Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash. On December 1, 2021, the United States Supreme Court will hear the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that threatens to be the death knell for abortion rights, reproductive freedom, and the right of women to bodily autonomy and security in the U.S. In Dobbs,…
Today the news broke that Kyle Rittenhouse had been “acquitted on all charges in the shooting deaths of two men and wounding of a third at a Wisconsin protest against racial injustice last year,” as AP put it. I don’t say this glibly: God help us. Rittenhouse, as we would say growing up, was clearly “looking for…
Moral Reflections on 21st Century Tax Policy Trends Susan Pace Hamill Tax policy, an important ethical issue that every voting citizen and public office holder must address, boils down to defining the amount of tax revenues needed and deciding how the burden for paying taxes should be allocated among taxpayers enjoying different levels of income…
Pope Francis and President Joe Biden at the Vatican, October 29, 2021. Wikimedia (PD-US). The meeting between President Joe Biden and Pope Francis at the Vatican has left us with memorable photographs and an important moment in history. What remains with me most vividly is the fact of the meeting itself, stripped of ceremony and…
Photo by Brad Dodson on Unsplash. One of the most contentious issues in constitutional law is whether governmental action amounts to “an establishment of religion” in violation of the First Amendment. For the past fifty years, the Court has often, but not always, resolved Establishment Clause cases using the three-pronged test established by Lemon v. Kurtzman. Under the…
Law and the Christian Tradition in Modern Russia edited by Paul Valliere and Randall A. Poole This volume is part of a fifty-volume series on “Great Christian Jurists in World History,” presenting the interaction of law and Christianity through the biographies of 1000 legal figures of the past two millennia. Commissioned by the Center for…
Framing Tax Enforcement Against the Poor Through Catholic Social Teaching W. Edward Afield What makes for just tax policy? As Professor Hamill observes in her Canopy Forum piece on the estate tax, tax policy “is ultimately a justice-based ethical issue” that naturally connects to the values underlying a citizen’s perception of justice. Law and religion…
The Gita for a Global World: Ethical Action in an Age of Flux Rohit Chopra Reading the Gita in a Global World An Introduction by Rohit Chopra It is a sign of the universal relevance and enduringly enigmatic character of a book when it speaks compellingly to opposing concerns, when it is invoked in the…
Photo by Artem Sapegin on Unsplash. This article is part of our “What’s Wrong with Rights?” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. First of all, let me express my gratitude to Professor Witte for having taken the trouble to comment at some length on my book. What he has…
The Innocence of Pontius Pilate by David Lloyd Dusenbury An overview by the author, with parts adapted from the book, published with the permission of Hurst and Oxford University Press. Ecce Homo: Pilate and Jesus in the History of Secularity In a beautiful volume of lectures and conversations, Julia Kristeva suggests that “the ‘genius of…