James Luther Adams died last summer at the age of 92. He was one of four or five giants in his generation of American Christian ethicists. Many members of this society who were doctoral students under him have themselves become important teachers and writers of religious ethics.

George Huntston Williams has described Adams as one of the three most significant figures in the history of the Unitarian Universalist denomination, yet Adams grew up as the son of a Baptist and Plymouth Brethren preacher. Adams lived in tension but not in rejection with this Fundamentalist youth. On the one hand, he found lacking there what became his constant passion. Christian life must be carried out in the midst of the institutions of society.

Echoing the prophet Isaiah, Dr. King dreamed of societal harmony and common understanding. Not only would “the glory of the Lord” be revealed, but “all flesh” would see the truth together. In today's America, this vision seems increasingly distant; some would say increasingly fantastic. From abortion to homosexuality to affirmative action, Americans are deeply divided on fundamental issues of morality and public policy. Combatants in an ongoing culture war, we disagree not only about specific issues, but also about the manner in which these issues should be considered, debated, and resolved. At bottom, we are divided because we disagree about the nature of moral and political truth and about how this truth should properly be determined. Far from seeing the truth together, we see separate truths that emerge from separate ways of thinking.

Our public life takes shape within a field of competing organizational forms. Corporations, assemblies, constitutions, and federations compete for our loyalties, providing models of proper human existence. Like the family, they seek to provide trustworthy and dependable relationships of power and authority that enable us to live, work, argue, and reconcile with each other. Many crucial decisions of our social life revolve finally around the choices we make as a society among these institutional forms and the means by which we evoke deep sentiments of legitimacy and trust to uphold them.

The primary forms of American public life emerged in the rejection of European monarchy and religious establishment. The Constitution replaced the Crown and the denomination came to replace the one true Church. Fundamental to this revolutionary transition were the emergence of covenantal forms of association and democratic assemblies as the constituent elements of legitimate public authority. Social life was not to be governed by hierarchical and patriarchal authority “from above” but by free agreements of the people forged in open public assemblies. This model of legitimate order flowed through both governmental and religious spheres in complex and interpenetrating ways.

In consultation with his pastoral advisor, James Luther Adams dictated two letters when one of his many strokes forced him to ponder his own mortality with a new urgency. In the first letter, he specified that a memorial service be held at his beloved Arlington Street Church in Boston (rather than in an academic setting), that it be on a Sunday afternoon so his daughters and the clergy could come, and that we have particular pieces of music.

His wishes in death extended his commitments in life: he loved the church and called those in academia to attend to its importance in the souls of individuals and in the destiny of civilizations, even though he often became a “smiling prophet” in his impatience with the ecclesiastical community. He loved his family, in spite of the fact that he knew that he often neglected them because he was preoccupied with a multitude of adopted sons and daughters, represented by the many ministers and professors here today. And he loved the arts, holding that true beauty also shows itself to have a “heart of service,” one that can reveal “the nature of existence, and the character of the transformed life,” as a marvelous homage to him, in ARTS, says.

James Luther Adams was famous for his pioneering work in religion and public life, religion and society. His interests embraced economics, public policy, contemporary culture, civil liberties, and church law. His wide-ranging mind at times compellingly focused on issues in civil law as well. I say “compellingly” advisedly, for Adams was essentially a Protestant theologian who had a central concern with the work and influence of Luther, so it was natural and inevitable that his interest would flow from theology of law to the wider subject of law and religion.

Adams' study of an issue was often characterized by certain intellectual qualities. He tried to include almost all aspects of the question; he was not satisfied, as courts at times are, with seeing only a single set of facts and answering a question that is limited only to the facts before him. He could see other sets of facts, and asked, what about them? This approach naturally forced him to look for an organizing principle, an all-embracing concept or set of concepts. First, then, he tried to be comprehensive in his examination; and secondly, he tried to be principled in his analysis and thinking.

It is commonplace for the English to regard their age and culture as “post-Christian.” What exactly is meant by this label is not always clear, but it seems meant to bespeak a hardheaded realism accompanied by a kind of wistfulness for a more certain, vibrant, robust past. So while supporting note is often taken of the low rate of church attendance in England, the sense of loss runs deeper, as if all that is left from the past is a kind of “domesticated pantheism” which somewhat ironically operates as a “bulwark against religion.” Reminders of this bygone culture are found in a countryside of handsome churches, cities landmarked by grand cathedrals, and a ceremonial clergy whose robes and scepters make for great spectacle and some good TV; but the churches are empty and the clergy are said to be mostly dispirited, effete, irrelevant, “enfeebled and unsure.” The term “post-Christian,” however, carries an even deeper charge insofar as it suggests something more about the state of English culture in the late twentieth century than simply the decay of the established Church as the institutional bearer of the main nourishment of Western civilization. In some sense, we are to suppose that, in England at least, the Christian world is dead and that the established Church of England remains but a many-branched museum, staffed with actors playing uncertain parts whose demise as a part of the apparatus of state is near at hand.

Sister Lewis sits
pedaling her rusty sewing machine
in her dark and tiny hut
in the hills of Jamaica.
Only the thinnest sliver of light
filters through the one paneless window.
Sister Lewis is making children's dresses
for the wealthy.
From early morning till the last light slips
behind the hills she sews
back hunched eyes straining
fingers flying feet pedaling.
She is surrounded in the dark and dank by
piles of colorful cloth
the pastels, the lacy frills with which
we happily dress our little white girls.
She sews well.

The religion of our father Abraham was the religion of a single believer. He was, as described by Thomas Jefferson, a sect of one person calling for recognition by the overwhelming majority. But even his descendants remained a tiny majority among the population of the area; they were aware of being a small people (Deut 7:7) in danger of being absorbed by the Canaanite culture in the neighborhood.

The danger of acculturation was felt not only from the majority, but equally felt from other minority cults and religions (Num. 33:55; Jos 23:13), whose religious practices set a negative example for Israel and its religion. The rule prohibiting any participation in foreign cults and marginalizing religious minorities in Israel's society (for example, Exod 34:11-17) presents itself as a conditio-sine-qua-non in the covenant with the God of Israel.

Icons of river frost
weep in the bleak fields
of the Republic.
Ghost Dance songs sweep the plains;
the eucharistic moon wanes.
All the trees are bare.

When it comes to human rights violations, the cruelty of the action seems obvious, the enemy seems clear. That is often true, no doubt. But what makes me sure that it is what the victim sees? What if I consider something as cruel, but the victim does not regard it as such? What if I don't see something as being as painful as the victim does?

I am thinking of a story I was told in the Philippines. The Filipina who told it to me had joined the Resistance Movement and had been arrested by the military together with some others, including her husband. When she told me the story of her arrest, the fear of being raped was mentioned again and again. The fear was there—when she got caught in the mountains, when the soldiers brought her down, while she was being interrogated, in detention, even when she was already released while she was making love to her husband. She told me: “Sometimes, during our sex life, sometimes in the middle of it I would say: what if the military was doing it to me?” She described her time in detention, how the group of political prisoners developed a “project.” She said, “The project is, you have to be pregnant.” During Marcos' time, being pregnant was considered a humanitarian reason to be released.

Southern proslavery writers recognized that the powerful imagery employed by abolitionist writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe was among the abolitionists' most potent weapons in fighting slavery. Southern reviewers of Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin criticized Stowe most frequently for mischaracterizing the harshness of slavery. William Gilmore Simms, who published his novel Woodcraft as a proslavery answer to Stowe in 1854, thought her novel was a gross misrepresentation of the South:

There is a work of fiction, recently published by Mrs. Stowe, which is just now the rage with the abolitionists; the great error of which, throughout, consists in the accumulation of all the instances that can be found of cruelty or crime among the slaveholders. … She shows us a planter of Louisiana, as one of the most heartless, bloody, brutal, gross, loathsome and ignorant wretches under the sun. … [B]ut in doing so, she herself isolates him. She shows that he resides in a remote, and scarcely inaccessible swamp region, where his conduct comes under no human cognizance. How is society answerable for his offenses? How does he represent the condition and character of the slaveholder?

From the onset, one must dispel the idea that addressing gender issues or referring to “women” and “woman” is marginal to larger considerations of civil society and current global dynamics. Double standards with regard to images and treatment of women are indicators of distorted visions of social justice. Without remorse, women are often consigned to a sub-category in the estimation and construction of the social order through which we acquire justice.

What I discuss here are some preliminary ideas about social justice. My vision of social justice is predicated upon two things: my personal experiences of inequities because of race, class and gender; and my search in the Islamic tradition, and more precisely, in the Qur'anic text, for a perspective on civil society which dispels the tendencies towards oppression and social injustice.

At the center of Muslim life sits The Qur'an — the Recitation — scripture for Muslims. Islamic dress, though understood intimately and expressed culturally by Muslims, seems to pose several dilemmas in the U.S. Yet, the most used translation of The Qur'an states:

Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty: that will make for greater purity for them: And Allah is well acquainted with what they do.

And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty: that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof: that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their fathers, their husband's fathers, their sons, their husband's sons, their brother or their brothers' sons, or their sisters' sons, or their women, or the slaves their right hands possess, or male servants free of physical needs, or small children who have no sense of the shame of sex: and that they should not strike their feet in order to draw attention to their hidden ornaments. And O you believers! Turn all toward Allah that you may attain bliss.

Those who come before a judge do not really know before whom they stand. The person who presides over the courtroom, cloaked in the solemn black robes of his or her office, is in that moment less an individual than a symbol of democratic values and an instrument of state power. In recognition of that power and authority, all rise as the judge enters the courtroom and takes the seat, elevated above everyone else in the room, from which justice will be dispensed. It is the hope of all, and the conviction of most, that this individual will do his or her job well, dispensing what is perhaps our most precious social good—justice. What no one knows, what no one is even permitted to ask, is the character of the person wearing that robe and the ways in which that individual's personal qualities will affect the performance of his or her duties.

I first met John Noonan at a Law Review dinner when I was a year or so out of law school and he was a third year student. Chance placed us at the same table, and the conversation—naturally—proved to be more interesting than the speeches. When I came home and reported on the occasion to my wife, it developed that she was already acquainted with John Noonan. When they were teenagers, he had been a particularly suave and glamorous summer inhabitant of a beach resort where one of her friends also spent summers.

Not long after the Law Review dinner, John graduated and went to Washington, and we left Boston, first for New Jersey and then for Notre Dame. I heard nothing more of John until one day when Joe O'Meara, the formidable dean of the Notre Dame Law School, showed me an article from the 1955 volume of the Journal of Legal Education called Value References in the Teaching of Negligence. The author had looked at all the Torts casebooks he could find, and earlier editions of many of them; at all the relevant case write-ups from the Harvard Law Review and the Yale Law Journal; at a number of law school examinations; and at all the issue sheets used by Harvard's Board of Student Advisors in supervising their moot court, the Ames Competition. He had found the value concerns in great disarray, and not much relied on anyhow. It was clear that teaching about negligence involved analysis of rules and not much else. The author (of course, it was John) admitted reluctantly that neither philosophy nor theology nor social science provided any principles that would be of much use in deciding negligence cases, but he expressed a rather wistful hope that more facts might lead to a more effective application of values to these cases. “More facts” was to be a major distinguishing quality in the rest of his work.

“The freer women are to share their gifts with society and to assume leadership in society, the better are the prospects for the entire human community to progress in wisdom, justice and dignified living …” So argued Mary Ann Glendon, the Vatican delegate to the Fourth World Conference on Women in September, 1995. While Glendon's point is well taken, in many societies, including the Catholic Church which Glendon represented at the Conference, women often do not have the opportunity to choose their roles and share their gifts and talents with society in the manner they deem most appropriate. In patriarchal societies women's roles and contributions are often reduced to the periphery. This is the case in traditional societies where the community is viewed as the bearer of rights, and the roles assigned women are designed to ensure that they conform to the needs of the community, rather than the needs of individual women. Women are often socialized into accepting the roles mapped out for them by the community, and attempts to challenge them often lead only to ostracization by the community.

Not enough has been done to integrate the value of equal rights for women into Jewish religious life and teaching. On the one hand, traditional Judaism (both in its sources and by its spokesmen) differentiates between the status of man and woman, without seriously taking into consideration the feeling of the latter, and without respecting her human rights. On the other hand, Jewish Feminism starts from modern individual or group feelings of frustration, without taking God seriously, with little understanding for the spirituality of Bible and tradition and with recklessness regarding the preservation of the Jewish family and people.

Jewish Feminism is quite right to criticize Jewish tradition for failing to lift up the lack of attention to women's contribution to both the spirituality and the preservation of Torah Judaism. Tradition did recognize the contribution of women to both spirituality and preservation, but indirectly and in a form that would not be appropriate for the modern day.

Judge Noonan's book, Persons and Masks of the Law, written a decade before he became judge, stirred up both hope and skepticism. On the one hand, readers felt drawn to what today might be called a kinder, gentler vision of judging. It is a vision that insists on viewing people in their full and connected humanity, rather than as the abstracted and partial legal constructs that filter through the laws of evidence and trial court decisions to the briefs and arguments that appellate judges see. On the other hand, some readers expressed concern that the richer contextualization Noonan had modeled could not, by itself, determine particular outcomes. Those contextualizing facts require interpretation and ordering. Furthermore, for every detail seeming to point in one direction, another detail pointing to an opposite outcome is likely to be available. In other words, contextualization risks either endless regression or arbitrary truncation. Despite the polite controversy—some of the politeness no doubt due to the fact that at the time Noonan was a professor and in no danger of wreaking any contextualist havoc on the Rule of Law—his book did ensconce the trope of “empathy.”