San Antonio College Library

Religion, Public Life, and the American Polity brings together ten essays exploring the continuing vitality of religion in American public life. Featuring contributions by leading political scientists and legal scholars, the volume locates current debates within the broader contexts of history, society, and constitutional theory. The book opens with an investigation of the contending positions on church-state relations in current American thought....

In view of the expanding religious diversity within American society, this study addresses the church-state conflict that threatens the nation's unity and offers solutions for reconciling the problem.

The United States is founded upon the principles of freedom of religion, although it has been difficult at times to understand and apply those principles. Phillip Hammond argues that the Constitution assumes a radical religious liberty, which protects the convictions of individual Americans, whether or not those convictions are explicitly religious. This book is an excellent guide to the church-state debate of today and deepens that discussion by...

The free exercise of conscience is under threat in the United States. Already the conservative bloc of the Supreme Court is reversing the progress of religious liberty that had been steadily advancing. And this danger will only increase if more conservative judges are nominated to the court. This is the impassioned argument of Religion on Trial. Against Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Chief Justice Rehnquist, the authors argue that what the First Amendment...

The attitudes of the German Protestant Church towards politics during one of the most turbulent periods of German history encompassing the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism are examined in this book.

Although the Constitution states that there shall be no laws that either establish or prohibit religion, the application of the Religion Clauses throughout United States history has been fraught with conflict and ambiguity. In this book, a leading constitutional scholar proposes a set of guidelines meant to provide for the consistent application of the First Amendment's Religion Clauses. Choper's guidelines are designed to provide maximum protection...

"Thomas J. Curry argues that our understanding of the First Amendment has reached a point of deep crisis. Historical scholarship dealing with the background of the amendment is at an impasse, and judicial interpretation is in a state of disarray. Curry traces much of the current difficulty to the largely unexamined assumption on the part of judges and scholars that the amendment created a right - the right to free exercise of religion - and that the...

"In this book, Derek H. Davis 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 United States was founded as a "Christian Nation" have made much of the religiosity of the founders, particularly as it was manifested in the ritual invocations of a clearly Christian God as well as in the adoption of practices such as government-sanctioned...