by Some readers of this blog might be interested in two pieces I’ve posted recently on SSRN. The first is an upcoming book chapter on “The Natural Law Challenge to Choice of Law.” In addition to a discussion of the relation of natural law (if it exists) to positive law and sovereign political deliberation, it also [...]
Read the full postMonthly Archive for November, 2010
by Attorney and commentator Jennifer Braceras has an op-ed in today’s Boston Herald responding to Time Magizine’s recent cover story entitled “Who Needs Marriage” and a recent Pew Study on the state of marriage and out of wedlock births in the United States. If she is correct in her assessment, as I think she is, what can be [...]
Read the full postA couple of months ago, I read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” a post-apocalyptic story that manages to celebrate the possibility of goodness and the hope of redemption even in the midst of unremitting destruction and human depravity. The religious subtext in the novel is implicit but clear. One particular passage jumped out at me, though, [...]
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by John Shimkus, a member of Congress from Illinois, has received international attention recently for a statement that he made at a congressional hearing on climate change in March 2009. Shimkus said, “The earth will end only when God declares that it is time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth.” He cited Genesis [...]
Read the full postI was recently invited to join the ReligiousLeftLaw blog, and with their kind permission, I’m going to be cross-posting some of my thoughts both here and there. Here’s the substance of my first effort: Let’s define the religious left, very roughly and tentatively, as tending toward some sort of religious universalism, comfort with freedom of [...]
Read the full postPatrick Deneen’s lecture “In Defense of Culture“, posted on the Front Porch Republic, argues that “liberalism, in its many forms – whether classical or progressive, whether purportedly on the Right or the Left – shares one basic feature in common, namely a hostility to cultural forms that are a pre-modern inheritance.” Since I found it enlightening and [...]
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by Over the weekend I participated in some fascinating conversations at Marquette as part of a conference on social justice organized by Christopher Wolfe. With folks like Jean Bethke Elshtain, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and John Finnis in the lineup, I (wisely) did more listening than talking. I found Wolterstorff’s exploration of social justice to be especially interesting.
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by By now, I suspect many of you have seen the text of the new Oklahoma amendment to its state constitution – an amendment that received 70% of the vote in a recent referendum – which states, in part, that “The Courts . . . when exercising their judicial authority . . . shall not consider [...]
Read the full postYesterday I attended The Royal Society’s conference entitled “Geoengineering – Taking Control of Our Planet’s Climate.” The Royal Society is 350-year-old group of elite scientists that “encourages public debate on key issues involving science.” I confess that the only member of the Society’s board whom I recognized was HRH William, the Prince of Wales, whose [...]
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