This collection of essays, presented in honor of Ronna Burger, addresses questions and themes that have animated her thinking, teaching, and writing over the years. With a view to the scope of her writings, these essays range broadly: from the Bible and Ancient Greek authors--including not only Plato and Aristotle, but also Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Xenophon--to medieval thinkers, Maimonides, Dante, and Boccaccio, as well as modern philosophers, from Descartes and Montesquieu to Kant, Lessing, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. Moving in order from antiquity to modernity, the essays highlight certain recurring philosophical issues, including the relations between nature and convention, law and justice, human and divine, in light of the indispensable need for questioning and self-knowledge. Taken collectively, the essays disclose intriguing connections among the various authors and texts and display how the themes of nature, law, and the sacred continue to resonate across time.

"Often considered a secularizing force in the rise of the nation state, natural law was called upon in the defence of the early-modern confessional states. The fourteen chapters of this volume show how religious and legal thought around natural and biblical law interacted and combined in the new Christian states of Lutheranism, Calvinism and Catholicism. The volume addresses also questions of political legitimacy, civic and ecclesiastical authority, societal stability, conceptions of common good, liberalism's value pluralism (and its pretence), toleration and the lingering humanist project of determining "who are we", issues that were then important as they are now. Contributors are: Dominique Bauer, Thomas Behme, Hans Blom, Jiří Chotaš, Alberto Clerici, Stefanie Ertz, Arthur Eyffinger, Heikki Haara, Mads Langballe Jensen, Adriana Luna-Fabritius, Denis Ramelet, József Simon, and Markus M. Totzeck"--

Since time immemorial indigenous people have engaged in legal relationships with other-than-human-persons. These relationships are exemplified in enspirited sacred natural sites, which are owned and governed by numina spirits that can potentially place legal demands on humankind in return for protection and blessing. Although conservationists recognise the biodiverse significance of most sacred natural sites, the role of spiritual agency by other-than-human-persons is not well understood. Consequently, sacred natural sites typically lack legal status and IUCN-designated protection. More recent ecocentric and posthuman worldviews and polycentric legal frameworks have allowed courts and legislatures to grant 'rights' to nature and 'juristic personhood' and standing to biophysical entities. This book examines the indigenous literature and recent legal cases as a pretext for granting juristic personhood to enspirited sacred natural sites. The author draws on two decades of his research among Tibetans in Kham (southwest China), to provide a detailed case study. It is argued that juristic personhood is contingent upon the presence and agency of a resident numina and that recognition should be given to their role in spiritual governance over their jurisdiction. The book concludes by recommending that advocacy organisations help indigenous people with test cases to secure standing for threatened sacred natural sites (SNS) and calls upon IUCN, UNESCO (MAB and WHS), ASEAN Heritage and EuroNatura to retrospectively re-designate their properties, reserves, parks and initiatives so that SNS and spiritual governance are fully recognised and embraced. It will be of great interest to advanced students and researchers in environmental law, nature conservation, religion and anthropology.

Reproduction of the original: Natural Law in the Spirritual World by Henry Drummond

'Natural Law in the Spiritual World', written in the 1800s by Henry Drummond, delves into how the natural laws of the universe apply to the world of spirit. The book presents spiritual insights in an easy-to-understand manner, making it accessible to readers of different backgrounds. There are chapters dedicated to topics such as biogenesis, abiogenesis, degeneration, reversion to type, and more. The book may be a little wordy in places, but it is spiritually poetic and beautiful. Ultimately, it provides insight into the importance of God and the eternal nature of the soul.

This noteworthy book develops a new theory of the natural law that takes its orientation from the account of the natural law developed by Thomas Aquinas, as interpreted and supplemented in the context of scholastic theology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Though this history might seem irrelevant to twenty-first-century life, Jean Porter shows that the scholastic approach to the natural law still has much to contribute to the contemporary discussion of Christian ethics. Aquinas and his interlocutors provide a way of thinking about the natural law that is distinctively theological while at the same time remaining open to other intellectual perspectives, including those of science. In the course of her work, Porter examines the scholastics' assumptions and beliefs about nature, Aquinas's account of happiness, and the overarching claim that reason can generate moral norms. Ultimately, Porter argues that a Thomistic theory of the natural law is well suited to provide a starting point for developing a more nuanced account of the relationship between specific beliefs and practices. While Aquinas's approach to the natural law may not provide a system of ethical norms that is both universally compelling and detailed enough to be practical, it does offer something that is arguably more valuable -- namely, a way of reflecting theologically on the phenomenon of human morality.

Has Hobbesian moral and political theory been fundamentally misinterpreted by most of his readers? Since the criticism of John Bramhall, Hobbes has generally been regarded as advancing a moral and political theory that is antithetical to classical natural law theory. Kody W. Cooper challenges this traditional interpretation of Hobbes in Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law. Hobbes affirms two essential theses of classical natural law theory: the capacity of practical reason to grasp intelligible goods or reasons for action and the legally binding character of the practical requirements essential to the pursuit of human flourishing. Hobbes’s novel contribution lies principally in his formulation of a thin theory of the good. This book seeks to prove that Hobbes has more in common with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of natural law philosophy than has been recognized. According to Cooper, Hobbes affirms a realistic philosophy as well as biblical revelation as the ground of his philosophical-theological anthropology and his moral and civil science. In addition, Cooper contends that Hobbes's thought, although transformative in important ways, also has important structural continuities with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of practical reason, theology, social ontology, and law. What emerges from this study is a nuanced assessment of Hobbes’s place in the natural law tradition as a formulator of natural law liberalism. This book will appeal to political theorists and philosophers and be of particular interest to Hobbes scholars and natural law theorists.

An indirect response to Darwin's landmark work "On the Origin of Species," Drummond shows that faith and science actually go more hand in hand than most of us as theologians are willing to accept. By going over the facts of science, Drummond is able to show how the two relate so that we can reconcile our Christian beliefs in the world that is obsessed with the Scientific Method.

For over twenty centuries, from ancient Greece the ideal of natural law has been appealed to in Western moral and legal philosophy as a grounding for ethics and jurisprudence, centered on capacities of a common "human nature". From the early medieval advent of "Christendom", it was embedded within theistic and religious systems for over a millennium, during which time it was treated as incomplete and part of an enveloping divine law of ethics. Modern agnosticism in theology, religion, and metaphysics then saw natural law unhitched from these associations, but it is still suspect due to its lingering ties with these disciplines and practices. It endured through its meta-ethical capacity to integrate changes in science with ethics via its central notion of wellbeing as the perfection of human nature, via access to "the highest good", however variously understood. Today, nature and human nature's wellbeing, are both endangered. Ecological destruction arising from unbridled growth, industrial pollution, nuclear weapons and mass population displacement though poverty and wars threaten humanity. But in terms of the meta-ethics of wellbeing, both the humanist normative ethics of natural law, and some of its enveloping theistic and religious divine law addenda, can be invoked to address such evils. The book aims to reinvigorate natural law as a unifying ethical organon for this purpose, showing that it can dialogue with its enveloping divine law "overlays" constructively, uncovering its points of essential unity with them, and generating some unified solutions to the global threats mentioned, like poverty. These are largely due to global injustices like tax evasion, the arms trade, and political corruption, which are better prevented by cooperatively agreed and enforced global ideals, norms, and laws, based on natural and divine law, grounding international laws rather than appealing to national norms and laws alone.