“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” – Declaration of Independence (1776). Scholars have long sought to understand what Thomas Jefferson meant when he included the pursuit […]
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Countering Challenges to the Constitution
It is characteristic of every age under our Constitution that Americans are prone to see contemporary challenges to the national charter as dire, perhaps unique—or to see the Constitution as urgently in need of being challenged, or changed. Justice Scalia observed, in the Tanner Lectures published as A Matter of Interpretation, that the Constitution’s—any constitution’s—“whole […]
Shame and Politics
If our goal as Americans is to create a politics fit for persons, we need to cultivate the kind of shame that warns us against the use of persons as means to our own ends. Shame, as it appears in common discourse, means “feeling badly about oneself.” Here, however, I’m interested in shame understood as […]
Somewhere/Anywhere: Reflections of a Brit at the University of Missouri
(Remarks delivered after dinner in the Hall of St. Peter’s College, Oxford on Thursday 28th March 2019 as part of the Kinder Institute-Oxford program, 2019) On our walking tour of Oxford yesterday, we saw many of the university’s most famous places and buildings: The High Street; Radcliffe Square with, at its centre, the Radcliffe Camera, […]
The Constitutional Roots of American Global Leadership on Religious Freedom
Forged out of a century and a half struggle against religious persecution in the colonies, the American constitutional heritage codified an innovative break from centuries of Western practice. Both the First Amendment and state constitutional provisions bar religious establishments and protect religious free exercise from government infringement. These two provisions work in tandem. Freed from […]
