Making Promises: Oaths, Treaties, and Covenants in Multi-jurisdictional and Multi-religious Settings

How should we understand promises as public, private, or political commitments? What are the conditions for promise-making in religiously diverse societies with competing jurisdictions and sovereignties? Making Promises addresses how promises are made meaningful not only through law, but also through appeals to transcendent powers across diverse traditions.
Each contribution in this volume takes a closer look at specific kinds of promises: oaths, treaties, and covenants. The chapters reveal much about the nature of promises in multi-religious and multi-jurisdictional societies, and with contributions from scholars of religious studies, Indigenous studies, law, history, politics, and anthropology, this volume represents a comparative conversation on the making of promises. It pays close attention to Indigenous histories, visions, and conceptions of justice; comparative law within and across settler colonial states; interactions among religions and secularisms; and the ongoing importance of material culture, ritual, and emotion for these practices.
At a time of human-caused environmental devastation and political upheaval, when making promises for the future seems both urgent and futile, this volume shows that promises have long been made and unmade, kept and broken, in ways that successive generations need to acknowledge and take up anew.

Pamela E. Klassen is a professor of the study of religion at the University of Toronto, and the author of The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

Benjamin L. Berger is an associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University.


Monique Scheer is a professor of historical and cultural anthropology at the University of Tübingen, and the author of Enthusiasm: Emotional Practices of Conviction in Modern Germany (Oxford University Press, 2020).