirs somewhere somebody not likely to be in any of the state departments is going to have to devote themselves to understanding these different concepts of law as we heard from a colleague here so well today in domestic life the same kind of thing the self-critical dimension we heard many critiques including today on the polarization doesn't allow us to examine anything in between two extremes the self-critical function is extremely important for the people who are in patterns of law and in patterns of religion the second and I heard some good translations for the concept of tolerance tolerance is having a hard time around here this week and I'll add to it tolerance is a wonderful word and history it was hard fought it took centuries and centuries 1688 in England you could get a pretty good dose of it or its revolution they start talking about tolerance as a loyal patriotic self-centered Christian I thought me must have really invented it and W.C. Fields once said I spent a lot of years studying the Bible looking for a loophole I spent a lot of years reading Christian history looking for somebody that had the concept of tolerance and I found a lactantius in the court of Constantine and then it stopped again the help of the enlightenment about which we had such ambiguity enlightenment isn't all rationality it's spiritual too it's intellectual too it pulses Jefferson says the head and the heart they're all there but we needed that and today tolerance my paraphrase will be close to what I heard this morning it has come to mean for many people if I can get you to believe as little as I do and to believe as lightly as I do we're going to get along alright you are dead before you start in the world where the volatile concepts of law and religion are present if you think that's what's going to happen I prefer the word and the concept of hospitality a strong I call it risking hospitality we all know the word xenophobia xenostranger you hate the stranger xenophilia the love of the stranger is the Greek word translated as hospitality in the Hebrew scriptures there's almost no sin worse than being inhospitable you Israel you have to take in the stranger for you were one strangers and the New Testament the same kind of thing is a long essay a pee onto this and Jesus knocks over all the tables in order to get to the tables where hospitality is present during a six year study of militant fundamentalism around the world my colleague Robert Scott Apple he now at Notre Dame and I paraphrase a sentence by Harold Isaacs in his book idols of the tribe it's in my mind just like the framework was that I gave you around the world there is a massive convulsive in gathering of peoples into their separatenesses and over againstnesses to protect their pride and power and place from the real or presumed threat of others who are doing the same hospitality means breaking that apart and there are many people I have many good stories of people who break that pattern that seems so irresistible but I think the fact that a center like this wants to be hospitable to uncongenial ideas to people representing very different kinds of forces and you better get ready you're doomed to have to do more in the future not all the voices are going to be gentle and kind but they're going to be here and if they are receiving hospitality they will give hospitality and their ideas and their spiritual forces and their laws will get a new hearing is reform itself there are many people as we heard this morning who are dealing with the vast number of concepts that are listed under Sharia law there's no single thing like that and there's no single thing like Islam and single thing like Christianity you have to get into the local manifestations you have to see all the ways that are there then you can set out I think to reform along the way and I don't think that all intellectual analysis is something necessarily leads to reform but I don't think reform can happen without analysis of things along the way and then the empathy for the other empathy for the other almost inevitably grows when you have people gathered to deal with wonderfully tough issues like this you start seeing it from their angle and in their eyes along the way so what to do and how to do it I will leave challenged by four five six presentations two of them today and by the life work of Harold Berman who is the spirit behind all this challenged because I haven't got it figured out and I'm going to have to come back for a little inoculation in a while in case you break through and that is the search for world law world civil religion world sufficient consensus that there can be law Don Courtney Murray we are great said that there has to be minimal consensus you're is just enough that you agree about that you even know what to fight about you have to have the same words after some of these languages what will they be image of God oh man I like that I'm going to take it right home and write a book about it I was really good but there's so many others that were offered we heard them tossed up and then they're down writes does everybody talk rights everybody talking about nature natural law it isn't easy at all I by accident chaired a session on religions anteceding the Cairo conference on population women's reproductive rights and migration it was held in 1995 at Cairo and several foundations got together and had us get scholars from around the world representative of the various religions what did they teach about these three things and of course birth control and abortion were the major things were talked about but many things about women's rights were there all along 26 people 20 nations 16 religions and there were a lot of things we agreed on pretty quickly we really could agree on a lot but there was always a pressure can we really ask why we're agreeing because it's going to be a hard sell when we get to the NGOs and the national delegates in Cairo how do we sell it to them can I have a consensus the papal delegate was a Polish priest who said well at least our consensus can be based on our common belief in God Michio Araki was sitting there and he said I'm as religious as you are but we don't believe in God we have holy emptiness so the priest said well couldn't we then say we all have common belief in the sacred he said capital S that's how you smuggle God back in in the west we have sacred books we have sacred shrines we have sacred holy people we don't have that long way Araki was not less humane less hospitable less willing to be self-critical I think he left changed by it and we left changed by it but we couldn't necessarily come to a clear formulation of it and maybe you never will many of you know the old story of when you want to ground something I often think of that when I read the Berman essays which are really exciting challenges for me because I want to make it work the old story I've heard 50 versions of it where somebody's talking to a Native American and you know one know about the world well the world rests on a great turtle back a great turtle well that didn't solve a lot what is it a turtle on it's on another great turtle where is it in it's turtles all the way down and when you say that it's called a relativist nihilist anything else but it seems to me to pose the issue that we're going to have to work on on how you get a fabric of law that can transcend some of the domestic laws that now are in opposition to each other and I think we've seen in the last century in the midst of all of the chaos the time of the unpleasant events as Herman Kahn called it embodiments we've seen individuals who had one on the campus here last week we have them in the in the historic religions we have people of no visible faith who have risked a great deal along the way they are models they are exemplars and I think they will be studied a great deal here at the center in the future so as somebody who profited a great deal already from this place who gobbles up these books as they come out I intend to hang around and keep learning how to be more self critical and more hospitable and more reformist and way down deep maybe get some new ideas about the ideas behind it all thank you very much well thank you very much Dr. Marty, Dr. Bella, President Chop this was a wonderful final panel to end a wonderful conference and humility compels me to say nothing further substantive except to give substantive thanks and that is from the heart to many people that have made this conference possible beginning of course with all of you that have gathered here that have shared your time, that have shared your spirit, that have shared your spirit of inquiry in particular and that have wished us well we can't have a party without a party and you have made it such I want to thank our 25 speakers that have brought their very very best talent to the lectern that have shared with us their insights that have compelled us to think anew that have challenged us to take new pathways for the next 25 years and who have given us such abrasive ideas that I think we'll have to have our golden anniversary next year because we have so many ideas that we'll have to try to figure out with these great folk so the 25 speakers that are here I think they deserve a remarkably loud round of applause organizations don't exist with absolutely critical people and this kind of conference and this kind of center do not exist without the hard work and extraordinary dedication of a lot of wonderful souls and professionals that have dedicated their time I want to recognize four group of folk and I want to invite applause for each of them as we go along the way first of all we wouldn't be heard we wouldn't be seen we wouldn't be recorded we wouldn't be reported on without the work of our AV folk and our media folk the great Corky Gallows Scott Andrews and our freelance reporter Mary Loftus and I think they deserve a loud round of applause Corky Gallows handy work in that opening video it was just marvelous and that's going to be on our streaming website form on our streaming video on our website in a couple of days thank you very much Corky there's a couple of wonderful students in the college who have just wandered off to the law school and they've been working diligently with us the last couple of days Grace Kim Martha Kim and Stephanie Finkler and we want to thank them for spending their time with us and giving us their talent and energy there are five joint degree students in law and theology here doing their JDM DIV, JDMTS or JDPHD that have just ducked out of first year law classes not withstanding midterm exams and have spent these last three days working diligently with us and I want to recognize them Silas Allard, Amos Davis Danielle Goldstone Judd Treiman and Stephen Weier thank you so much for all that you have done but the heart of our center for the study of law and religion lies in its superb staff we have the dream team as I like to call them five wonderful professional women that all turned out all to be women and they're all extraordinarily powerful and they're all extraordinarily devoted to the work here and I've just cherished the opportunity to work with them and I'm going to ask them to come forward even though that will embarrass them but I would like to ask April Bogle and Eliza Ellison and Linda King Anita Mann and Amy Wheeler to come forward and I'd like to invite you when they come forward to stand up and to give them your robust applause Frank Alexander told me when I first got here without staff you are nothing and without super staff you will never be anything. Point of order point of order we have a couple of law students who would like to come forward because the other night all kinds of awards were being handed out and honors were being given and we don't want you to walk into homes and see them on their walls and think that you're neglected so from the depth of the heart of all staff here and everybody's around this is the Founders Award to John Witte Jr who deserves it right Frank? Thank you very much Thank you so much Thank you for making this a wonderful conference God speed in your travels home I hope you'll come back 25 years hence for our Golden Anniversary Conference for the same 25 speakers have promised to return. Thank you so much Good night and thank you The preceding program is copyrighted by Emory University