Joseph Prud'homme – författare

Faith and Politics in America explores the period from 1607 to the American Civil War. This book addresses the role of religion in the political process in early America, the extent to which religion influenced eighteenth century politicians and decision-makers, and how the founding fathers used religion in laying the foundations for a fair and just constitution. It also explores the meaning of the separation of church and state in the mind of many of the great political actors and thinkers in America in the early and late federal period and their views on traditional Christianity. The book traces how religion contributed to the success of subsequent political leaders, such as the founders of the Whig and Democratic parties, who claimed to be religious or to be adherents of a certain faith and who used religion as a guide to execute policies; and the role of religious faith in arguments over the institution of slavery before and during the Civil War. While exploring these topics from the time of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, the essays included in Faith and Politics in America afford unique assessments of the American Revolution; the thought of Thomas Jefferson; the religious philosophy of James Madison; the life and thought of John Quincy Adams; the operation of the second party system; and religious debates over the acceptability of slavery immediately prior to the Civil War.

Taking a unique, multi-faceted approach to the 1,000 years of Polish Jewish history in this volume, Gary S. Schiff combines academic scholarship with his own family’s long history and his insightful travel experiences and candid observations. From its earliest medieval days, to its «golden years» in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to its subsequent decline and Poland’s three-way partition in the eighteenth century, to its ultimate destruction in the Holocaust and its mini-revival today, the Jewish community of Poland – the world’s largest for 500 years – comes to life again. Tracing his own family back hundreds of years, he finds that they typify Polish Jewry in its most classic setting, the shtetl or small town. Their names, occupations, family sizes, education, religious, cultural and political affiliations, lifestyle and dress, and their relationship with whatever government they happened to live under at the time (Polish, Prussian, Russian, and so on) all personified the rich and diverse world of the millions of Jews of «Polin» who are now merely ghosts, figures of memory. At the same time the rise and fall of the great Jewish communities of the cities of Poland – Cracow, Lublin, Lodz, and Warsaw – are deftly chronicled. Polish Jewry's many great personages and mass movements – influential rabbis and mystic charlatans, merchant princes and secular socialists, heroes and villains, Hassidim and Mitnagdim, Zionists and assimilationists, Yiddishists and Hebraists – are revealed with fresh insights.

Curriculum and the Culture Wars offers a fresh perspective on perennial debates about the role of religion in public schools, focusing on the intersection of religion and curriculum. This debate has been renewed in part due to the growth of elective Bible courses in public schools in many parts of the country. The first half of the book presents new scholarship on the use of the Bible in schools, including a historical analysis of what the Founders had to say about the use of the Bible in public education, a more current assessment of the politics behind the elective Bible class movement in the early twenty-first century, and a critique of such educational programs from constitutional and pedagogical perspectives. This edited volume also offers new insights into long-standing battles that pit religious and secular advocates against one another in the areas of evolution and sex education and considers whether school choice programs that would allow parents the right to send their children to sectarian schools are an affront to promoting the goals of a liberal democracy.

In this work, leading contemporary philosophers discuss key facets of the human person from a variety of perspectives in Christian thought. This closely woven volume includes chapters by Nicholas Wolterstorff on the distinction between humans and other animals; Robert Sokolowski on language; Marilyn McCord Adams on the presence of the Holy Spirit in human beings; Roland Teske on the soul and soteriology; Nicolas Austriaco on bioethics and human nature; J. Hayes Hurley on consciousness; and Germain Grisez on death and immortality. An excellent source for scholars, this book is also ideal for courses in philosophy, theology, and psychology.

City of Christian Love provides a detailed history of Nazareth from the dawn of the Christian Era until today with special focus on the religious communities found in this sacred city, including both the periods of tension and the periods of profound interreligious partnership and solidarity.

This book presents a study of the career of Charles R. Crane, a central player in President Woodrow Wilson’s entourage. In the wake of the U.S. intervention in the Great War, Crane participated in important diplomatic and fact-finding missions. Leclair follows Crane through revolutionary Russia and on the Western front, in the emerging countries born out of the Ottoman Empire, and then in postwar China. In the process, Leclair’s book offers original insights into some of the major domestic and international decisions that define Wilson’s presidency and its legacy in the history of the United States and of international relations, most notably Wilson’s motivation and effort to bring about a new world order under American political and moral leadership. Leclair convincingly portrays Crane as a proponent of the principle of self-determination –one, indeed, whose aversion to colonialism predated Wilson’s international vision as formulated in his Fourteen Points. While a convergence of reform interest and humanitarian concerns brought Crane and Wilson together on some of the most complex issues of the time, Crane’s vision –propelled by a genuine philanthropic commitment—adds substance to what has largely been derided as empty Wilsonian idealism. The thematic structure of this book, the quality of its narration, and the wealth of information it contains, are added elements that make it an excellent contribution to the field of U.S. history. It could be used as a an assigned reading in college or university courses, especially in advanced American history, American Political thought and international relations courses.

Stephen Strehle is a leading scholar of church/state issues. In this volume, he focuses his rigorous historical analysis and philosophical acumen upon a topic of great interest today and source of cultural wars around the globe—the process of secularization. The book starts with a discussion of early capitalism and how it saw the real world functioning well-enough on its own principles of individual struggle and self-interest, without needing religious or moral principles to meddle in its affairs and eventually dispelling the need for any intelligent design or providential orchestration of life through the work of Darwin. The book then discusses the growth of the secular point of view: how historians dismissed the impact of religion in developing modern culture, how scientists conceived of the universe running on self-sufficient or mechanistic principles, and how people no longer looked to the providential hand of God to explain their suffering. The book ends with a discussion of how the Deist concept of human autonomy became a political policy in America through Jefferson’s concept of a wall of separation between church and state and how the US Supreme Court proceeded to dismiss the importance of religion in shaping or justifying the values of the nation and its laws. The book is accessible to most upper-level and graduate students in a wide-variety of disciplines, keeping technical and foreign words to a minimum and leaving scholarly details or debates to its extensive notes.

For the Life of the World: An Eastern Christian Approach to Nature and Environmental Care explores climate change and global ecological issues via the ability of Christianity—one of the world’s most frequently practiced religions—to provide insight. Author Robin Gibbons outlines the tradition of prior Christian involvement in the issue, drawing upon ideas of freely given care and human stewardship of the world. Recently, the issue of climate change and the Christian community’s inability to act against it has been characterized by a disconnect between human life and nature, with the biblical model of human stewardship subsumed by politics, business, and greed. In contrast, this book advocates for embracing an older model of Christian thought, theoretically surmounting the consequences of climate disaster through care and respect for nature.

Stephen Strehle continues his detailed analysis of the secular forces that shape the modern world in this second and final volume to the study, offering a fresh perspective and solid philosophical, theological, and historical conclusions from his years of research. He continues to find forces of secularity embodied in social or political institutions, cultural dispositions or interests, and new or disturbing intellectual realities that challenge former religious perspectives. The present work starts out examining two powerful institutions of culture, the American university and Hollywood, and explains their place in promoting the secular mentality. The study then shows the secular mentality permeating society as the culture starts to accent the materialistic concerns of technology and divorce religion from the practical and social concerns of everyday life. The study completes the analysis with a discussion of intellectual problems that confront the old-time religion or even the very possibility of faith in the modern world, particularly pointing to the rise of biblical criticism and the rejection of all God-talk among critical philosophers. Like the first volume, the present work is accessible to most upper-level and graduate students in a wide-variety of disciplines, keeping technical and foreign words to a minimum and leaving scholarly details or debates to its extensive notes.

This book examines, through the use of archives and oral evidence, the role of the Pakistan Army in the context of Pakistan’s foreign policy and domestic politics. Focusing on its independent relationship with three instruments of policy-making in the United States – State Department, White House and Pentagon – the theory argues that the relationship between the Army and these policy-making bodies arose from a synergistic commonality of interests during 1947-65. The Americans needed a country, on the periphery of the Soviet Union to contain Communism while the Pakistan needed US military support to check Indian regional military hegemonism in South Asia. This alliance was secured to the disadvantage of democratic political institutions of Pakistan. The Army, which became stronger as a result of US military and economic support, came progressively to dominate domestic politics. This led not only to weakened civilian governments in the period under examination but also, in 1958, to the military seizure of political control of the country itself. Religion, the foundation of the creation of the country, failed to keep the East and West wings of Pakistan united.The book explores the influence of the martial-race theory and and reconstructs provincial politics that weakened the Federal Government and allowed the Army to usurp political power to a disproportionate degree. The complications arising in Indo-Pakistan relations as a consequence of an abrupt tilt of the US towards India after the Sino-Indian war in 1962 are also examined. This resulted in China-Pakistan friendship.In conclusion, the book argues that the period under consideration saw a complete failure of the US policy of containing communism while at the same time avoiding war between its allies in the region, and that this had tragic consequences for the future of democracy in Pakistan.