Saint Augustine opens his Confessions with the words “Great art thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is thy power, and of thy wisdom there is no number. . . . this tiny part of all that Thou hast created desires to praise Thee. Thou dost so excite him that to praise Thee is his joy. For Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” The author discovered these words, in the translation of Frank Sheed (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943), at a young age, and the concluding line in particular, “For Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee,” has occasioned continual return and reflection. In this article, the author investigates the meaning of this line in its context, following the phrase “to praise Thee is his joy.” Adopting a generous construal of his own experience with the text, the author examines some of the ways in which a person who wishes to be a Christian thinks about the elusive yet all-important dimension of human existence called happiness or joy.

Happiness is a universal concept and experience that cuts across cultures and religions. Nonetheless, the particular manifestations and descriptions of happiness are culturally informed and contextualized. This essay explores the concepts of happiness and the pursuit of happiness in Islamic thought, arguing that the pursuit of happiness is envisaged differently in Islamic thought. Rather than the more transient forms of happiness celebrated in modern, secularized or hedonistic cultures, the pursuit of happiness in Islamic thought is concerned above all with the attainment of enduring happiness.

Today I want to talk about Augustine's Confessions, a book that may seem a far cry indeed from the life of the modern lawyer—especially the lawyer for whom what we call “religion” seems a very distant matter. But I think Augustine has much to say to us about the nature of a good education, including a good legal education, and I hope this is so whether or not one shares his religious commitments.

This article examines South Sudan's experiment in creating a secular state out of the ashes of the professedly Islamic republic from which it seceded in 2011. South Sudanese political actors presented secularism as a means of redeeming the nation from decades of religious excess in which the government conflated political imperative with theological ambition, claiming to save the nation from its woes through the unifying force of Islam. However, secularism as an alternative soteriology—one that contended that it is only through political nonalignment in regards to religion that the public could be saved from the problems that plagued its predecessor—quickly became an object of contention itself, read by many South Sudanese to be anything but neutral. This article interrogates the secular promise of mediating religious diversity through exploring the tensions that have arisen in its fulfillment at the birth of the world's newest republic.

This article argues for a different reading of the history of law and religion in independent Sri Lanka, one that does not associate the persistence of religious tension with the failure of law, but, somewhat counterintuitively, with the legalization of religion in the first instance. I argue that it is not law's failure that adds to the intensity of religious tensions on the island, but its pyrrhic success. Sri Lanka's success in drafting, ratifying, and deploying legal regimes of religious rights has led to the further ossification of the very conflicts they were intended to arbitrate. Through a condensed overview of the history of debating, drafting, and adjudicating constitutional religious rights in Sri Lanka, this article demonstrates how, in turning to law to resolve religious disputes, Sri Lankans have deepened and hardened the very lines of conflict that those laws were meant to resolve.

The idea of happiness and its pursuit have been taken up by thinkers in many times and places. This article examines the role of happiness as a concept and goal in medieval Islamic thought and, especially, in the work of Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī and Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī. In examining Ghazālī's and Fārābī's perspectives on happiness, the article looks at the influence of Plato and Aristotle on these medieval Islamic thinkers and puts Islamic thought on happiness in conversation with the views of the American founders.

The sparse scholarship on the political role of Coptic Christians in modern Egypt almost always takes the Coptic Orthodox Church as a point of departure, assuming that the head of the church, the Coptic patriarch, is not only the spiritual leader of the community but its political leader as well. This article argues that the disproportionate attention afforded to the Coptic Orthodox Church in this scholarship has obscured intra-communal dynamics of the Copts that are essential to an understanding of their political role. Through an analysis of historical struggles between the Coptic clergy and the Coptic laity for influence in Egyptian politics, as well as a particular focus on how these struggles have played out in the arena of personal status law, the article demonstrates that Egyptian politics and Coptic communal dynamics are deeply intertwined, to a degree often disregarded both by Copts and by Egypt analysts.

In this article, I set forth conceptions of happiness (sa‘ada) from the Islamic tradition, and against this background, I discuss the failure to attain happiness in the modern age. The cumulative Islamic tradition attests to the importance of happiness to faith in God, and to the importance of faith to happiness. While the themes of knowledge, enlightenment, balance, peace, and knowing the other are central to the Islamic theology of happiness, the failure of happiness is embodied by the idea of jahiliyya (a state of ignorance). I argue that a crucial issue in considering happiness and the failure of happiness is how one understands submission to God, and that submission to God is not simply obedience or servitude to God; rather, submission to God means aspiring to and seeking the goodness of God, and liberating one's soul and being from a state of godlessness, or ignorance (jahiliyya), in order to attain a state of Godliness. To grow into and with God's love is the epitome of fulfillment, goodness, and happiness. However, when submission becomes a formulaic relationship based on generalized stereotypes about history, societies, and people, or on a stereotyped understanding of one's self dealing with a stereotypical understanding of an omnipotent but inaccessible God, unhappiness becomes the norm. Drawing on this analysis, I argue that in the modern age, the modalities of thought in puritanical movements have had a consistently demoralizing and dehumanizing effect that persistently undermines the possibilities for social and moral happiness, and thus, undermines the very purpose of the Islamic faith.

Early in John Updike's exquisite historical novel In the Beauty of the Lilies, a Presbyterian pastor named Clarence Wilmot, whose faith has deserted him, calls upon a certain Elias Orr, a member of his flock who lies on his deathbed. Orr asks his pastor whether he—Orr—is among the elect or headed to eternal damnation in the flames of Hell. Clarence, searching for words of comfort, tells him, “I should estimate your chances to be excellent.” The dying man is unpersuaded. If the order of salvation was laid down by God at the moment of creation, he demands, “[w]hat can we poor bodies down here do?”

In another essay being published contemporaneously with this one, I have explained that as the concept “human right” is understood both in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in all the various international human rights treaties that have followed in the Universal Declaration's wake, a right is a human right if the rationale for establishing and protecting the right—for example, as a treaty-based right—is, in part, that conduct that violates the right violates the imperative, articulated in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration, to “act towards all human beings in a spirit of brotherhood.” Each of the human rights articulated in the Universal Declaration and/or in one or more international human rights treaties—for example, the right, articulated in Article 5 of the Universal Declaration and elsewhere, not to be subjected to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”—is a specification of what, in conjunction with other considerations, the imperative—which functions in the morality of human rights as the normative ground of human rights—is thought to forbid (or to require). A particular specification is controversial if and to the extent the supporting claim—a claim to the effect that the “act towards all human beings in a spirit of brotherhood” imperative forbids (or requires) X—is controversial. My aim in this essay is to elaborate and defend a particular specification: the right, internationally recognized as a human right, to freedom of conscience—to freedom, that is, to live one's life in accord with the deliverances of one's conscience.

The late Harold Berman was a pioneering scholar of Soviet law, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion; he is best known today for his monumental Law and Revolution series on the Western legal tradition. Berman wrote a short book, Law and Language, in the early 1960s, but it was not published until 2013. In this early text, he adumbrated many of the main themes of his later work, including Law and Revolution. He also anticipated a good deal of the interdisciplinary and comparative methodology that we take for granted today, even though it was rare in the intense legal positivist era during which he was writing. This essay contextualizes Berman's Law and Language within the development of his own legal thought and in the evolution of interdisciplinary legal studies. It focuses particularly on the themes of law and religion, law and history, and law and communication that dominated Berman's writing until his death in 2007.

As Ronald Dworkin was writing his Einstein lectures “Religion without God,” at New York University (NYU) in the fall of 2011, I was also working in Washington Square, as a fellow of the NYU Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice. On December 8, just a few days before Dworkin delivered the lectures at the University of Bern, I had the opportunity to attend the last session of his famous Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy at Furman Hall. In that session, co-led by his colleague and friend Thomas Nagel, Dworkin presented the manuscript of his Swiss lectures. After the seminar, we had an anticipatory celebration of Dworkin's eightieth birthday, which would take place three days later. And that was the last time I would see Ronald Dworkin—which might explain why I remember in such detail that seminar, in which he talked about religion without God with more spontaneity and improvisation, I imagine, than he would in the Einstein lectures days later.

Scholars of Islamic law, gender, and Africa will be pleased with the arrival of two important new volumes that are bold in their bringing together of ethnographic data with legal history and analysis. Margot Badran's Gender and Islam in Africa: Rights, Sexuality, and Law, and Christina Jones-Pauly and Abir Dajanfi Tuqan's Women under Islam: Gender Justice and the Politics of Islamic Law collectively advance a movement in Islamic legal studies that focuses on interdisciplinary explorations into the ways particular constructions of Islamic law are foregrounded and reified in accordance with the existential impulses and demands of a particular society at a particular time, what we might call the “hermeneutic of experience.” I would argue that gender functions as the category that most regularly exposes the limitations of various historically situated concepts of orthodoxy, and these books bear out this claim.

When Ronald Dworkin was to deliver his 1988 Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Stanford University, he was introduced by the university's president, Donald Kennedy. Kennedy offered an appreciative account of Dworkin's background and achievements, noted the title of the upcoming talk, then gathered up his notes and turned the podium over to the speaker. Dworkin proceeded to give a two-hour oration on the foundations of liberal equality, breathtaking in its detail and logical rigor and flowing eloquently without a hitch or hesitation. Just as he was concluding, Kennedy rushed up to the dais and exclaimed to the audience: “Please forgive me, I just realized that when I picked up my notes, I also inadvertently picked up Professor Dworkin's manuscript.” Without missing a beat, Dworkin had delivered his entire lecture from memory.