Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay Introduction This short posting on what the Jewish tradition has to say about Thanksgiving will strike some as surprising — so a word of background might be helpful. Traditional Jews do not celebrate holidays of another religion and have always shied away from even nominally secular holidays that are…
Photo from Unsplash This article is part of our “Fratelli Tutti: Reflections on Pope Francis’s Call for Fraternity in Law and Religion” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. On October 3, 2020, Pope Francis took the unusual step of traveling to the birthplace, home, and tomb of his…
Photo from Unsplash When Japan set out to reinvent itself as a modern nation-state in the second half of the 19th century, the new generation of policymakers had to navigate a plethora of foreign concepts as the vocabulary of Western thought was translated into Japanese. While many of these concepts were essentially new philosophical outlooks…
Georgia State Capitol, Atlanta, Georgia. Source: DXR, Wikimedia CC BY-SA 4.0. Currently, all eyes are on Georgia as the state prepares for the runoff elections on January 5th, which will determine which party has control of the Senate. While the battles between Jon Ossoff and David Perdue and Raphael G. Warnock and Kelly Loeffler are…
This article is part of our “Fratelli Tutti: Reflections on Pope Francis’s Call for Fraternity in Law and Religion” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. On October 3, 2020, the vigil of the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, Pope Francis issued his third papal encyclical. The title,…
Image by Mark Thomas from Pixabay We the People … in order … to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Because neither the People nor their leaders are angels, the Constitution reflects a Calvinist theological perspective and embodies “obsessive…
Photo by Catherine Dionne from Unsplash This article is part of our “Fratelli Tutti: Reflections on Pope Francis’s Call for Fraternity in Law and Religion” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. The modern history of humanity is driven by several contradictions, one of them being the conflict between…
Render Unto Caesar: Law, Religion, and Tax Allen Calhoun No area of law is more central to the interplay of religion and law than taxation. In his book The City of God, the theologian and philosopher St. Augustine famously questioned the difference between an empire and a band of robbers. Any faith traditions trying to…
Photo from Pixabay This article is part of our “Fratelli Tutti: Reflections on Pope Francis’s Call for Fraternity in Law and Religion” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Pope Francis’s recent encyclical is the second of his major writings inspired directly by his papal namesake, St. Francis of…
Image from Pixabay This article is part of our “Fratelli Tutti: Reflections on Pope Francis’s Call for Fraternity in Law and Religion” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. The post-9/11 world was marked by an urgent need to theorize about the relationship between religion and violence, but at…