Symposium Introduction: The Competing Claims of Law and Religion: Who Should Influence Whom?

Abstract

This reality of continuous interaction between religion, law, and politics served as the baseline assumption of the Third Annual Religious Legal Theory Conference, titled The Competing Claims of Law and Religion: Who Should Influence Whom? on February 23–25, 2012, sponsored by Pepperdine University’s Nootbaar Institute on Law, Religion, and Ethics and Pepperdine’s Diane and Guilford Glazer Institute for Jewish Studies. At its core, the conference theme presumed that law and religion—and in turn, religion and politics—forever engage each other in conversation, each providing its own perspectives on how to resolve everyday social problems. So often, the situs of this conversation is the individual whose self-understanding flows from the ongoing dialogue between the religious and political components of one’s identity. In this way, individuals remain—to use Michael Sandel’s term—“encumbered” by their contextual existence and the dialogic character of their religious and political commitments. These competing and complimentary strands of individual identity evolve because there is no realistic way to wall off religion from law or religion from politics.