Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Thomas Ascik as he considers three recent books that address the prospects for Christianity in modern American culture. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher In Mere Christianity (1952), the published version of his radio talks delivered in the early 1940’s, C. S. [...]
“Precedence,” as well as following or overturning precedents, is not limited to what is decided in new cases. It is also concerns the adherence to established principles of judicial jurisprudence. Without both kinds of precedence, there is no limit to the power of the judiciary... In the last installment of this survey of the judicial principle [...]
In the case of United States v. Windsor, the Supreme Court found that the Constitution required formal, legal, and constitutional recognition of homosexual marriage. And yet if the Court had followed its own precedents, it would have ruled that Edith Windsor lacked the legal standing to file her original lawsuit... In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), [...]
With the Supreme Court’s decision in Gill v. Whitford, the door is now open under the right political circumstances for state courts to take over political redistricting. And the constitutional changes will be permanent… In the Wisconsin political-gerrymandering case, Gill v. Whitford, decided by the Supreme Court last week, the Court avoided ruling on the substantive constitutional [...]
Though Masterpiece is a decision upholding religious liberty, the Supreme Court’s ruling makes it clear that free speech about homosexuality does not enjoy broad protections… In the first of two momentous cases on its docket as to whether some Americans can be left alone as dissenters from the punishing orthodoxies of the progressive society and state, [...]
Patrick Deneen has entitled his book Why Liberalism Failed, but by his own analysis, he could have entitled it Why Liberalism Succeeded… Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen (248 pages, Yale University Press, 2018) In his comprehensive condemnation of three hundred years of modern liberalism, Patrick Deneen at one point speaks of “advanced liberalism,” and [...]
In December, the Supreme Court decided not to hear a case that proposed to extend the Court’s sexual freedom cases to wife-swapping. In Coker v. Whittington, two sheriff’s deputies in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, and their wives agreed to swap spouses, and each deputy began living with the opposite deputy’s wife. Invoking his office’s code of [...]
With a “clear, plain, and palpable” eagerness to seize control of the Pennsylvania congressional map in time for the 2018 mid-term elections, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has gone beyond judicial activism and joined with the Democrats in their attempt to win control of the U.S. Congress. The details of how this came about and the [...]
If governments can directly instruct families about what to believe concerning homosexuality and about the correct frame of mind to have in conducting daily business, it is hard think that the policies and practices of religious schools and other institutions, like hospitals, will be left alone... In Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision of the [...]
Is a long-standing commemorative cross on public land socially divisive and a governmental endorsement of religion? Or, to the contrary, is a constitutional challenge to that cross an act of gratuitous social divisiveness? Recently, in American Humanist Association v. Maryland, the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a ruling of the federal district court of [...]
In the potentially momentous case considering the issue of “political gerrymandering,” the Supreme Court last week spent almost no time discussing and demanding that the litigating parties address the language of the Constitution. In Gill v. Whitford, Wisconsin Democrats had won a 2-1 ruling of a three-judge federal district court that the 2010 re-apportionment plan [...]
In favor of Trinity Lutheran, the Supreme Court ruled that a government program cannot require a church “to renounce its religious character in order to participate in an otherwise generally available public benefit program for which it is fully qualified…” In its decision in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer this week, the Supreme Court took another [...]
Even those critics friendly to Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option have failed to take its implications seriously, likely because they are afraid to take the concrete steps he suggests to preserve their Christian way of life in this country… Does the United States need Christianity or at least the conventional morality based on Christianity? Until the [...]
With the grave worry of many Christians about living in a culture that seems to be antagonistic to Christianity itself, we ought to consider the radical alternative of intentional communities. In these days of the rise of the “nones,” said to be the fastest growing “religious” body in the country, and with the grave worry [...]