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Pilgrim to Nowhere—The Mysterious Journey of Robert Rodes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
Extract
Robert Rodes settled on the metaphor of the pilgrim for his story of the law. For him, pilgrim law is “the jurisprudential manifestation of liberation theology.” To begin my discussion of Rodes and the ongoing story of the law, I begin with a tale of my own pilgrimage to find justice in one place in the world I thought most needed it—when, as Dorothy could have told us from the outset, if it was not in my own back yard, I had never really lost it to begin with. In the mysteries of a Christian life that Rodes emphasizes is rooted in our unknowing, Milovan Djilas figures as central to Rodes's analysis; Djilas himself gave me crucial, but slightly cryptic, wisdom for my journey. Thus I feel haunted by some of the same characters and stories Rodes deems crucial in his pilgrim experience.
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- Robert E. Rodes, Jr. Tribute
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- Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 2007
References
1. Rodes, Robert E. Jr., Pilgrim Law 175 (U. Notre Dame Press 1998)Google Scholar.
2. Rodes notes in the “Preface” that a “Christian interested in social justice has to find some way to appropriate the important insights of Marx and Engels [and, in my opinion, Djilas] into class dialectic without absolutizing class as Marx and Engels do.” Id. at xv.
3. Bolt, Robert, A Man for All Seasons 126 (Vintage Intl. 1990)Google Scholar.
4. Djilas, Milovan, Conversations with Stalin (Petrovich, Michael B. trans., Harcourt, Brace & World 1962)Google Scholar.
5. Djilas, Milovan, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (Praeger 1957)Google Scholar.
6. See Rodes, supra n. 1, at 103 (“The only way to avoid an inadvertent bias in our own favor is to adopt a deliberate bias the other way.”).
7. Id. at 105.
8. Id. at 11.
9. Id.
10. Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes: Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World § 39, at 35 (Natl. Cath. Welfare Conf. 1965)Google Scholar.
11. Rodes, supra n. 1, at 92.
12. Id. at 24.
13. Id. at 88.
14. Id. at 157.
15. Id. at 89.
16. Edelman, Murray, The Politics of Misinformation (Cambridge U. Press 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17. See Alison, James, Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (Crossroad Publg. 1996)Google Scholar.
18. At the very end of the book, Rodes notes this primacy of God's love for us, and this undoubtedly animates much of his reflection, but it is not visible in the body of his analysis. Rodes, supra n. 1, at 177 (“Our service to our neighbors is less an implementation of God's love for them than a response to God's love for us.”).
19. Id. at 163.
20. Id. at 146.
21. The use of “nowhere” in the title of this piece is insufficient to this unknowing, but the use of a term that would be much more nearly evocative of this, chora, would require too much discussion of that term, particularly as its use in Plato unfolds in the play and delicate irony of Jacques Derrida. Derrida, Jacques & Eisenman, Peter, Chora L Works (Monacelli Press 1997)Google Scholar.
22. See e.g. id. at 176-177.