Religion, Reform, and Antislavery

Author(s):  
Margaret Washington

This chapter considers, through a biracial lens, some essential complexities of antebellum women’s reform. The emphasis is on antislavery and a socioreligious ethos based on the intersectionality of spiritual egalitarianism, civil liberty, and the jeremiad tradition. Black women’s double burden, slavery and race, automatically channeled them as reformers into more expansive visions than whites, already jeopardizing their privileged True Woman status. For disparate reasons, convergence of abolition and equal rights was not a calling that white reform women embraced monolithically. As “doers of the word,” some upheld apostolic tenets of Christian unity. Others chose what eventually became republican individualism and a “segregated sisterhood.” Nonetheless, women of both races were mainsprings in the ultimate success of antebellum reform, the training ground for future struggles for equal rights.

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-193
Author(s):  
Julian Rivers

A series of cases, some of them with a high media profile, suggest that freedom of religion or belief in the United Kingdom is being undermined by the operation of new equality laws. This article outlines the constitutional context for liberty and equality rights as well as the main ways in which religious liberty is secured by and within equality law. However, British equality law puts pressure on religious liberty in four ways: (1) it confines the relevance of ‘religion’ to limited social contexts; (2) it creates a priority for equality-perspectives over liberty-perspectives on social conflict; (3) it generates new social assumptions about what individuals have to believe and say (or refrain from saying) if they are to be trusted to uphold the law; (4) it provides legitimation for the imposition of contested comprehensive equality doctrines, some of which are inimical to civil liberty. In response, it is important to emphasise the role of equality law as a tool to secure mutual toleration and equal rights in the face of religious and ethical disagreement.


Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore

The period of the French Revolution was famous for erecting an entirely new system of government and social mores on the basis of a declaration of the rights of man and the citizen. Everything changed in France, over a remarkably short period of time, leading to an especially intense debate about what a society founded on equal rights for all ought to look like. This chapter examines two of the systems expounded, derived from the political philosophies of Thomas Paine and Emmanuel Sièyes. The chapter examines the shock with which opponents such as Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon greeted rights-based politics, and what happened when the new worlds of peace and prosperity promised by Paine and Sièyes descended into chaos and poverty. Around the turn of the eighteenth century the chapter charts a turn away from France and towards Britain as a possible model state for rights compatible with order and with civil liberty; in this turn the history of Scotland, and the existence of brilliant Scottish philosophers played a prominent role, being proof that Britain was not an empire run for the benefit of a mercantile class based in London, but was rather a cosmopolitan empire whose peripheries benefitted as much as the metropole. Republican voices still dedicated to the kinds of transformative natural jurisprudence promised in the early years of the French Revolution, shouted from the sidelines that if Britain was now the model state for humanity, then all of the reform projects of the eighteenth century had altogether failed.


2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Weisz ◽  
Diane Quinn ◽  
Renee Houston
Keyword(s):  

2001 ◽  
pp. 91-100
Author(s):  
Yu. Ye. Reshetnikov

Last year, the anniversary of all Christianity, witnessed a number of significant events caused by a new interest in understanding the problem of the unity of the Christian Church on the turn of the millennium. Due to the confidentiality of Ukraine, some of these events have or will have an immediate impact on Christianity in Ukraine and on the whole Ukrainian society as a whole. Undoubtedly, the main event, or more enlightened in the press, is a new impetus to the unification of the UOC-KP and the UAOC. But we would like to focus on two documents relating to the problem of Christian unity, the emergence of which was almost unnoticed by the wider public. But at the same time, these documents are too important as they outline the future policy of other Christian denominations by two influential Ukrainian christian churches - the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. These are the "Basic Principles of the attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church to the" I ", adopted by the Anniversary Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Concept of the Ecumenical Position of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, adopted by the Synod of the Bishops of the UGCC. It is clear that the theme of the second document is wider, but at the same time, ecumenism, unification is impossible without solving the problem of relations with others, which makes it possible to compare the approaches laid down in the mentioned documents to the building of relations with other Christian confessions.


Author(s):  
Lucas A. Powe Jr.

Texas has created more constitutional law than any other state. In any classroom nationwide, any basic constitutional law course can be taught using nothing but Texas cases. That, however, understates the history and politics behind the cases. Beyond representing all doctrinal areas of constitutional law, Texas cases deal with the major issues of the nation. This book charts the rich and pervasive development of Texas-inspired constitutional law. From voting rights to railroad regulations, school finance to capital punishment, poverty to civil liberty, this book provides a window into the relationship between constitutional litigation and ordinary politics at the Texas Supreme Court, illuminating how all of the fiercest national divides over what the Constitution means took shape in Texas.


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