In this age of information technology that shrank our world into a global village, it is fair to ask how this recent development has impacted Muslim women's rights across the world. Having just traveled through nine Muslim countries, ranging from Pakistan and Bangladesh to the Gulf States, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon, I would answer that it is leading, slowly but surely, to reassessment and change. Attempts to accelerate the pace of this change, however, without full understanding of its complex topology, and the deep-rooted commitment by most Muslim women to spiritual and cultural authenticity, could halt or even reverse this process at great cost to women particularly and Muslim societies as a whole. Hence the challenges and opportunities.

In every legal system a gap exists between the law as it is actually enforced by the courts and the ethical categorical imperative. Although it was rejected by Justice Holmes in his “bad man rule,” a strong claim can be made that the measure of an enlightened and advanced legal system and society is its success in bridging this gap. Within a religious legal system which rejects the clear separation of law and ethics, the severity of this problem is ameliorated. As illustrated by Jewish law, even such a system's purely civil law must be influenced by ethical duties to a far greater degree than in secular legal systems.

This article compares the legal rules and jurisprudence of the American common law and Jewish law in the area of finding and returning lost or abandoned property, illustrating the interplay between the purely legal and ethical components of the respective legal systems. Surprisingly enough, the differences between the two systems are not usually significant; they follow the same basic legal principles, and typically lead to the same results. There are, however, two major exceptions: Jewish law imposes a duty to rescue the lost property of one's neighbor, while the common law does not require that one initiate the process by retrieving the article. Thus according to Jewish law, when one happens to stumble across lost property, one must intervene to retrieve it; according to the common law one need not. Second, Jewish law imposes ethical duties as part of its legal mandate, a practice the common law does not follow.

The July 14, 2006, issue of Commonweal carried an article by Michael J. Perry, entitled The Morality of Human Rights: A Problem for Nonbelievers?. In that article, as in his books The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries, and Toward a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts, Perry argues that a plausible nonreligious foundation for the idea of human rights has yet to be articulated—that this idea, therefore, appears to be unavoidably religious. He expresses concern that “the growing marginalization of religious belief in many societies that have taken human rights seriously—in particular, in many liberal democracies… may leave those societies bereft of the intellectual resources to sustain the morality of human rights.”

Nicholas Wolterstorff shares Perry's judgment. “It is impossible to develop a secular account of human dignity adequate for grounding human rights. Or to speak more cautiously: given that, after many attempts, no one has succeeded in developing such an account, it seems unlikely that it can be done.”

The latest book entry in Thomas Shaffer's ongoing conversation with us, American Lawyers & Their Communities (1991) (with Mary Shaffer) (1991), takes the practice of community as its subject. In spirit, it appeals to us as members of communities to be and to do better, and it intimates how we can and why. This review of the book has turned out to be less a review than a response to that underlying appeal.

Each of the book's three parts focusses on a different form of communal practice: the ethics honored among lawyers, the rispetto observed by Italian-Americans, and the obligations laid upon religious believers.

In the first part Tom labors manfully with “the gentleman's ethic.” This is a real ethics and not the how-to-avoid-malpractice-suits instruction that passes for ethics in those continuing legal education programs lawyers are required to attend each year. Real ethics puts the questions of who we are and where we come from. In his view, we lawyers are gentlemen with gentlemanly virtues nurtured as habits of the heart by the republican and biblical traditions. The gentleman is our culture. The gentleman gazes down upon us from the walls of our courthouses, law firms and law schools and calls us to remember and to realize our traditional values. The gentleman who has gone before, the gentleman we now are and are to become furnishes us with guidance.

I understand my primary task in this essay to be to take you inside the world of evangelical political reflection and engagement. Though I actually grew up Roman Catholic and attended the liberal Union Theological Seminary in New York, I am by now an evangelical insider, rooted deeply in red state mid-South America, a member of a Southern Baptist church (actually, an ordained minister), a teacher at a Tennessee Baptist university, and a columnist for the flagship Christianity Today magazine. Due to the blue state/red state, liberal/conservative boundary-crossing that has characterized my background, I am often called upon to interpret our divided internal “cultures” one to another. Trained to be fair-minded and judicious in my analysis and judgments (though not always successful in meeting the standards of my training), I seek to help bridge the culture wars divide that is tearing our nation apart.

As one deeply invested in American evangelicalism, most of my attention these days now goes to the internal conversation within evangelical life about our identity and mission, especially our social ethics and political engagement. In this essay I will focus extensively on problems I currently see with evangelical political engagement, addressing those from within the theological framework of evangelical Christianity and inviting others to listen in to what I am now saying to my fellow evangelicals.

Joan in her last moments had wonderful contrition and broke out into words so Catholic and devout that they moved everyone in that great throng, including the English cardinal and many other Englishmen. She asked me to stay with her at the end and humbly begged me to go to a nearby church and bring her a cross, and I held it erect before her eyes, until her passing, so she could always and ceaselessly see the cross. In the middle of the flames, she never stopped confessing and crying out in aloud voice the holy name of Jesus Christ, or imploring most devoutly the help of the saints. As she expired and bowed her head, she professed the name of Jesus, a sign of the faith with which she was animated, just as we read of St. Ignatius and many holy martyrs.

The executioner came to me and my associate, Brother Martin Lavenu, immediately after the burning, impelled by a wonderful and terrible penitence. It was as if he despaired of receiving pardon from God after what he had done to her, who, as he said, was such a holy woman. He also affirmed that although he had several times put the wood and coals upon her entrails and heart, he could in no way consume her heart or reduce it to cinders; and at this he was amazed, as if it were an evident miracle.

The end of the 20th century demonstrates not only a series of encounters between different religious and ethnic traditions but also between such traditions and secularism. An example for the latter is the cultural phenomenon of Jewish Religious Law vis-a-vis Modernization and Postmodernism. The following may therefore be seen as a case study illustrating the problems and options arising in such encounters during the next century.

Jewish religious law (halakhah) is that part of Jewish tradition, defining a Jew's duties towards God and fellow human beings. It is part of a more comprehensive concept, the divine teaching (torah), including narratives (agadah) as well as law (halakhah), and morals (derekh ‘erets) as well as matters of faith ('emunah). This teaching is contained not only in the Pentateuch and in Holy Scripture, but even more so in the oral traditions of the sages. Morals and faith are therefore complementaries to Jewish religious law, and rules of the second order to control it.