The intellectual history of Western rights talk is still very much a work in progress, with scholars still discovering and disputing in earnest the basic roots and routes of the development of rights concepts and structures. What follows is a brief sampling of some of the highlights of this still highly contested story.
Christian jurists, theologians, and ethicists have made monumental contributions to this burgeoning field of law and religion study that we have just loosely mapped. I would like to address briefly a few of the main challenges that
lie before Christian jurists and jurisprudence in this new century.
“Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched,” Justice Benjamin Cardozo once warned, “for starting as devises to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it.” So it has been with the metaphor of a wall of separation. This metaphor has held popular imagination so firmly that many of us have not noticed that separation of church and
state is no longer the law of the land. In a long series of cases over the past fifteen years, the Supreme Court has abandoned much of its earlier separationism, and reversed several of its harshest cases on point. The Court has upheld government policies that support the public access and activities.
In this essay, I focus on the development of rights talk in the pre-Enlightenment Protestant tradition. More particularly, I show how early modern Protestants, especially followers of Genevan reformer John Calvin (1509–1564), developed a theory of fundamental rights as part and product of a broader constitutional theory of resistance and military revolt against tyranny.
In discussing the meanings of marriage, we need to understand 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 some overlapping, some conflicting. It is in the overlapping and creatively juxtaposed legal contributions of the Christian and Enlightenment traditions that one sees some of the ingredients of a third way respecting marriage.
The New Testament authors may use the term “virtue” sparingly, but, as in so many similar cases, the substance
of the concept pervades their moral teaching. Moreover, ample documentation exists to show that some of the earliest
moral instruction in the Church uses the language of virtue. In fact, St. Augustine spoke about the virtue of Christ
himself as the principal support of the believer’s whole life.
While some categories favored by recent spiritual authors, such as religious experience and community, do not figure as key notions in Aquinas’s writings, both his philosophical and theological treatises provide rich sources of insight about the human experience of transcendence and man’s mystical bond with God. It is customary to identify three strains of mystical teaching that appear in the works of Thomas Aquinas: Being-mysticism, Bridal-mysticism, and Knowledge-mysticism.
Links to course of twelve lessons based on Cessario’s, Introduction to Moral Theology
Though the popular imagination is wont to consider any exercise of Magisterial authority as an unwarranted intrusion into the sphere of personal determination, the charism of infallibility, which belongs principally to the Roman Pontiff and the bishops in union with him, actually promotes and safeguards authentic Christian freedom
To emphasize the practical dimensions of Aquinas’ doctrine of man in the image of God, I propose to examine the relationship of this doctrine to both the Church’s sacraments and the practice of divine friendship.
