by (Parody News Service*) President Barack Obama has tonight for the first time hosted a Purim celebration at the White House.
Purim celebrates the successful efforts of Queen Esther and her Uncle Mordecai to save the Jews of the Persian Empire from “Haman’s plot to annihilate them, as recorded in the Biblical Book of Esther.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purim . The traditional celebration includes dressing in costumes and drinking to the point where you cannot distinguish between the hero Mordecai and the villain Haman.
Monthly Archive for February, 2010
by Turkey’s newest crisis pitting secularist plotters against the conservative Islamic government is one of the world’s dramatic examples of the distrust between proponents of clear church-state divisions and those who believe that religion and politics may be useful or even necessary companions in creating a just and moral society. One of my fall seminar students suggested that the cycle of military coups in Turkey when army officers decide that religion is damaging the state may simply be Turkey’s distinctive way of navigating church-state issues.
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by At times during American history, some Christians have proposed that the United States declare itself “a Christian nation” through monuments, symbols, and official designation. We occasionally hear such proposals today. Such a designation would unjustly alienate many non-Christian citizens, but I believe that there are also theological reasons for Christians to oppose such a move. [...]
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by Law, Religion, and Ethics? The title of this blog might seem a bit grandiose, and it also hints at subversion– at an attempt to undo centuries of effort designed to keep separate subjects that this blog evidently proposes to bring together.
A major jurisprudential effort of the last couple of centuries, often described as “positivist,” has sought to separate law from morality. That’s a simplification, of course. Legal positivists have typically not wanted to insulate law from moral evaluation, and some have argued that the very separation of law from morality can itself serve a larger “rule of law” and essentially moral purpose. (As it happens, I’m sympathetic to that argument.) But legal positivists have typically insisted that a law’s validity and, usually, its meaning are not dependent on morality. And they have often argued, as in the famous Hart-Devlin debate, that some kinds of morality are “not the business” of the law.
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by “Conscience and the Common Good” not only refers to my new book (more on that in a moment), but it also helps capture my own sense of the value that this blog can bring to the already bursting-at-the-seams blawgosphere. Participants in this blog come from a variety of faith traditions (or no faith tradition), but I’m guessing that most (maybe all?) of the participants operate from the premise that bringing our own convictions and values into the conversations about law, religion, and ethics will enrich our understanding and challenge our easy conclusions; making the conversations more particular and personal need not preclude a meaningful shared conception of the common good. My own interest in this blog is motivated, in significant part, by my skepticism toward the notion that the common good is best pursued by a lowest-common-denominator approach to law, politics, or ethics. The wisest response to moral and religious pluralism is not to keep our core convictions — those that comprise our consciences –to ourselves. It is often those core convictions that help us look beyond ourselves.
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