Forgiveness and mercy are often thought of as acts that we perform or gifts that we bestow. In this essay the author focuses on character and explores the implications for punishment if one focuses on having a character that is merciful and forgiving in disposition. He argues that the tension that is often thought to exist between justice, on the one hand, and forgiveness and mercy, on the other, is lessened by focusing on the virtue of having a forgiving and merciful character.

Drawing on a qualitative study conducted with both individuals who have been shunned from the Jehovah’s Witnesses community and those who were in a position to shun others, the authors identify areas of development within the Serious Crime Act 2015 and propose that there is scope to interpret the law broadly to include instances of people shunned from the Jehovah’s Witnesses community.

John Milbank's critique of the secular as a violent distortion of Christian theology is well established. Less clear is how Milbank's framework might bear upon secular liberalism as it specifically relates to liberal ideas of religious freedom and public or secular reasons in political contexts. This is especially worthy of investigation since “religious freedom” is part of the liberal framework Milbank so stridently critiques. This article attempts to reconcile Milbank's theological critique of secular liberalism with the idea of religious freedom by applying Milbank's theology and the law of love to liberal notions of public discourse for the purpose of redeeming and transforming that discourse. This redeemed “liberalism” provides a framework for persuasion to the Good by recognizing that all public positions (including secularism) are ultimately faith positions, and advocates a discourse governed by the law of love to produce genuine religious freedom that paradoxically transcends and fulfils the liberal ideals that secular liberalism proclaims but can never attain.

It is a thousand miles from the coast of the land of Israel to the city of Rome, over the sea that is called in both Hebrew and Latin, “the Sea In-Between.” The closing chapters of the book of Acts tell of the Apostle Paul's journey over that sea, from Caesarea to Rome, around the year 60 C.E. By this time, of course, Paul had made many journeys in his life: from Tarsus to Jerusalem, Jerusalem to Damascus, to Ephesus, Athens, Corinth and numerous other cities east of Rome. At the conclusion of his Epistle to the Romans, Paul mentions that he planned to visit Rome as well, on his way to Spain. But as best we can tell, when Paul did finally come to Rome, his wanderings ended, for he came as a prisoner, and it was in Rome, according to Church tradition, that he was eventually put to death.

In the book of Acts, the portrayal of the events leading up to Paul's journey to Rome—its description of his arrest and subsequent appearances before various courts and authorities—is clearly reminiscent of the Gospel descriptions of Jesus' arrest and execution approximately thirty years earlier. In both accounts, we read of disturbances in the Temple, crowds of angry Jews calling for an innocent victim's death, his arrest and confrontations with both Jewish and Roman authorities, and acknowledgement by representatives of Rome of the victim's innocence. However, the conditions surrounding the two series of events suggest two very different historical moments. And Paul's response to those who would sit in judgment of him, and to the jurisdictions they represented, at least as recorded in Acts, suggests a sea of difference between Paul's outlook and that of his Lord.

In a world of but few moral verities, Judge Richard Posner and others pursuing the economic approach to law have introduced a normative principle into discussions of law and policy that receives very wide currency. They propose that society should always sanction market exchanges, as a means of maximizing wealth, unless some exceptional normative commitment on society's part requires otherwise. Where the principle reigns, nonmarket values are treated as restrictions on individual autonomy requiring special justification.

As a consequence, the justifiability of restricting market freedom becomes a standard mode of framing normative issues. Disagreements about values are formulated as disputes over whether contracts should be enforced. Arguments are made for and against enforcing contracts for the purchase and sale of votes, the intervivos transfer of eyes or kidneys, addictive recreational drugs, enslavement or prostitution, and environmental purity.

It gives me great pleasure to be here today and to give remarks on a subject in which I take considerable interest, the legal and social status of women. I would like to thank Ambassador Mejdoub, the Hannibal Club, and the President's Interagency Council on Women for providing this forum to discuss and promote women's issues.

Women from all countries have much to share with each other about their own cultures, experiences, successes, and failures. Today, as always, women are the primary caregivers worldwide. We bear and nurture the children, and we manage the household for our families. But we also work outside the home. We want and expect to have equal opportunities in business, in the professions, and in public service. We want and expect to be paid as much as men for the same work. While women have made tremendous advances in this century, the process of achieving gender equality is still an ongoing one, in this country and throughout the world. In many respects, we have traveled far, although we have a way yet to go. We remember the old adage that “[t]he test of every civilization is the position of women in the society.”

In the article The Use of Natural Law in Early Calvinist Resistance Theory, David VanDrunen, Robert B. Strimple Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at Westminster Seminary (California), analyzes natural law as it appeared in the writings of several sixteenth—century resistance theorists—John Knox, Christopher Goodman, John Ponet, Theodore Beza, Francois Hotman, and the unknown writer of Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. Van Drunen's article is much needed, since Richard Tuck, in his otherwise astute 1979 study on natural law, does not adequately address Reformation-era developments, focusing instead on Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf, and other seventeenth-century theorists. Nevertheless, I take issue with Van Drunen's assertion that these writers were all “committed to the theology of Calvin” and were “early Calvinist resistance theorists.” One could make the case that most of these writers were, but there is one notable exception: English reformer, humanist, bishop, and polemicist John Ponet.

This is a story; let us begin at the end.

They have come, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Joshua and their colleagues, this Friday afternoon to visit the dying outcast, to offer him one last chance to repent, to return. “Why have you come?” he asks them. “We have come to learn Torah, ” is their reply.

It is about time. For R. Eliezer is shammuta, excommunicated. Under the ban he has been forbidden to teach, forbidden casual social intercourse, unkempt and unshaven: like a leper, like a mourner. Hear how he expresses himself, the teacher cut off from students:

“Woe is me, ” he tells them. “I know three hundred laws concerning the bright white spot” - the mark of the condition we translate as leprosy - “but there is none to ask me questions.”

Now there are people to ask him questions about Torah, although not about the bright white spot.

“What is the law of a ball, a shoemaker's last, an amulet, a curative leather bag of pearls, and a small weight?” Are they succeptable to ritual impurity if they come in contact with a corpse? “And what of the shoe, just completed but still on the last?”

Technological consciousness and libertarian doctrine reduce the material world to an instrument—or better, to an amorphous resource existing solely for those ends which we freely choose. We are trapped in matter without true form or meaning.

Even for the Christian, such reduction has grave consequences. God resides in a distant heaven or in a distant time. Only after years of exile in a nature bereft of divinity can we hope, perhaps, to be rewarded with bodily salvation in a different universe. In the meantime, any spirituality we hold to must be necessarily non-material— founded in a dualistic belief in the presence of the intangible Deity whispering to our own intangible selves. We are put asunder, into godless brains and disembodied souls.

The organization of a Section on Law and Religion in 1976 by the Association of American Law Schools (after Watergate) was followed in 1977 by the incorporation of the Council on Religion and Law. My participation in both led to the study of theology and especially to the question, what, if anything, can a legal scholar, particularly one specialized in penal law and the philosophy of law, contribute to the literature on the interrelations of law and religion? In the English-speaking world not many legal scholars have written on this subject, and none, to my knowledge, on the interrelationship of religion and modern criminal law. I here confine my discussion to the Bible and, more particularly, to some of the writing on atonement by Christian theologians.

The central focus of Christianity is on the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the relevant theme, originating in the Old Testament and frequently addressed in the New Testament, is that of atonement. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament accept and emphasize the vicarious significance of the sacrifice—the lamb in the Old Testament, Jesus in the New Testament. The one sacrificed takes on itself or himself the sins of Israel or the sins of all mankind. Likewise, the sacrifice frees all Israel or all mankind from sin, and the consequence is reconciliation with God.

American culture bears a lasting imprint from its Puritan founders. Their ideal of a social and political community based on a religious covenant has provided a sense of mutual obligation and commitment to public purposes in American life that cannot be fully explained by the contractarian notion of “mutually disinterested” persons who join forces to further their individual aims more effectively. Covenant theology, at the beginnings of modern liberal individualism, sustained an older notion of the self fulfilled in community. At the same time, however, the covenantal emphasis on consent, the voluntary creation of new communities of identity, introduced new elements of historicity, initiative, and equality into old political theories. The distinctive covenantal form of some basic democratic norms thus continues to exert an influence on public choice and political ideals, even in a public philosophy which is today dominated by contractarian and utilitarian theories.