Photo by Ravi Pinisetti on Unsplash. The New Age of Rights In the 1990s, the European Union (EU) seemed to be done. The Old Continent was pacified. Soviet imperialism had melted away. European dictatorships — from Portugal to Spain, from Greece to Romania — had ended. European citizens could travel from Italy to the Netherlands,…
Photo by Tom Gainor on Unsplash. This article is part of our “Chaos at the Capitol: Law and Religion Perspectives on Democracy’s Dark Day” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. We are shocked. Morally outraged. How could a U.S. president, touting “law and order,” incite a blatant attack on “American democracy”…
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash. This article is part of our “Chaos at the Capitol: Law and Religion Perspectives on Democracy’s Dark Day” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. “Onward, Christian soldiers!Marching as to war,With the cross of Jesus Going on before.” Though this began as a song for a…
Photo by Mohammed Nasim. 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. Nigel Biggar’s publications are predictable, but never uninteresting: predictable in that he is unashamedly a conservative moral philosopher who self-defines as a professional Christian ethicist, a description which seems…
Image by Pexels from Pixabay. 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. What’s Wrong with Rights is a superb book. If there is one subject that lends itself to interdisciplinary research, it is that of human rights. To the extent…
Photo by Konrad Ziemlewski 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. Nigel Biggar is essentially right about rights. They are indeed paradigmatically legal. They are indeed conditional and limited. And it is indeed the case that they can…
Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash. This article is part of our “Chaos at the Capitol: Law and Religion Perspectives on Democracy’s Dark Day” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. In a deeply divided nation, and especially after the events of January 6, 2021, no one is in a particularly forgiving…
Image by Sage Scott from Pixabay. This article is part of our “Chaos at the Capitol: Law and Religion Perspectives on Democracy’s Dark Day” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. A mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Perhaps its most visible leader was a man wearing a bearskin headdress,…
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 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. In his book What’s Wrong with Rights?, Nigel Biggar argues that “the task is actually not to jettison talk about subjective rights, but rather to save…
Photo by Ryan Hoffman 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. Despite the title, Nigel Biggar’s main objective, in this stimulating but debatable book, is not to discredit rights language entirely. He is perfectly content to support the…