THE BIBLE IN AMERICAN LAW AND POLITICS: A REFERENCE GUIDE. By John R.Vile. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. PP. vii‐638. Hardcover, $125.00.

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-243
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Reference Guide ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
American Law

scholarly journals Christian Scripture and American Scripture: An Instructive Analogy?

2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory A. Kalscheur
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
American Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Biblical Interpretation ◽  
The Church ◽  
The U.S

As a Jesuit priest whose ministry includes the teaching of constitutional law, I regularly struggle with the task of interpreting two foundational normative texts: the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. The Bible plays a central normative role in the life of the Church, while the Constitution provides a normative framework for American law and politics. These texts ground the ongoing lives of both the Church and the American political community. Both of these textually constituted communities face the challenge of appropriating for contemporary experience a normative text produced in a significantly different historical context. But can American constitutional lawyers learn anything from the ways in which the Bible has been interpreted within the life of the Church?Jaroslav Pelikan, eminent historian of the Church's doctrinal tradition and Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, believes that those engaged in the enterprise of constitutional interpretation can indeed learn something from the history of biblical interpretation. Drawing on a life-long “study of the twenty centuries of interpreting Christian Scriptures,” Pelikan offers his new book,Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution, in the hope that it “may be of some help and illumination … to those who stand in the tradition of the two centuries of interpreting American Scripture.” (37)

Exceptional America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mugambi Jouet
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
Law School ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
American Conservatism ◽  
The Bible

Americans are far more divided than other Westerners over basic issues, including wealth inequality, health care, climate change, evolution, the literal truth of the Bible, apocalyptical prophecies, gender roles, abortion, gay rights, sexual education, gun control, mass incarceration, the death penalty, torture, human rights, and war. The intense polarization of U.S. conservatives and liberals has become a key dimension of American exceptionalism—an idea widely misunderstood as American superiority. It is rather what makes America an exception, for better or worse. While exceptionalism once was largely a source of strength, it may now spell decline, as unique features of U.S. history, politics, law, culture, religion, and race relations foster grave conflicts and injustices. They also shed light on the peculiar ideological evolution of American conservatism, which long predated Trumpism. Anti-intellectualism, conspiracy-mongering, radical anti-governmentalism, and Christian fundamentalism are far more common in America than Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing inspiration from Alexis de Tocqueville, Mugambi Jouet explores American exceptionalism’s intriguing roots as a multicultural outsider-insider. Raised in Paris by a French mother and Kenyan father, he then lived throughout America, from the Bible Belt to New York, California, and beyond. His articles have notably been featured in The New Republic, Slate, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, and Le Monde. He teaches at Stanford Law School.

Autobiographies of Three Surviving Branch Davidians

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-197
Author(s):  
Catherine Wessinger
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Human Dimensions ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Initial Report ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Branch Davidians ◽  
The Bible ◽  
American Law ◽  
The Media ◽  
Federal Agents

This article provides an initial report on oral histories being collected from three surviving Branch Davidians: Bonnie Haldeman, the mother of David Koresh, Clive Doyle, and Sheila Martin. Their accounts are being made into autobiographies. Interviews with a fourth survivor, Catherine Matteson, are being prepared for deposit in an archive and inform the material gathered from Bonnie Haldeman, Clive Doyle, and Sheila Martin. Oral histories provided by these survivors humanize the Branch Davidians, who were dehumanized and erased in 1993 by the application of the pejorative ‘cult’ stereotype by the media and American law enforcement agents. These Branch Davidian accounts provide alternate narratives of what happened in 1993 at Mount Carmel Center outside Waco, Texas, to those provided by American federal agents, and flesh out the human dimensions of the community and the tragedy. Branch Davidians are differentiated from many other people primarily by their strong commitment to doing God's will as they understand it from the Bible. Otherwise they are ordinary, intelligent people with the same emotions, loves, and foibles as others.

„Rzymski” Żyd – nieznana twórczość Romana Brandstaettera

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Dariusz Konrad Sikorski
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Role Model ◽  
The Self ◽  
Polish Literature ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Law

Summary After 1946, ie. after embracing Christianity, Roman Brandstaetter would often point to the Biblical Jonah as a role model for both his life and his artistic endeavour. In the interwar period, when he was a columnist of Nowy Głos, a New York Polish-Jewish periodical, he used the penname Romanus. The ‘Roman’ Jew appears to have treated his columns as a form of an artistic and civic ‘investigation’ into scandalous cases of breaking the law, destruction of cultural values and violation of social norms. Although it his was hardly ‘a new voice’ with the potential to change the course of history, he did become an intransigent defender of free speech. Brought up on the Bible and the best traditions of Polish literature and culture, Brandstaetter, the self-appointed disciple of Adam Mickiewicz, could not but stand up to the challenge of anti-Semitic aggression.

Is Racial Equality Unconstitutional?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Golub
Keyword(s):  
Racial Formation ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Racial Consciousness ◽  
Constitutional Order ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
American Law ◽  
Racial Domination ◽  
Fundamental Transformation

This concluding chapter considers the implications of the book’s central claims: that constitutional law marks a contested site of racial formation, that color-blind constitutionalism represents an assertion of white racial interest and identity, and that the peculiar form of racial consciousness it enacts renders the pursuit of racial equality a violation of white rights. Taking up the question of political possibility within a legal system constituted by racial domination, the chapter suggests that racial equality may not be achievable within the current American constitutional order. It calls for a rethinking of American law and politics from the premise that racial equality will require a more fundamental transformation than these constraints would permit, and points toward an explicitly antiredemptive political vision upon which a more authentic racial democracy might be founded.

The Common Law in Colonial America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
American Law ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
The Law ◽  
Substantive Law ◽  
The Revolution

This volume begins where volumes 2 and 3 ended. The main theme of the four-volume project is that the law of America’s thirteen colonies differed profoundly when they first were founded, but had developed into a common American law by the time of the Revolution. This fourth volume focuses on what was common to the law of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, although it also takes important differences into account. The first five chapters examine procedural and substantive law in colonies and conclude that, except in North Carolina and northern New York, the legal system functioned effectively in the interests both of Great Britain and of colonial localities. The next three chapters examine changes in law and the constitution beginning with the Zenger case in 1735—changes that ultimately culminated in independence. These chapters show how lawyers became leading figures in what gradually became a revolutionary movement. It also shows how lawyers used legal and constitutional ideology in the interests, sometimes of an economic character, of their clients. The book thereby engages prior scholarship, especially that of Bernard Bailyn and John Phillip Reid, to show how ideas and constitutional values possessed independent causal significance in leading up to the Revolution but also served to protect institutional structures and socioeconomic interests that likewise possessed causal significance.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document