“My Body, Their Baby: A Progressive Christian Vision for Surrogacy”Grace Y. Kao Nearly four decades after the In re Baby M case stimulated widespread debate in the United States, the legal and religious debates over surrogacy continue. Surrogacy laws in the U.S. vary widely by state, and Pope Francis recently made international headlines by calling…
The Oxford Handbook of Christianity and LawJohn Witte, Jr. and Rafael Domingo This text is excerpted in part from the front matter of the Oxford Handbook of Christianity and Law, edited by John Witte, Jr. and Rafael Domingo (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) and is used herein with permission. This hefty new volume, over…
Table Talks on Law and ReligionJohn Witte, Jr. This is an excerpt from John Witte, Jr.’s open access book, Table Talk: Short Reflections on the Weightier Matters of Law and Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2023). “Table talks” have long been a familiar genre of writing for jurists, theologians, politicians, and novelists. In this little volume, leading…
Photo by Ramaz Bluashvili. Historical Context A timely, significant topic of discussion worth remembering, stretching back to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s battle against anti-Catholic prejudice, is the relationship between politicians and their faith leaders. This relationship, particularly involving politicians who are Roman Catholic, is the focus of this article. In his September 12, 1960,…
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,…
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…
Photo by Andrey Grinkevich on 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. In his previous encyclical Laudato Si, Pope Francis claims that the contours of biblical teaching “suggest that…
Photo by Xavier Coiffic on 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. As understanding the finer points of Roman Catholic ethical doctrine can be a feat in and of…
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 has just published a far-reaching encyclical that is destined, with time, to become his spiritual legacy to mankind in the realm…