https://hastac.hcommons.org/members/johnwittejr/activity/ Activity feed for John Witte, Jr.. Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:16:32 +0000 https://buddypress.org/?v=10.6.0 en-US 30 hourly 2 5a91267bd1e32496ae58a52b30c543dd https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1695874/ Wed, 08 Jul 2020 13:26:38 +0000 A brief overview of an important new collection of essays on great Christian jurists in Italian history from the Middle Ages until today.

]]> 0 e0fc9a9b85a6b6e92192904ddc1b28c7 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1695873/ Wed, 08 Jul 2020 13:23:50 +0000 This is a brief introduction to a book that explores both historical and contemporary Christian sources and dimensions of global law and includes critical perspectives from various religious and philosophical traditions. In this book, two dozen leading scholars discuss the constituent principles of this new global legal order historically,…[Read more]

]]> 0 681a82696cb481d53ddcab2597d6e12e https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1695872/ Wed, 08 Jul 2020 13:22:07 +0000 A brief preface to this volume of Christianity and Global Law, one of several new introductions to Christianity and law commissioned by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. Each volume is an anthology of some two dozen chapters written by leading scholars. Each volume has historical, doctrinal, and comparative…[Read more]

]]> 0 ed7aee31dcc9081ab4e8ff9f7b9281cc https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1695871/ Wed, 08 Jul 2020 13:19:57 +0000 This Article outlines the human rights theories of nineteenth-century abolitionist and civil rights leader James Pennington. Born into slavery in Maryland, Pennington escaped North and became the first African American to attend Yale. As an ordained Presbyterian clergyman, educator, orator, author, and activist, he adapted traditional Protestant…[Read more]

]]> 0 e040a2c4d73de757105670038d88978e https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1695870/ Wed, 08 Jul 2020 13:17:04 +0000 This article responds to Mark Jordan, Brian Bix, Michael Broyde, Robin Fretwell Wilson and Jonathan Chaplin who offered learned reviews of my volume, Church, State, and Family: Reconciling Traditional Teachings and Modern Liberties (Cambridge University Press, 2019). This volume marshals historical, philosophical, jurisprudential, theological, and…[Read more]

]]> 0 cfb8a40ad55dfe89780ecb2f804e8a47 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1695869/ Wed, 08 Jul 2020 13:13:34 +0000 Concluding remarks on the compiled essays in Russell Sandberg’s edited volume, Leading Works in Law and Religion, along with a reflection on the broader global development of the field of law and religion.

]]> 0 e4119ae51bdae4d637f06196fa6f29d6 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1695868/ Wed, 08 Jul 2020 13:08:29 +0000 This Article explores the role of metaphors in shaping our thought and language in general, and in the fields of law and reli- gion in particular. Drawing on modern cognitive theorists like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, the Article distinguishes and il- lustrates the roles of “orientation,” “structural,” and “ontologi- cal” metaphors in everyday…[Read more]

]]> 0 7ea337ebca8c4c529e0fa34d323c66d4 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1695867/ Wed, 08 Jul 2020 13:04:55 +0000 The eighteenth-century American founders believed that religion is special and deserves special constitutional protection, and that all peaceable faiths must be drawn into the constitutional process and protection. The founders introduced six constitutional principles for the protection of religious freedom – freedom of conscience, free exercise o…[Read more]

]]> 0 87f8321cddfd2e58b6fb7d3bd2bede61 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1695866/ Wed, 08 Jul 2020 13:01:29 +0000 Este artículo compara la protección de la libertad religiosa contenida en la Primera Enmienda de la Constitución de los Estados Unidos con las principales normas internacionales de derechos humanos sobre la materia. Especialmente, se analiza el Pacto Internacional de Derechos Civiles y Políticos de 1966, la Declaración de las Naciones Unidas sobr…[Read more]

]]> 0 0016aaa85074cf7aa0f8a605f78222c7 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678824/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 19:18:10 +0000 This brief Article analyzes the traditional Protestant pedigree of the political teachings of the Christian coalition that formed the heart of the “moral majority” movement of the Reagan era. While applauding the coalition’s efforts to bring moral reform to American society, the Article criticizes one if its intellectual leaders, Ralph Reed, for i…[Read more]

]]> 0 1286eea51a0b082bd718c7f1249829ba https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678823/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 19:16:14 +0000 Some scholars portray John Calvin as a champion of religious liberty and human rights. Others view him as a rigid and brutal theocrat. This article shows that neither interpretation does justice to Calvin’s complex and evolving views of spiritual and political liberty. In his early writings, Calvin distinguished sharply between the spiritual and p…[Read more]

]]> 0 c2c9f7f2b6baa814f5b727b739a6bc89 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678820/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 19:14:11 +0000 Some scholars portray John Calvin as a champion of religious liberty and human rights. Others view him as a rigid and brutal theocrat. This Article shows that neither interpretation does justice to Calvin’s complex and evolving views of spiritual and political liberty. In his early writings, Calvin distinguished sharply between the spiritual a…[Read more]

]]> 0 305410265b4c685c164d180239fe12b3 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678819/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 19:11:52 +0000 A new war has developed for the salvation of souls in Russia, as local and foreign religious groups battle in Russia over the right and power to proselytize. This is, in parti a legal war just as it is a religious war, as the Russian government has developed favorite denominations and oppressed others. After the Soviet Union crumbled, president…[Read more]

]]> 0 8dfd9bb0832fbb442e591362da2d64d3 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678818/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 19:09:16 +0000 A new war has developed for the salvation of souls in Russia, as local and foreign religious groups battle in Russia over the right and power to proselytize. This is, in parti a legal war just as it is a religious war, as the Russian government has developed favorite denominations and oppressed others. After the Soviet Union crumbled, president…[Read more]

]]> 0 c5b5b01885762615f0ae5d6eaa19f951 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678817/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 19:04:59 +0000 This Article analyzes John Calvin’s reformation of the life, law, and lore of the marital family in sixteenth-century Geneva. Calvin’s early efforts in the 1530s and 1540s were focused on the law of marital formation, maintenance, and dissolution. Particularly his 1545 Marriage Ordinance was famous for requiring parental consent, church con…[Read more]

]]> 0 caae5716cfecaaf1c02767de1396d609 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678816/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 19:02:58 +0000 This Article analyzes John Calvin’s reformation of the life, law, and lore of the marital family in sixteenth-century Geneva. Calvin’s early efforts in the 1530s and 1540s were focused on the law of marital formation, maintenance, and dissolution. Particularly his 1545 Marriage Ordinance was famous for requiring parental consent, church con…[Read more]

]]> 0 82be0211634ae666d397b6a0ae0fc95a https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678815/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 19:00:11 +0000 The United States Constitution (1787) and its twenty-seven amendments (1791- 1992) prohibit governmental deprivations of life, liberty, and property without due process of law; guarantee equal protection of the law and freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly; provide procedural protections in criminal and civil trials; and maintain…[Read more]

]]> 0 945d37f3aecae9d24c5fdea9a0f55ef2 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678814/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:57:24 +0000 In an impressive series of books, articles, briefs, and judicial opinions spanning nearly half a century, John T. Noonan, Jr. has established himself as one of the great oracles of religious liberty in twentieth-century America. The Lustre of Our Country is both a confirmation and a proclamation of the depth of his conviction and erudition on this…[Read more]

]]> 0 3ba1c6f53c2f757b1883b14ba321edad https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678812/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:50:54 +0000 This brief Article introduces the highly original theory of equality of two distinguished Catholic legal scholars. They root their argument in a reconstructed theory that human beings are created with the divine invitation to moral self-perfection, however impossible this state is for anyone to achieve in this life. Humans can still, however,…[Read more]

]]> 0 c82898a86fdf7696d1242092bcbcb478 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678811/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:46:58 +0000 Massachusetts was the last of the original 13 American states to disestablish religion, having been founded in the early seventeenth century as a bastion of Puritanism. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 moved part way toward disestablishment by guaranteeing freedom and equality to all peaceable private religions but also retaining what…[Read more]

]]> 0 016093835fcba858ad282ec2b253e954 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678810/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:42:31 +0000 John Adams is gaining new respect today both for his political shrewdness and his religious wisdom. Both these talents were on full display in the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution that Adams largely crafted. Striking a via media between defenders of the traditional Congregationalist establishment and religious dissenters, Adams’ constitution…[Read more]

]]> 0 fb20eca01809d06fc67d2cbaefb7124e https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678809/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:39:53 +0000 The modern Western legal tradition owes a great debt to the medieval canon law of the Church, several new authoritative titles have shown. James Brundage’s Medieval Canon Law provides an efficient outline of the development of Western canon law from its apostolic beginnings till the sixteenth century. He deals particularly with the monumental i…[Read more]

]]> 0 790edbea786a75052752a23bf1a36626 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678808/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:32:50 +0000 This work is a learned and lively account of the law of the medieval Catholic Church and the hundreds of learned commentaries and texts on these church laws, written by the jurists. R. H. Helmholz, leading historian of medieval canon law, reads these texts as a modern inquisitor who wants to know what his ancient brethren thought and taught about…[Read more]

]]> 0 d6c8de83e9bf6ca349cbda40739eafbe https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678807/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:29:25 +0000 The sixteenth-century Anglican reformation of marriage was born of Henry VIII’s abrupt break with Rome over his desire to end his marriage with Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. While initially experimenting with a variety of new Protestant teachings, the Anglican Church soon settled on a commonwealth model of marriage, which viewed m…[Read more]

]]> 0 3c5d9ecb2d44aab68f38db731f70ad3b https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678806/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:26:26 +0000 This Article reviews the theory of rights and liberties developed by Dutch theologian, philosopher, and statesman Abraham Kuyper at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing generously on the Calvinist tradition, Kuyper distinguished religious, ecclesiastical, associational, and political liberties, which he grounded in his signature theories of…[Read more]

]]> 0 2795eb90084162765e60b612f2b6ef79 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678804/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:24:07 +0000 This article offers an appreciative review of a new title on Calvin’s theory of equity developed in conversation with Greek, Roman, and humanist tracts on legal interpretation

]]> 0 79b05c99a7feb96bb80d72fdd741f086 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678803/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:17:37 +0000 This article introduces a symposium issue on the new “war for souls” between Western proselytizing religions and local Orthodox and Catholic religious groups in the former Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe. The velvet democratic revolutions of these countries in the later 1980s and 1990s relieved local churches from decades of political opp…[Read more]

]]> 0 1d6b0e4f3502575078e7661f9bd837d1 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678802/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:11:59 +0000 This brief Article introduces a volume that compares Jewish, Christian, and Muslim teachings on mission work and conversion. The modern context for this inquiry is that the modern human rights revolution that has catalyzed a great awakening of religion around the globe. But it has also created a new “war for souls” between Western religions and…[Read more]

]]> 0 b06a93ccd94b33d6cb3df412569da045 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678801/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:08:40 +0000 This Article argues that modern Anglo-American marriage law was formed out of two traditions — one rooted in Christianity, a second in the Enlightenment. Each of these traditions has contributed a variety of familiar legal ideas and institutions of modern domestic life, lore, and law — some overlapping, some conflicting. The overlapping and…[Read more]

]]> 0 b0e6d50d75cc5b3c985b4cf6751fc990 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678800/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:05:51 +0000 This is a brief review of an important text by one of the leading Christian scholars of the family who is trying to reconcile traditional Christian teachings on marriage and the troubling marital condition in the post-modern West. Thatcher ultimately commends the traditional Christian monogamous, heterosexual, permanent marriage, citing Scripture…[Read more]

]]> 0 39c668018dba66739fc655ffd8af1360 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678798/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:01:59 +0000 This Article offers a brief review of the sharp new religious conflicts that have emerged at the end of the second millennium, particularly between Western and Eastern Orthodox Christians and Muslim and Christian groups over issues of proselytism and conversion.

]]> 0 35734f092ddb98a6154ecf5db47870ae https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678794/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 17:32:36 +0000 This Article explores the surprising use of medieval Catholic canon law in the new Protestant civil law of Lutheran Germany within a decade of Luther’s decision to burn the canon law books and reject papal authority. Inertia is part of the reason. Prior to the Reformation, the canon law was a vital part of the ius commune in which most jurists a…[Read more]

]]> 0 598e07ef3913de0aec23c92b8bbbd4ce https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678788/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 17:27:28 +0000 The modern human rights revolution has catalyzed a great awakening of religion around the globe. But it has also created a new “war for souls” between Western religions and local religious groups, many of them trying to recover from decades of political oppression. Particularly Orthodox Christians in the former Soviet bloc and Muslims in sub…[Read more]

]]> 0 15690f525bcac907e93b47fa0ff68287 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678787/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 17:24:54 +0000 This Article was written at a time when international discussions of religion, human rights, and religious freedom were just beginning to blossom. The Article documents the paradox that the modern human rights revolution has catalyzed a new religious awakening around the globe but has also triggered sharp new interreligious conflicts. This has led…[Read more]

]]> 0 eac585a0a1e86aeb5dc20d1ac3e5d673 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678786/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 17:22:06 +0000 A brief overview of the enduring and shifting understanding of the marital family in the Western tradition in biblical, Graeco-Roman, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and modern liberal thought and law.

]]> 0 8e2af64b8bbf7e47a15876092616cdf7 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678785/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 17:19:59 +0000 A brief argument that that a Christian theory of history is built on the idea that time has a pattern, that history has a purpose, and that life has an end of reconciliation.

]]> 0 4af5dea139918329c6d3653d427b52ef https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678784/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 17:18:03 +0000 The Protestant Reformation began as a religious reform in Germany and ended in political revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. The early Reformation ideas of human freedom, equality, and dignity, advocated by Martin Luther and his co-religionists, helped paved the way for later democratic revolutions. Particularly influential were the early…[Read more]

]]> 0 15ba41c27d01f389fd673ceb77d5e287 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678783/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 17:16:01 +0000 Jefferson’s axioms of separation of church and state and discouragement of public religion are well known. However, they are more nuanced than typically stated, and were controversial even during his time. Daniel L. Dreisbach explains that Jasper Adams held another nineteenth century view, far from that of Jefferson. Adams insisted on d…[Read more]

]]> 0 d593dae7697f749ce95825ac6e2bad40 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678775/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 17:01:56 +0000 Religious freedom is moving in opposite directions in Canada and the United States. In recent years, Canadian law has moved openly toward the separation of church and state. American law has moved quietly in the opposite direction. Most public opinion-makers still think America remains faithful to the separatism of Thomas Jefferson. To end…[Read more]

]]> 0 f7cc45f6ace69a1669a9d267b852988f https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678774/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 16:55:09 +0000 While Thomas Jefferson’s theory of strict separation of church and state has long captured the 20th century constitutional and cultural imagination, it was his friendly rival John Adams’ theory of the freedom of both private and public religion that dominated American life until the 1940s and is returning to prominence in recent United States Sup…[Read more]

]]> 0 471b19598bbf87ea9cf67a00b4219976 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678773/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 16:52:52 +0000 This essay, dedicated to Professor Lindberg in admiration and appreciation, introduces one such Lutheran jurist, Johannes Eisermann (ca. 1485-1558). Eisermann, a former student of Philipp Melanchthon, was the founding law professor of the new Evangelical University of Marburg and counselor to one of the strongest Lutheran princes of the day,…[Read more]

]]> 0 3293967f8782100325c79c936684f58e https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678772/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 16:50:53 +0000 Modern American marriage law was born of both Christian and Enlightenment teachings. Christians have long regarded marriage as a natural, contractual, social, and spiritual institution that depends ultimately on church, state, and society alike to be effective and enduring. Enlightenment liberals, however, have slowly reduced marriage to a…[Read more]

]]> 0 b0b9f8f4b2069945a474cd6a08c5c015 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1678771/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 16:48:20 +0000 This Article analyzes the distinct legal contributions of the Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican, and Anabaptist traditions from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. All four Protestant movements triggered massive shifts of jurisdiction from the church to the state, and engineered striking legal reforms of marriage and family, education and…[Read more]

]]> 0 4066bc203c729458c85f8616ac38aa25 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1677018/ Fri, 31 Jan 2020 20:19:33 +0000 This chapter surveys the arguments for and against religious establishment and religious freedom that informed the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 and the subsequent amendments of 1821 and 1833. Most preachers, politicians, and citizens during this period agreed that religion was an essential source of morality, and that the Constitution should…[Read more]

]]> 0 84ac1d3425bb67e555ccdd4691450dd5 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1662775/ Fri, 06 Sep 2019 19:02:37 +0000 This essay offers a critical rereading of the Western theological and legal doctrine of illegitimacy or bastardy. The text first traces the Western stigma against bastards to the Bible, particularly to the story of Ishmael, the illegitimate son of Abraham and Hagar. It then shows the systematic discrimination against bastards in classic canon law…[Read more]

]]> 0 094a29f047b41303b52f61ae1ff21e1e https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1662774/ Fri, 06 Sep 2019 19:00:36 +0000 Martin Luther (1483-1546) was one of the great revolutionaries in the Western legal tradition. The Protestant Reformation that he inaugurated produced fundamental changes in legal theory, political organization, church-state relations, marriage, education, and social welfare. These changes were inscribed on the legal and confessional systems of…[Read more]

]]> 0 7c2692c8c7c9d67f16635133598a3213 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1662773/ Fri, 06 Sep 2019 18:58:58 +0000 This Article argues that Martin Luther’s classic tract, Freedom of a Christian (1520) had a shaping influence on modern theories of human dignity, liberty, and equality. For Luther, the essence of human dignity lies in the juxtaposition of human depravity and human sanctity. Human dignity is something of a divine fulcrum that keeps our depravity…[Read more]

]]> 0 2156b851ef5f9648ca3a3be79a2f6dfa https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1662771/ Fri, 06 Sep 2019 18:56:39 +0000 The wall of separation between church and state has been an abiding metaphor in the history of Western thought, and especially in the history of American law. This essay reviews two important new volumes that trace the evolution, and escalation, of separationist thought in America from the mid- eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. While…[Read more]

]]> 0 6e07c9c9e3617a127cc7dba3a70eaf82 https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1662770/ Fri, 06 Sep 2019 18:54:50 +0000 This brief article surveys the interaction of law and religion from biblical times until today.

]]> 0 78a12dd6d498ea5999b70c00f1d27b2d https://hcommons.org/activity/p/1662769/ Fri, 06 Sep 2019 18:52:51 +0000 This Article provides a brief analysis of the main shifts in Western law and legal theory in four watershed periods: (1) the Christianization of Rome and Romanization of Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries; (2) the Papal Revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; (3) the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century; and (4)…[Read more]

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