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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

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]

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]

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]

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.

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.

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]

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]

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]

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]