The Educational Values of Law and Religion Study

This chapter sketches the historical flow and ebb of the study of law and religion in Western universities. Before the nineteenth century, the faculties of medicine, law, and theology dominated Western universities – focused on the body, mind, and soul respectively. The modern rise of positivism and disciplinary specialization eventually separated law and theology from each other and from the broader university. But in recent decades, this positivist paradigm has given way to more holistic forms of interdisciplinary study, including the study of law and religion. Many scholars are now exploring the religious dimensions of law, the legal dimensions of religion, and the interaction of legal and religious ideas and institutions, methods and practices -- historically and today, in the West and well beyond.