Happiness is an essential goal of all people. Because happiness is so fundamentally part of our being, the question of how to attain it is of great importance. Buddhism has a long and well-developed philosophical and practical tradition with the goal of helping humans to attain happiness and end suffering. In this article, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama draws on the wisdom of the Buddhist tradition to explain how one can achieve happiness by transforming the mind. In particular, His Holiness explains how, in the Buddhist tradition, there is a special instruction called Mind Training, which focuses on cultivating concern for others and turning adversity to advantage that can be of great benefit to people seeking to end suffering and cultivate happiness.

In Buddhism, happiness is achieved when a person can perceive the true nature of reality, unmodified by the mental constructs we superimpose upon it. This authentic happiness comes from having an exceptionally healthy state of mind that underlies and suffuses all emotional states and that embraces all the joys and sorrows that come one's way. The mental states necessary for authentic happiness are not simply found or happened upon. Rather, happiness is achieved through mental training that purges the mind of afflictive emotions, such as hatred and compulsive desire, which literally poison the mind, and above all through the eradication of ignorance. This article discusses the Buddhist conception of happiness and its attainment. In particular, the article addresses the methods and practices that Buddhism employs to train the mind to achieve authentic happiness and the recent developments in contemplative neuroscience that complement and advance these methods.

Happiness has both universal and culturally specific forms. This article describes three sensibilities of happiness in Judaism: the prophetic life of struggle; the happiness of ashrei, with its life of simplicity in accordance with the will of God; and simchah, the life-lived-in-relationship given supreme expression in Moses's covenantal vision in the book of Deuteronomy. Focusing, in particular, on the social vision of Moses, the article explores how Jewish notions of happiness challenge contemporary conceptions of happiness grounded in materialism and acquisition, and it discusses how a focus on material happiness threatens to undermine relationships and the social fiber that is the thread from which true and lasting happiness is woven.

This essay seeks to place happiness and sadness as values in their proper place in the Jewish legal tradition—as secondary concerns that are properly invoked and considered in cases where Jewish law is indefinite and unclear. This article provides a number of illustrative examples where such is done, and it then seeks to place happiness and its related values in their proper place in Jewish law as compared to other second-tier principles.

This article explores resources within the Christian theological tradition that recognize happiness in earthly life while also preparing Christians for ultimate happiness through union with God. Two resources explored in the article are the appreciation of happiness in Jesus's ministry and its engagement with Greek philosophy. After exploring these resources, the article turns to Aelred of Rievaulx, the great medieval theologian, to investigate how moral virtue, transcendent happiness, and earthly pleasure are harmonious parts of a holistic Christian vision of happiness. Finally, after examining Aelred's contribution, the article considers how this integrated view of happiness can help us to think through the problems of happiness in our lives today.

Saint Augustine opens his Confessions with the words “Great art thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is thy power, and of thy wisdom there is no number. . . . this tiny part of all that Thou hast created desires to praise Thee. Thou dost so excite him that to praise Thee is his joy. For Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” The author discovered these words, in the translation of Frank Sheed (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943), at a young age, and the concluding line in particular, “For Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee,” has occasioned continual return and reflection. In this article, the author investigates the meaning of this line in its context, following the phrase “to praise Thee is his joy.” Adopting a generous construal of his own experience with the text, the author examines some of the ways in which a person who wishes to be a Christian thinks about the elusive yet all-important dimension of human existence called happiness or joy.

Happiness is a universal concept and experience that cuts across cultures and religions. Nonetheless, the particular manifestations and descriptions of happiness are culturally informed and contextualized. This essay explores the concepts of happiness and the pursuit of happiness in Islamic thought, arguing that the pursuit of happiness is envisaged differently in Islamic thought. Rather than the more transient forms of happiness celebrated in modern, secularized or hedonistic cultures, the pursuit of happiness in Islamic thought is concerned above all with the attainment of enduring happiness.

The idea of happiness and its pursuit have been taken up by thinkers in many times and places. This article examines the role of happiness as a concept and goal in medieval Islamic thought and, especially, in the work of Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī and Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī. In examining Ghazālī's and Fārābī's perspectives on happiness, the article looks at the influence of Plato and Aristotle on these medieval Islamic thinkers and puts Islamic thought on happiness in conversation with the views of the American founders.

In this article, I set forth conceptions of happiness (sa‘ada) from the Islamic tradition, and against this background, I discuss the failure to attain happiness in the modern age. The cumulative Islamic tradition attests to the importance of happiness to faith in God, and to the importance of faith to happiness. While the themes of knowledge, enlightenment, balance, peace, and knowing the other are central to the Islamic theology of happiness, the failure of happiness is embodied by the idea of jahiliyya (a state of ignorance). I argue that a crucial issue in considering happiness and the failure of happiness is how one understands submission to God, and that submission to God is not simply obedience or servitude to God; rather, submission to God means aspiring to and seeking the goodness of God, and liberating one's soul and being from a state of godlessness, or ignorance (jahiliyya), in order to attain a state of Godliness. To grow into and with God's love is the epitome of fulfillment, goodness, and happiness. However, when submission becomes a formulaic relationship based on generalized stereotypes about history, societies, and people, or on a stereotyped understanding of one's self dealing with a stereotypical understanding of an omnipotent but inaccessible God, unhappiness becomes the norm. Drawing on this analysis, I argue that in the modern age, the modalities of thought in puritanical movements have had a consistently demoralizing and dehumanizing effect that persistently undermines the possibilities for social and moral happiness, and thus, undermines the very purpose of the Islamic faith.

In another essay being published contemporaneously with this one, I have explained that as the concept “human right” is understood both in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in all the various international human rights treaties that have followed in the Universal Declaration's wake, a right is a human right if the rationale for establishing and protecting the right—for example, as a treaty-based right—is, in part, that conduct that violates the right violates the imperative, articulated in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration, to “act towards all human beings in a spirit of brotherhood.” Each of the human rights articulated in the Universal Declaration and/or in one or more international human rights treaties—for example, the right, articulated in Article 5 of the Universal Declaration and elsewhere, not to be subjected to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”—is a specification of what, in conjunction with other considerations, the imperative—which functions in the morality of human rights as the normative ground of human rights—is thought to forbid (or to require). A particular specification is controversial if and to the extent the supporting claim—a claim to the effect that the “act towards all human beings in a spirit of brotherhood” imperative forbids (or requires) X—is controversial. My aim in this essay is to elaborate and defend a particular specification: the right, internationally recognized as a human right, to freedom of conscience—to freedom, that is, to live one's life in accord with the deliverances of one's conscience.

The late Harold Berman was a pioneering scholar of Soviet law, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion; he is best known today for his monumental Law and Revolution series on the Western legal tradition. Berman wrote a short book, Law and Language, in the early 1960s, but it was not published until 2013. In this early text, he adumbrated many of the main themes of his later work, including Law and Revolution. He also anticipated a good deal of the interdisciplinary and comparative methodology that we take for granted today, even though it was rare in the intense legal positivist era during which he was writing. This essay contextualizes Berman's Law and Language within the development of his own legal thought and in the evolution of interdisciplinary legal studies. It focuses particularly on the themes of law and religion, law and history, and law and communication that dominated Berman's writing until his death in 2007.

Scholars of Islamic law, gender, and Africa will be pleased with the arrival of two important new volumes that are bold in their bringing together of ethnographic data with legal history and analysis. Margot Badran's Gender and Islam in Africa: Rights, Sexuality, and Law, and Christina Jones-Pauly and Abir Dajanfi Tuqan's Women under Islam: Gender Justice and the Politics of Islamic Law collectively advance a movement in Islamic legal studies that focuses on interdisciplinary explorations into the ways particular constructions of Islamic law are foregrounded and reified in accordance with the existential impulses and demands of a particular society at a particular time, what we might call the “hermeneutic of experience.” I would argue that gender functions as the category that most regularly exposes the limitations of various historically situated concepts of orthodoxy, and these books bear out this claim.

On Valentine's Day, 1989, novelist Salman Rushdie was driven into hiding in England by a fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran decrying his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, as “blasphemy against Islam” and demanding Rushdie's execution. Twenty years later, Yale University Press refused to publish cartoon representations of the Prophet Muhammad in political scientist Jytte Klausen's book, The Cartoons That Shook the World. That book analyzed the controversy spawned by a Danish newspaper's publication of the cartoons in 2005 and the republication of the cartoons in several European newspapers in 2008, which led to protests by Muslims around the world. In 2010, Terry Jones, a Christian pastor in Florida, announced plans to publicly burn a Qur'an on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Under protest, he cancelled his book-burning plans for the 9/11 anniversary, but he made good on his promise six months later in March 2011, in an incident whose online video dissemination around the world is said to have motivated riots in Afghanistan that resulted in the deaths of twelve people. Throughout this period, with the regularity of a drumbeat, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) (formerly the Organization of the Islamic Conference), a coalition of majority Muslim nations at the United Nations, introduced resolutions each year—first in the Human Rights Council (HRC) from 1999 forward and then in the General Assembly from 2005 forward—on “combating defamation of religions” at the UN and in wider global discourse.

In a short, provocative essay in First Things, political scientist Daniel Philpott argued that there is a new international theology. He called that theology “the liberal peace.” The liberal peace is an approach to international peacebuilding and transitional justice that emphasizes criminal trials alongside the rapid establishment of a market economy and a liberal democracy, especially in the form of elections. According to Philpott, this “theology” has its own cathedral in The Hague, its own pope (Luis Ocampo, the first Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court), magisterium (speeches by UN secretary generals, beginning with Boutros Boutros-Ghali's 1992 document An Agenda for Peace), saints (Woodrow Wilson), and doctrinal tradition. The doctrinal tradition is composed primarily of the writings of liberal philosophers (Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Rawls, etc.) who highlight individual rationality as the ground of human rights and the protection of individual rights as the solution to the dangers of living in the state of nature.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of academic and popular writings on the relationship among Islam, secularism, and democracy. Often, this topic is approached through the question of compatibility: Is Islam compatible or incompatible with secular democracy? Regardless of whether one answers this question with a yes or with a no, such an approach does little to help one in achieving a more nuanced understanding of Islam or secular democracy as discursive traditions. The two works under review here do not follow this pattern. Though distinct in their disciplinary persuasions and in their questions and objects of research, both works offer critical insights into the interaction between Islam and the conditions and structures of secular modernity.