Can Human Dignity Help Heal Us In Our Coronavirus Moment?

Brett G. Scharffs is Director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies and Rex E. Lee Chair and Professor of Law at  Brigham Young University Law School. This post arises from his particpation in an international Webinar held 16 April 2020 [1]  and is part of a Talk About Conversation on COVID-19 and Human Dignity.

There are no magic wands in figuring out how to respond to the global medical and economic pandemic that is coronavirus. We are learning as we are going. There is much to be said. There is more to be done.

But I believe there is something useful in looking to our existing resources—especially when we are in the midst of a crisis (as opposed to before and after a crisis, when we have more time and capacity for institutional design and re-design). For example, I find myself returning to the words of the Apostle Paul in Corinthians 13, where he speaks so movingly about charity, or pure love, as embodied by Jesus Christ. He speaks of long suffering, envying not, humility, being not easily provoked, endurance, seeking truth, and above all, faith, hope and charity, with the greatest of these being Godlike love or what the King James Bible translates as charity. (more…)

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Series: Religion and the Rule of Law

We have opened a Series on the topic of Religion and the Rule of Law. Existing posts are listed below.  Watch for more. Sohail Wahedi. Private Beliefs, Public Platforms and the Rule of Law Paul Gowder: Religion and…

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The World-Defining Contest between Monism and Dualism and the Future of Religious Freedom

Brett G. Scharffs is Director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies and Rex E. Lee Chair and Professor of Law at  Brigham Young University Law School. This post is excerpted from a chapter in the forthcoming book in the Routledge ICLARS Series on Law and Religion:  Law, Religion, and Freedom: Conceptualizing a Common Right, W. Cole Durham, Jr, Javier Martínez-Torrón, and Donlu Thayer, eds. (Routledge 2020).

This post is part of an ongoing Series about Religion and the Rule of Law.

Setting aside the immediate exigencies of the coronavirus crisis, we are living at an important time for religious freedom, and that is not necessarily a good thing. It seems quite apparent that in recent years many nations are in the midst of a world-defining struggle between two dramatically different visions of the state and its relationship with its people. The contest is between what is sometimes called monism, which is inclined towards various types of statism that emphasize the state’s monopoly on legal power, and dualism, the idea that the state’s domain over the peoples’ lives is in some important way subject to limits that lie outside and beyond the state itself.

Dualism is an old idea. The Gospel of Mark famously reflects a worldview at least 2000 years old in Jesus’s answer to a lawyer who asked whether it was lawful to pay taxes to the ruling state:  “ Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Mark 12:15-17 (KJV). (more…)

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