Religion and the Law of Church and State and the Supreme Court PDF Download

Author: Philip B. Kurland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Author: Philip B. Kurland
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781330653692
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Excerpt from Religion and the Law of Church and State and the Supreme Court The election of a Catholic as President of the United States and the excitement over the proposed national aid-to-education bills have raised the debate over the proper relationship between church and state. God and Caesar, religion and law, to an unprecedented crescendo in this country. The subject is hardly a new one. Probably in prehistoric times, as among primitive peoples today, frequent power conflicts arose between the medicine man and the chief. Certainly the problem was known to the Greeks and the Romans, though merger of the contestants frequently muted the issues. It provided the dominant theme for six hundred years of European history. The very slow development of the notion of religious toleration and the absence of any notion of separation of church and state in the English speaking world outside of America, both before and after the American Revolution, amply demonstrate the continued vitality of the problem, with dimensions until now unknown in America. Thus, for example, it may surprise some that, by law, religious qualifications for public office in England continued late into the nineteenth century. And perhaps equally disquieting is the fact that the ultimate arbiter of Anglican church doctrine is, even today, not any ecclesiastical authority but the English Parliament, most of whose members are not actively affiliated with the Anglican church. However hoary the problem, it is livelier than ever in the United States today. Federal aid to Catholic schools has become the essential issue on which many Congressional elections may turn: in the cities of the Northeast, the newly-formed Citizens Party, joined with a group called "Citizens for Educational Freedom," threatens to unseat or defeat any candidate who is not prepared to pledge himself to support federal contributions to parochial schools. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Author: Jay Sekulow
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0742550648
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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When it was ratified in 1791, the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States sought to protect against two distinct types of government actions that interfere with religious liberty: the establishment of a national religion and interference with individual rights to practice religion. Since that time, no question has so bedeviled the U.S. Supreme Court as finding the best way to interpret and apply the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. In this unique and timely book, Jay Sekulow examines not only the key cases and their historical context that have shaped the law concerning church-state relations, but also, for the first time, the impact of the religious faith and practices of Supreme Court Justices who have ruled in each case. Covering cases from the teaching of religion in public schools and the use of federal funds for parochial schools to today's debates about the Pledge of Allegiance and public displays of the Ten Commandments, Witnessing Their Faith is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and future of religious freedom in America.

Author: Derek Davis
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195326245
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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21 essays present a scholarly look at the intricacies and past and current debates that frame the American system of church and state, within 5 main areas: history, politics, sociology theology/philosophy and law.

Author: Roger Williams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Freedom of religion
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Author: Marc O. DeGirolami
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674074157
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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When it comes to questions of religion, legal scholars face a predicament. They often expect to resolve dilemmas according to general principles of equality, neutrality, or the separation of church and state. But such abstractions fail to do justice to the untidy welter of values at stake. Offering new views of how to understand and protect religious freedom in a democracy, The Tragedy of Religious Freedom challenges the idea that matters of law and religion should be referred to far-flung theories about the First Amendment. Examining a broad array of contemporary and more established Supreme Court rulings, Marc DeGirolami explains why conflicts implicating religious liberty are so emotionally fraught and deeply contested. Twenty-first-century realities of pluralism have outrun how scholars think about religious freedom, DeGirolami asserts. Scholars have not been candid enough about the tragic nature of the conflicts over religious liberty—the clash of opposing interests and aspirations they entail, and the limits of human reason to resolve intractable differences. The Tragedy of Religious Freedom seeks to turn our attention from abstracted, absolute values to concrete, historical realities. Social history, characterized by the struggles of lawyers engaged in the details of irreducible conflicts, represents the most promising avenue to negotiate legal conflicts over religion. In this volume, DeGirolami offers an approach to understanding religious liberty that is neither rigidly systematic nor ad hoc, but a middle path grounded in a pluralistic and historically informed perspective.

Author: John A. Ragosta
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813933714
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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For over one hundred years, Thomas Jefferson and his Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom have stood at the center of our understanding of religious liberty and the First Amendment. Jefferson’s expansive vision—including his insistence that political freedom and free thought would be at risk if we did not keep government out of the church and church out of government—enjoyed a near consensus of support at the Supreme Court and among historians, until Justice William Rehnquist called reliance on Jefferson "demonstrably incorrect." Since then, Rehnquist’s call has been taken up by a bevy of jurists and academics anxious to encourage renewed government involvement with religion. In Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed, the historian and lawyer John Ragosta offers a vigorous defense of Jefferson’s advocacy for a strict separation of church and state. Beginning with a close look at Jefferson’s own religious evolution, Ragosta shows that deep religious beliefs were at the heart of Jefferson’s views on religious freedom. Basing his analysis on that Jeffersonian vision, Ragosta redefines our understanding of how and why the First Amendment was adopted. He shows how the amendment’s focus on maintaining the authority of states to regulate religious freedom demonstrates that a very strict restriction on federal action was intended. Ultimately revealing that the great sage demanded a firm separation of church and state but never sought a wholly secular public square, Ragosta provides a new perspective on Jefferson, the First Amendment, and religious liberty within the United States.

Author: David M. Ackerman
Publisher: Nova Publishers
ISBN: 9781594546426
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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The religion clauses of the First Amendment provide that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...." In modern times the Supreme Court has frequently construes these clauses to create, in Thomas Jefferson's oft-quoted metaphor, a "wall of separation between church and state". The Court's decisions have precipitated substantial opposition and, in particularly since the election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency in 1980, a concerted and partly successful effort to change its separatist constructions of the religion clauses. This volume summarises the doctrinal debates and shifts on the religion clauses that have occurred on the Court during this period. It summarises and examines as well the legal effect of each of the 56 decisions the Court has handed down concerning church and state since 1980.

Author: Leonard W. Levy
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146962043X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Leonard Levy's classic work examines the circumstances that led to the writing of the establishment clause of the First Amendment: 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. . . .' He argues that, contrary to popular belief, the framers of the Constitution intended to prohibit government aid to religion even on an impartial basis. He thus refutes the view of 'nonpreferentialists,' who interpret the clause as allowing such aid provided that the assistance is not restricted to a preferred church. For this new edition, Levy has added to his original arguments and incorporated much new material, including an analysis of Jefferson's ideas on the relationship between church and state and a discussion of the establishment clause cases brought before the Supreme Court since the book was originally published in 1986.

Author: Derek Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195133552
Category : Church and state
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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This book offers the first comprehensive examination of the role of religion in the proceedings, theories, ideas and goals of the Continental Congress. Those who argue that the U.S. was founded as a "Christian Nation" have made much of the religiosity of the founders, particularly as it was manifested in ritual invocations of a clearly Christian God. Congress's religious activities, Davis shows, expressed an unreflective popular piety, and by no means a determination of the revolutionaries to entrench religion in the federal state.