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Pepperdine Law Review

Law and Society

2013

Christianity

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

The Mighty Work Of Making Nations Happy: A Response To James Davison Hunter, Patrick Mckinley Brennan Jan 2013

The Mighty Work Of Making Nations Happy: A Response To James Davison Hunter, Patrick Mckinley Brennan

Pepperdine Law Review

This article is an invited response to James Davison Hunter’s much-discussed book To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2010). Hunter, a sociologist at UVA and a believing Protestant, claims that law’s capacity to contribute to social change is “mostly illusory” and that Christians, therefore, should practice “faithful presence” in the public square rather than seek to influence law directly. My response is that it is, in fact, law’s stunning ability to alter and limit available choices that makes it an object of deservedly fierce contest. The wild …


Faithful Presence And Theological Jurisprudence: A Response To James Davison Hunter , Zachary R. Calo Jan 2013

Faithful Presence And Theological Jurisprudence: A Response To James Davison Hunter , Zachary R. Calo

Pepperdine Law Review

This paper considers how James Hunter’s arguments, presented both in his address and his book To Change the World, might inform the development of a constructive religious legal theory based in the particular resources of Christian theology. In speaking of religious legal theory, I mean something quite different than a theory of law and religion. For some time, the academic conversation about law and religion has centered around issues concerning church-state relations and, more broadly, the place of religion within the liberal political order. Yet, the regnant methodological concerns that have shaped this discourse reflect the boundedness of law to …