Sociology of Religion Commons^™

Today's Challenges To Religious Liberty In Historical Perspective, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

From the Introduction

Many people say that religious liberty in our country is now under attack more than ever before. That's true as far as it goes, and in what follows I shall supply some reasons why I think so. But the chief aim of this Article is not to try to establish that religious liberty is in its most parlous state ever, as if some common threat-level metric is higher today than it was, say, a hundred or fifty years ago. As a matter of fact, Mormons and Native Americans in the late-nineteenth century faced government actions more hostile …

American Conversations With(In) Catholicism, Richard W. Garnett

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CATHOLICISM AND AMERICAN FREEDOM: A HISTORY. By John T. McGreevy. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co. 2003. Pp. 431. $26.95.

John T. McGreevy's Catholicism and American Freedom tells the story of how America or, more particularly, American liberalism has reacted and responded to Catholic claims about the nature and purpose of freedom. It also addresses how these claims were, in turn, shaped by Catholicism's own interactions with, internal conversations about, and adjustment to American liberalism. As McGreevy shows, for many people and for many years, the Roman Catholic Church served as a foil for American values and …

E Pluribus Unum: The Aftermath Of September 11, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

September 11 forged an American unity not seen since Pearl Harbor. We shelved our political differences, put the culture war on simmer, and lost interest in celebrity scandal (think of Gary Condit). Americans rallied behind our Commander-in-Chief, and we agreed that our lives would never be the same. America’s vacation from history had ended, and we had forever lost our innocence and our perceived immunity from harm. When our Commander-in-Chief said that a return to “normalcy” would deny Bin Laden his victory, we rallied behind that, too.

A New Liberal Identity?, Gerard V. Bradley

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Private Consciences and Public Reasons. By Kent Greenawalt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 225 pp. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

The central point of Kent Greenawalt's latest book is that the basic principles of liberal democracy do not resolve the question to which liberal democracy has been proposed as the answer. The question concerns how comprehensive accounts of the good - especially religious accounts - fit into public deliberation and decisionmaking in a pluralist society like ours. The earmark of liberalism, one has come to think, is a principled insistence that some exclusion or, in Greenawalt's words, "self-restraint," of …

American Jews And The Separationist Faith, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

D. Dallin, Editor, American Jews and the Separationist Faith

David Dallin, an ordained rabbi and professor of American Jewish history at the University of Hartford, writes in his introduction to this important book, "American Jewry [no longer] speaks with one 'official' voice on the issues or religion and public life." [9] Dallin has been for several years at the center of an increasingly influential group of American Jews engaged in a "substantial reexamination" of the separationist faith. Other members of this group, all contributors to this volume, include Hadley Arkes, David Novak, Midge Decter, Marc Gellman, and Jerry Mueller. They …

A Jewish Voice In The Public Square, Gerard V. Bradley

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David Novak: Jewish Social Ethics. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xii, 252. $45.00.)

Jewish participation in American public life has been either genuinely or constructively de-Judaized. (Admittedly, many orthodox Jews - the Hasidim among them - have steered clear altogether of the public square.) "Genuinely" de-Judaized Jews are simply those like Frankfurter who have a thoroughly secular outlook. "Constructively" de-Judaized Jews include the orthodox, observant Pfeffer. For them religious conviction (and practice) are private matters, checked at the entrance to the "naked public square." Quite obviously, Jews had good reason, especially in 1947, to prefer a secular …

Exorcizing Everson, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Daniel Dreisbach: Real Threat and Mere Shadow: Religious Liberty and the First Amendment. Crossway Books. 351 pp. $15.00 (paper).

No aspect of constitutional law sports a bigger profile these days than that concerning religion, or "Church and state." Academics debate it prodigiously, lawyers litigate it furiously, and judges issue opinions on the subject with clockwork regularity. But this commotion is hardly esoteric. Pat Robertson's candidacy stirred everyone's emotions precisely because each of us has a strong sense of just how religious politics should be. George Bush clumsily attested to this popular sensitivity. What sustained bomber pilot Bush …