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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
It is an honor to be asked to give the 2002 annual lecture in honor of James Luther Adams, a great scholar, a great teacher, a great man. I remember him well, and miss his wisdom and his wit. He lives on, not only in his wide-ranging scholarly writings but also in the memories of his many creative actions and of his caring personality, memories still shared by dozens of his former colleagues and a multitude of his students.
It is also an honor to be asked to associate this lecture with the program on Issues of Faith and the Practice of Law sponsored by the Georgia Chief Justice's Commission on Professionalism, the Atlanta Bar Association, and the Georgia Justice Project. I have had the privilege of attending some of the afternoon sessions of that program at which there were interesting and useful discussions of the lawyer's calling to bring his religious faith into his work, to serve God in his practice, and not to neglect what Jesus, in rebuking the Pharisees, called “the weightier matters of the law, which are justice and mercy and good faith.”
This lecture was presented at Emory University School of Law in February 2002, under the auspices of the James Luther Adams Foundation, in memory of one of the leading Christian social ethicists of the twentieth century. A professor first at the Federated Theological Faculty of the University of Chicago and later at Harvard Divinity School, Adams taught that human society flourishes through voluntary associations dedicated to spiritual and social causes and he himself was a major participant in scores of such associations. He believed that the theological school must be in the midst of the entire university and that Christian ethics should be taught and worked out in the context of life, especially law, business, and the arts. Together with the author of the present article, Adams conducted for several years a monthly luncheon program of discussions of law and religion with Harvard Law School students. After his death in 1994 at the age of 92, tributes to him were published in Vol. XII J. L. & Relig. 1-23 (1996), and since that time the James Luther Adams Foundation has sponsored annual lectures inspired partly by his life and work.
1. Niebuhr, H. Richard, Radical monotheism and Western culture, with supplementary essays 38–48 (Faber & Faber 1960)Google Scholar.
2 See Hunt, James D., Voluntary Associations as a Key to History, in Voluntary Associations: A Study of Groups in Free Societies, Essays in Honor of James Luther Adams ch. XVIII (Robertson, D.B. ed., John Knox Press 1966)Google Scholar.