The sexual abuse of children and teens by rogue priests in the U.S. Catholic Church is a heinous crime, and those who pray for a religious community as its ministers, priests and rabbis should never tolerate those who prey on that community. The legal disputes of recent years have produced many scandalous headlines and fuelled public discussion about the sexual abuse crisis within the clergy, a crisis that has cost the U.S. Catholic Church over $3 billion. In The Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis and the Legal Responses, two eminent experts, James O'Reilly and Margaret Chalmers, draw on the lessons of recent years to discern the interplay between civil damages law and global church-based canon law. In some countries civil and canon law, although autonomous systems of law, both form part of the church's legal duties. In the United States, freedom of religion issues have complicated how the state adjudicates both cases of abuse and who can be held responsible for clerical oversight. This book examines questions of civil and criminal liability, issues of respondeat superior and oversight, issues with statutes of limitations and dealing with allegations that occurred decades ago, and how the Church's internal judicial processes interact or clash with the civil pursuit of these cases.

Law, Person, and Community: Philosophical, Theological, and Comparative Perspectives on Canon Law takes up the fundamental question "What is law?" through a comparative study of canon law and secular legal theory. Canon law is analogous to the concept of law described by secular theorists such as Austin, Kelsen, Holmes, and H. L. A. Hart. Consistent with the secular concept, canon law aims to set a societal order that harmonizes the interests of individuals and communities, secures peace, guarantees freedom, and establishes justice. At the same time, canon law reflects a claim about the spiritual end of the human person and religious nature of community. The comparison of one of the world's ancient systems of religious law with contemporary conceptions of law rooted in secular theory raises questions about the law's power to bind individuals and communities. For example, to what extent, does each of the approaches to law reflect the theory of Austin which understands law as a command given by the sovereign and backed by the coercive power of the state? Or, as H. L. A. Hart suggested, does law require an additional internal meaning that carries the power to bind? If internal meaning is a necessary constituent to law, how might religious and secular conceptions of it differ? In addition to these questions, Law, Person, and Community asks the fundamental question "What is law?" through a comparative study of canon law and secular legal theory. This book also includes comparative consideration of the failure of canon law to address the clergy sexual abuse crisis, the canon law of marriage, administrative law, the rule of law, and equity. Professor John J. Coughlin employs comparative methodology in an attempt to reveal and contrast the concepts of the human person reflected in both canon law and secular legal theory.

This book explains and illustrates a variety of semiotic issues in the study of biblical law. Commencing with a review of relevant literature in linguistics, philosophy, semiotics and psychology, it examines biblical law in terms of its users, its medium and its message. It criticizes our use of the notion of 'literal meaning', at the level of both words and sentences, preferring to see meaning constructed by the narrative images that the language evokes. These images may come from either social experience or cultural narratives. Speech performance is important, both in the negotiation of the law and the narratives of its communication. Non-linguistic semiotic phenomena, utilizing other senses and involving such notions as space and time, also need to be taken into account. For the early biblical period, at least, conceptions of law based upon modern models need to be replaced by the notion of 'wisdom-laws'. Amongst the issues addressed in the course of the argument are the structure of the Decalogue, the role in the law of (Greenberg's) 'postulates', 'covenant renewal' and 'talionic punishment'.>

Focusing on writers who approach the Bible as a source that is both instructive and dangerous, "Subverting Scriptures" seeks to provide an academic analysis of cultural biblical saturation at a time when measured voices are necessary to counterbalance politically motivated religious rhetoric. Using as its point of departure the current political landscape - where the Bible is drawn on freely and unabashedly without critical reflection to legitimate and justify all manner of agendas - the contributors in this collection engage the Bible in new, imaginative, and critical ways, in the hopes of creating a new space for dialogue.

The present volume contributes to a reassessment of the phenomenon of episcopal elections from the broadest possible perspective, examining the varied combination of factors, personalities, rules and habits that played a role in the process that eventually resulted in one specific candidate becoming the new bishop, and not another. The importance of episcopal elections hardly needs stating: With the bishop emerging as one of the key figures of late antique society, his election was a defining moment for the local community, and an occasion when local, ecclesiastical, and secular tensions were played out. Building on the state of the art regarding late antique bishops and episcopal election, this volume of collected studies by leading scholars offers fresh perspectives by focussing on specific case-studies and opening up new approaches. Covering much of the Later Roman Empire between 250-600 AD, the contributions will be of interest to scholars interested in Late Antique Christianity across disciplines as diverse as patristics, ancient history, canon law and oriental studies.

First critical edition and translation of documents crucial to our understanding of the English Reformation. The English Reformation began as a dispute over questions of canon law, and reforming the existing system was one of the state's earliest objectives. A draft proposal for this, known as the Henrician canons, has survived, revealing the state of English canon law at the time of the break with Rome, and providing a basis for Cranmer's subsequent, and much better known, attempt to revise the canon law, which was published by John Foxe under the title `Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum' in 1571. Although it never became law, it was highly esteemed by later canon lawyers and enjoyed an unofficial authority in ecclesiastical courts. The Henrician canons and the `Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum' are thus crucial for an understanding of Reformation church discipline, revealing the problems and opportunities facing those who wanted to reform the Church of England's institutional structure in the mid-Tudor period,an age which was to determine the course of the church for centuries to come.This volume makes available for the first time full scholarly editions and translations of the whole text, taking all the available evidence into consideration, and setting the `Reformatio' firmly in both its historical and contemporary context. GERALD BRAY is Anglican Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University.

Melodie H. EICHBAUER is Professor of Medieval History at Florida Gulf Coast University, USA. She is the editor of A Cultural History of Genocide, Vol. 2: The Middle Ages (2021) and The Use of Canon Law in Ecclesiastical Administration, 1000-1250 (2018) with Danica Summerlin and other volumes. Her research focuses on the dissemination of legal knowledge; the interpretation of law; and the ways in which social, political, and intellectual developments and trends shaped both between c.1000 and c.1500 James A BRUNDAGE (1929-2021) was Professor Emeritus of history and, prior to his retirement, Ahmanson-Murphy chair of medieval European history at the University of Kansas, USA. His publications included The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians, and Courts (2008), Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (1996) edited with Vern L. Bullough, and Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (1987).