by I 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 [...]
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by Patrick 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 [...]
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by Yesterday 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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by Brian Tamanaha writes at Balkanization on New York Law School Dean Richard Matasar’s recent comments about legal education reform. I’ve raised this issue here before: how might we as law professors informed by religious values contribute to the discussion over legal education reform? An aspect of this problem that particularly disturbs me is that so much [...]
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by I’ve brought up here from time to time an issue that worries me, but that doesn’t worry others much: how serious and threatening is the division between people who adhere to what James Davison Hunter called the “orthodox” position– conservative Christians and devout Jews, mostly– and the adherents of the “progressive” position– secularists, more liberal [...]
Read the full postThe failure of Congress to enact a climate change law, like the failure of last December’s Copenhagen meeting to produce a new international climate change treaty, has provoked various responses from the proponents of such measures. A recent article in the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_lizza) cast blame on Republicans (for being obstructionists), Democrats (for being timid), [...]
Read the full postA recent article in the Economist (“Whose Law Counts Most“) has sparked another round of controversy regarding religious arbitration in the United States. On the heels of the article, a number of thoughtful blog posts have also grappled with the issue (see, e.g., Volokh, Volokh, and CoOp). Abroad, religious arbitration has frequently faced significant opposition (best [...]
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