It was my good fortune to meet Doug Sturm at a conference at Harvard in the late '70s. At that conference, Doug was instrumental in founding the Council on Religion and Law (CORAL). After the Council was formed, Doug promoted the idea of a journal. I can assure you that this was not motivated by his desire to be published, since Doug has probably published more on law and religion than any other person I know.

After an unsuccessful effort to publish the Journal myself, we convinced Hamline Law School to be the home of the Journal and to provide the editorial staff. Doug was the obvious choice to chair the Editorial Board.

So, I have had the pleasure of seeing Doug in Boston at meetings of CORAL, in Minnesota at meetings of The Journal of Law and Religion editorial board, and at various conferences. I have also been to Doug and Margie's home to discover their wonderful hospitality.

I am not one of the favored few who have sat at Doug's feet as a student. I have stood with others around his piano singing old labor union songs. I have had the good fortune of listening to him, talking with him, and having him listen to me. I have also read his works. Early on in our relationship, I asked him to send me everything that he wrote and he has faithfully done so.

In moments such as these, if we be honest, we are brought to awareness more than ordinarily of the thick interdependency of our lives. We cannot be what we are, we cannot do what we do, we cannot accomplish what we accomplish apart from one another. Perhaps more than we can ever fully discern, our lives are but expressions, albeit creative expressions, of a communal matrix that sustains us, inspires us, and constitutes the origin of our dreams and yearnings, our obligations and our rights. We are members of each other. We belong together. That is the source of our joy in life, although that is, as well, the source of the tragedies of life, the dark side of our history that, on all too many occasions, makes us shudder. I do not mean this initial comment, please understand, as sheer sentimentality. It is, instead, both a political affirmation and a religious declaration, and it provides an opening for further reflections on the major theme of my remarks: a vision of justice as solidarity.

It is awe inspiring to be with you in this sacred place (Swift Hall) at this sacred time (Wednesday noon) engaged in sacred ritual (eating and talking). I am pleased to count myself among those who, nearly four decades ago, liberated this room from exclusive use by faculty, enabling all members of the community to gather for a common meal and common reflection thereby creating, at least in intention, a sacred people. Some traditions are worthy of preservation.

I would speak with you this noon about the profession I have pursued since leaving this Hall almost three decades ago: the profession of education. My remarks are occasioned by a Supreme Court decision announced on June 24, 1988, Kadrmas et al. v. Dickinson Public Schools et al. (North Dakota). Under North Dakota law, certain school districts are permitted to charge a fee for transporting pupils to the public school from outlying areas. The Kadrmas family, whose annual income at the time of the trial was at or near the poverty line, protested the fee they were charged, basically on the grounds of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The majority of the Court rejected the Kadrmas family's claim. Although the argument, set forth by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, contained many complexities pertaining to a long line of arguments about the Equal Protection Clause, I would focus on one strong and near determinative pronunciation that she makes: that the Supreme Court has never “accepted the proposition that education is a ‘fundamental right,’ like equality of the franchise.” That is, there is no constitutional right to education.

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Thomas Paine, pamphleteer of the American Revolution and defender of the French Revolution, captures in this phrase a central insight conveyed in the idea of human rights: we have it in our power to begin the world again. The sentiment is cast in simple declarative form. As such it may seem naive. We are, after all, constrained—are we not—by the inheritance of a world already accomplished, a world whose structures bind us in untold ways? But the intention of Paine's statement is more than aspirational. It affirms a vision of what is possible—and what is desirable—given the deepest character of who we are and what we might become. If we comprehend the full dialectic between self and world, then we have it in our power to begin the world again even as the world is the matrix—the source and the condition—of our power. That's a central insight conveyed in the idea of human rights which has stirred up such controversy, philosophical and political, since it emerged at the beginnings of the modern era.

More than any of you can possibly imagine, I am overwhelmed by this occasion. Yet I would not linger on my inner feelings about the honor you have so graciously provided me. I would instead use these precious moments to reflect with you about a question of immense import that presses upon us.

As we ponder the question, which I shall state in a moment, I would have us keep in mind two things, a conviction and a commemoration. The conviction was declared by Richard L. Rubenstein in his disturbing book, The Age of Triage, a study of genocide from the 16th century to the present. He affirms “that no theological enterprise, that is, no consideration of the ultimate values that move men and women, can be adequate to its task if it ignores critical political and social theory.”

One of the ironies in perceiving schizophrenics as violent is that they are the recipients of more violence than practically any of the rest of us. To lock someone up in a mental hospital, to pass electricity through their cranium until they are stupefied, to give them drugs that cure symptoms the way alcohol cures sobriety, to give them a label that will forever prejudice nearly everyone against them—these are the most common versions of our violence against those we call schizophrenic. In spite of the elaborate science and rhetoric about how all this is to help them to recover, nothing is so obvious in how we treat them as our fear, contempt, and most of all, our resulting neglect of them, and their continuing vulnerability.

This is not to deny that those we call “schizophrenic” are confused. Indeed, they are engaging a spiritual struggle that overwhelms them, and may well have done so for many years. It is an underlying suspicion of this chapter that their spiritual struggle is one of the central reasons we are so violent toward them.

In Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir, W. D. Ehrhart suggests the spiritual meaning of his Vietnam tour—the growing gulf between the ideals with which he had enlisted, and his actual combat experience—using the metaphor of a world exploding into pieces. He begins his Vietnam story with an incident that occurred virtually at the end of his tour, when he was nearly killed by a rocket grenade in Hue: “[S]uddenly the world was in pieces. I never heard the explosion. Only the impact registered.” By repeating these same words near the end of his memoir, Ehrhart frames his entire story within this metaphor of a world blown apart, with an impact that registers over the remainder of his life.

While the language with which he tells this story is quite straightforward and even prosaic, while his own lexicon does not include terms like “spiritual,” Ehrhart’s work is a chronicle of contemporary spiritual struggle. In our radically non-religious culture, fundamental spiritual questions and insights are often disguised in “secular” garb, and discovered—particularly by young people—only when worldly conventional wisdom is brought into question.

Because our modern world system emerged within world-wide contexts, we must consider how founding relationships that established it reflect global interconnectedness of their own era. Douglas Sturm has written, “History is a process of new formations. What we are and what we shall become are not givens. They are results of many relations in which we are engaged and whose character we affect, in however small a degree, by the manner of our participation.” Too often this relational perspective has been ignored in propounding origins and fundamental relationships of our modern world. For over five hundred years, for example, Eurocentrism has betrayed indebtedness to Renaissance hubris. Further, contemporary memories of our relational past are laced with policies and perspectives of forebears who constituted nation states. These processes entailed “inventing traditions” post facto, while also vesting collective memories with [hi]stories on behalf of national dignity and imperial stature. Even as false memories have been used for socializing children into citizens, and for motivating troops and voters, they also render indispensable historical understandings problematical. Sometimes there are hints of such fabrications in paradoxical impressions. Edward Lucie-Smith muses: “Granted that piracy is really no more than robbery at sea, how did the crime come to acquire the aura of sinister glamour that still clings to it, an aura which sets the pirate apart from other and more commonplace malefactors?” Piracy's “aura of sinister glamour” is not confined to tropes like Blackbeard, the Jolly Roger, or Long John Silver. “Piracy” has clouded Asian history and rationalized European incursions, at least since the Portuguese captured the fabulous port city of Melaka in 1511.

The Bible is generally recognized as the foundation and point of departure for later Jewish and Christian religious and moral understandings. Nevertheless, both conservative and liberal schools within these traditions have tended to assume that biblical religion has to do only with humankind. Much of Western secular philosophy likewise has been pre-occupied exclusively with the human situation. In recent years, many theologians and ethicists have begun to trace the roots of emerging environmental concerns back to biblical sources. Several excellent studies have resulted from this movement. None, however, has focused on biblical laws and covenants.

Commonly, biblical laws are thought to refer solely to Israel's relation with God (or Yahweh) and the structuring of relationships within the Israelite community. The term “covenant” generally refers to those reported occasions in biblical times when God designated Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their descendants, as his particular people, and laid upon them certain obligations, typically in the form of laws. Yet a great many biblical laws refer to treatment of animals, the land, trees, and vegetation. And two major biblical covenants embrace not only the people of Israel, but all human beings and all living creatures.

Somewhere near the heart of much recent liberal political theory is the claim that if the state restricts an agent's liberty, its restrictions should have some rationale that is defensible to each of those whose liberty is constrained. Liberals are committed to “the requirement that all aspects of the social should either be made acceptable or be capable of being made acceptable to every last individual.” In a pluralistic culture, there are many claims which are particularly controversial, many about which we expect “reasonable disagreement.” If we are to enjoy consensus regarding state restrictions, citizens should not support coercive policies on such controversial grounds. If, for example, some coercive policy is passed by popular referendum, and if its supporters have no reason to vote for the policy other than their religious convictions, then, given that reasonable, informed people reject religious belief, the policy in question lacks public justification. Given the liberal view that coercive policies should be defensible to all those affected by them, conscientious citizens should restrain themselves from supporting (or rejecting) policies on the basis of excessively controversial grounds. Principles of restraint specify both the types of grounds on the basis of which citizens may appropriately support a given policy and the types of grounds on which citizens may not properly rely.