Legal Studies Commons^™

Youth Gangs: An Overview Of Key Findings And Directions For The Future, Terrance J. Taylor, J. Michael Vecchio

Criminal Justice & Criminology: Faculty Publications & Other Works

Youth gangs have received considerable attention for many decades. Undoubtedly, their disproportionate involvement in violence is one main reason for this attention. While gang members spend most of their lives engaging in the same types of behaviors as other youth (sleeping, eating, playing video games, going to school), they are also much more likely than non-gang members to be involved in violence and other criminal activity. Indeed, scholars have often highlighted the functional nature of violence as it pertains to gangs.

Gangs come in a variety of forms: prison gangs, outlaw motorcycle gangs, extremist groups, and drug trafficking organizations, among …

How Secular Should Democracy Be? A Cross-Disciplinary Study Of Catholicism And Islam In Promoting Public Reason, David Ingram, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

I argue that the same factors (strategic and principled) that motivated Catholicism to champion liberal democracy are the same that motivate 21^st Century Islam to do the same. I defend this claim by linking political liberalism to democratic secularism. Distinguishing institutional, political, and epistemic dimensions of democratic secularism, I show that moderate forms of political and epistemic secularism are most conducive to fostering the kind of public reasoning essential to democratic legitimacy. This demonstration draws upon the ambivalent impact of Indonesia’s Islamic parties in advancing universal social justice aims as against more sectarian policies.