Brett T. Wilmot and John Witte, Jr. God’s Joust, God’s Justice; Conversations in Religion and Theology
Wiley on Line Library doi: 10.1111/j.1479-2214.2007.00121.x (2007)
14 Pages Posted: 9 Sep 2019
Date Written: October 17, 2007
Abstract
John Witte's latest volume is a fine contribution to the contentious contemporary academic debates about religion, law, and politics. His focus is less on the theoretical battles surrounding the relentless secularism of the dominant liberal tradition and more on the history out of which the modern paradigms of law and politics emerged in the West.
In God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition, Witte offers a fairly comprehensive narrative of the interplay of law and religion in the Western tradition, with particular emphasis on the American experience. This is a fine book and one worthy of serious attention, as it adds historical perspective to what often seems a largely ahistorical treatment of religion in law and politics that plays out in equally ahistorical arguments about the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The end result is a compelling account of how law and religion have always been intertwined in the Western tradition and how the continued health of this tradition suggests that they should continue to be so.
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