Photo by kylefromthenorth on Unsplash. We at Canopy Forum join the world in lamenting the recent death and celebrating the remarkable life of Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu. The following text is based on a keynote lecture that Archbishop Tutu offered to conclude the international conference on “Christianity and Democracy in Global Context,” November 11-14, 1991, convened by…
Million MAGA March at US Capitol East, November 14, 2020. Source: Elvert Barnes Photography. (CC BY-SA 2.0). “we live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable,” opined former President Trump in a press release issued through his new technology…
Portrait of John Locke by Godfrey Kneller. (PD-US). A manuscript by the philosopher John Locke recently discovered in North Carolina raises fundamental questions of political participation. John Locke’s influence on the Founding Fathers in their formulation of the U.S. Constitution is well-known. It was Locke who argued, in the 1689 Two Treatises of Government, that…
Photo by Jurga Ka on Unsplash. This article also appears at Mere Orthodoxy. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many deaths and much suffering. It has also created a number of acute challenges for churches, one of which is how to think about religious exemptions to vaccine requirements. These requirements are sometimes imposed by employers, and…
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash. As you can see, we’ve had our eye on you for some time now Mr. Anderson. It seems that you have been living two lives. In one life, you’re Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, pay your taxes, and…
With a 65-page decision, the Joint Section of the Supreme Court (Sezioni Unite della Corte di Cassazione), the highest Italian Court, has ruled on the display of the crucifix in public school classrooms. Issued on September 9, 2021, decision no. 24414/2021 synthesizes an extensive number of precedents, including those of the Italian Constitutional Court and…
Law and the Christian Tradition in Modern Russiaedited by Paul Valliere and Randall A. Poole This volume is part of a 50-volume series on “Great Christian Jurists in World History,” presenting the interaction of law and Christianity through the biographies of 1,000 legal figures of the past two millennia. Commissioned by the Center for the…
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…