Image by Hans from Pixabay. The millstone was an integral tool needed to grind grain to make bread and sustain life, and during Biblical times, it was deemed that taking someone’s millstone would be like taking his or her life in pledge. It has been analogized as an instrument of death, a wrath of severe…
Photo by Simon Shim 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. A giant flag demanding “Make America Godly Again,” flanked by a Rambo-image of President Trump with a machine gun. A crowd…
Photo from Pixabay On October 28, 2017, a post appeared on 4chan, an anonymous online message board, alleging Hillary Clinton’s imminent arrest and a subsequent violent national uprising. The poster, whose username was simply the letter “Q,” claimed to be a high-ranking government intelligence officer with access to classified information. Hillary Clinton was not arrested…
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 Pixabay By the 6th century CE, Christianity was a religion of empire that produced significant codices of imperial law, many of which regulated Jewish practice. Even so, however, Christian polemics against Jewish “legalism” and the perceived burden of the Mosaic-Pharisaic law were commonplace. According to foundational Christian writings, Jesus’s death on the cross…
Photo from Wikimedia Commons The right to vote is a contested concept in American society. The choices made by elected federal and state governments, on the behalf of “We the People” as to who is not included in our democracy both construct American citizenship and reflect American democratic values. The contest around the right to…
Photo of cells by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Public Domain) A virtual conference organized in partnership with Brigham Young University Law School, Emory University Law School, Notre Dame Law School, St. John’s University School of Law, and the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law. View the full video and browse all essays here.…
Photo of cells by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Public Domain) A virtual conference organized in partnership with Brigham Young University Law School, Emory University Law School, Notre Dame Law School, St. John’s University School of Law, and the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law. View the full video and browse all essays here.…
Photo of cells by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Public Domain) A virtual conference organized in partnership with Brigham Young University Law School, Emory University Law School, Notre Dame Law School, St. John’s University School of Law, and the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law. View the full video and browse all essays here.…
Photo by Pedro Figueras on Pexels I have taught the book of Jonah for years, and I used to be very pleased with my reading of it. I taught my students that the author was using the characters of God and Jonah to prescribe a new concept of relating to others. In the story, Jonah…