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32 Child & Fam. L. Q. 201 (2020)
Law, Love and Freedom: From the Sacred to the Secular

handle is hein.journals/chilflq32 and id is 201 raw text is: 201 Book Reviews Law, Love and Freedom: From the Sacred to the Secular Joshua Neoh Cambridge Studies in Law and Christianity Cambridge University Press, 2019 203pp, £85, hardback ISBN: 978-1-108427-65-4 This book, by the Australian philosopher of law Joshua Neoh, is written for legal theorists, theologians and philosophers of law, however, its fascinating subject matter, well-explained structure and elegant style open up the author's scholarship to readers from other disciplines, who have an interest in the history of ideas. An approach which describes human beings rather beautifully as 'suspended' in 'webs of significance that they themselves have spun'1 is one which can be readily appreciated by the social scientist or the historian. As a sociologist of the family with a recently acquired interest in family law, I have found myself repeatedly asking legal colleagues, 'but what IS law exactly?' This book takes the question back to the beginnings of the Judaeo-Christian story and shines a spotlight on law as a fundamental commitment in Western culture and one that is deeply related to the other fundamental concepts of love and freedom. Neoh turns each concept this way and that, to explore their internal bipolarities and their changing historical relatedness to one another in a way that, in the words of the author, enables us to 'see the present with new eyes, and thereby, get a better grasp of the predicament of the present'.2 The ideas explored - law, love and freedom - became vivid and urgent in the mind of this reader as reviewing coincided with the early stages of the crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The book's engagement with questions of human nature, authority, the inseparabil- ity of the individual from society, and the nature of freedom, was increasingly prescient as vital issues of values and practice were thrown up by the extraordinary, overnight, transformation of our social arrangements. The world viewed through the media and social media seemed starkly bifurcated into those who view their fellow humans as essentially 'good' and therefore capable of exercising freedom without law, and those with the more negative view of others as essentially 'bad' and in need of law in order to provide security from a descent into barbarism. For those of us uncomfortable with the politicisation of the crisis response along the old lines of Left and Right, Neoh's proposition that we need not seek synthesis or transcendence in the here and now, but rather, can learn to negotiate a plurality of values, offers a potentially helpful way through the current context which seems to veer between highly dramatised, pantomime political binaries or value-lite, political formlessness. Organised over six chapters, the book encourages us to take a dialectical view of the contradictory concepts underpinning our narrative of civilisation and imposes a schema on them through the prism of antinomianism. 1 At 84. 2 At 92.

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