Can Laws and Rights Teach? John Witte and the Uses of the LawPatrick McKinley Brennan & William S. Brewbaker III The following is an adapted excerpt from the chapter “Can Laws and Rights Teach? John Witte and the Uses of the Law” from the book, Faith in Law, Law in Faith: Reflecting and Building on…
Street sign of Max Weber Square. Cholo Alemen on Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA-3.0) Editorial Note: Page numbers in the text refer to the prior publication linked in the text. In an earlier article in this publication on Robert A. Yelle’s book, Sovereignty and the Sacred, I claimed that Yelle fails to take seriously the distressing theoretical and…
Human Rights and Orthodox Christianity: Learning from our DifferencesJohn Witte, Jr. This essay was originally published on November 3, 2023 as a chapter in The Legal Thought of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, edited by Norman Doe and Dimitrios Nikiforos. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians worldwide, has thought profoundly about the…
Juniata River in Pennsylvania, United States by Chris Liu-Beers on Unsplash. This article is part of our “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act at Thirty” series. If you’d like to explore other articles in this series, click here. The Society of Friends — popularly known as the Quakers — emerged in England in the wake of the Thirty…
“Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C.” Colorized by Jordan J. Lloyd on Unsplash. O n August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial a speech that 60 years later possesses enduring significance for the struggle to achieve equal social opportunity as delineated within America’s founding principles. In the…
St Francis of Assisi by Philip Fruytiers. From the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. (PD-US). It is possible to investigate Saint Francis of Assisi’s life (1181-1226) from many different and relevant angles. His biography and the accounts of the way he lived are permeated with remarkable singularities and events: his horizontalized view of non-human…
“A Close Up View of a Puzzle Piece” by Pierre Bamin (Unsplash license). This article is part of our “200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh: Law, Religion, and Native American Lands” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. The Jig Saw Puzzle February 28, 2023 marked 200 years since Chief Justice John…
Lake Mystery, Canterbury, New Zealand by Michal Klajban (CC BY-SA 4.0). This article is part of our “200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh: Law, Religion, and Native American Lands” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Here in Aotearoa-New Zealand the doctrine of discovery is, for many, a very new concept. If…
This article is part of our “200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh: Law, Religion, and Native American Lands” series. If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Legacy embeds the actions and inactions of those before us into the current legal, political, and social processes. Reverberating through history are the echoes of words…
This article is part of our “200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh: Law, Religion, and Native American Lands” series. If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. The United States Supreme Court’s first Indian law case, Johnson v. M’Intosh, was decided in 1823. In that case, the Court summarized and then applied four…