ROMAN CATHOLICISM AND THE TEMPTATION OF SHARI'A

Abstract

Perhaps, even if I have misread his contributions to the present and immediately preceding issues of Common Knowledge, Alick Isaacs will not take it amiss if I say they have stimulated the appearance of this essay of mine in the same venue and context. 1 Our efforts have in common, first, that we both are Scots whose religion is not that of the state-recognized national Church of Scotland: Dr. Isaacs, as I understand it, is a modern Orthodox Jew, and I am a Roman Catholic. We share also, and more significantly, a discontent, as citizens of the post-Nuremberg world order, with elements of our respective orthodoxies -and I believe we share also a sense that the authorities of our religions, in reaction against modernity, have gone astray from their own longer-term traditional principles. Dr. Isaacs writes, in this milieu, on behalf of peace. It is my intention to write here, in a complementary fashion, on behalf of democracy, its institutions, and the exercise of individual conscience. For his part, Dr. Isaacs builds a case on foundational texts of the talmudic age -and in turning first to the Christian Gospels, so, in a sense, do I.