Ethics and Public Policy Center
About EPPC Contact EPPC Support EPPC My EPPC
  Find:    
Home News & Updates Conferences & Events Programs Publications Fellows & Scholars
Programs
Bioethics and American Democracy
Catholic Studies
The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture
Economics and Ethics
Evangelicals in Civic Life
Foreign Policy
Islam and American Democracy
Jewish Studies
Program to Protect America's Freedom
Religion and the Media
Science, Technology, and Society
South Asian Studies and Religious Nationalism
Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society
Home  >  Programs  > 
The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture
The proper role of the courts in construing the Constitution is one of the most hotly contested issues in American society. Competing conceptions of the role of the courts animate election battles and fuel disputes over Supreme Court rulings, judicial nominations, and proposed constitutional amendments. EPPC's program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture, under the direction of EPPC President Edward Whelan, explores these competing conceptions. The program focuses, in particular, on what is at stake for American culture writ large – for the ability of the American people to engage in responsible self-government and to maintain the “indispensable supports” of “political prosperity” that George Washington (and other Founders) understood “religion and morality” to be.

New Books
The Latest Books from EPPC Scholars

Faith, Reason and the War Against JihadismEPPC Distinguished Senior Fellow George Weigel's new book is essential reading in a time of momentous political decisions. Drawing on a quarter century of experience at the intersection of moral argument and public policy, he describes rigorously and clearly the threat posed by global jihadism and points a new direction for both public policy and interreligious dialogue, one that meets the challenge of jihadism forthrightly while creating the conditions for a less threatening, more mutually enriching encounter between Islam and the West.
[More information][Purchase]

 
EPPC Resident Scholar James Bowman recounts the history of honor, noting that it is inseparable from the history of mankind. While honor has been disregarded or actively despised for three quarters of a century in the West, it is still essential to an understanding of the Islamic cultures of the Middle East and the sense of grievance they often foster against the West, and especially the United States.
[More information] [Purchase]

 

EPPC Fellow Christine Rosen writes a warm and affectionate memoir of her days as a school girl in a fundamentalist Christian school in St. Petersburg, Florida where "the Bible was our textbook," God the guide, and after entering the school gates, nothing was ever quite the same again.
[More information] [Purchase]

  


May 2009
Michael Cromartie
Faith Angle Conference

EPPC Vice President Michael Cromartie moderated a series of discussions in May at the semi-annual Faith Angle Conference sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and held in Key West, Florida. Transcripts of the informative talks are now available online.

 Obama's Favorite Theologian? A Short Course on Reinhold Niebuhr  -- Wilfred McClay, a historian specializing in American intellectual history, offered an overview of Niebuhr's unique form of progressive Christianity and addressed ongoing debates about the influence of Niebuhr's work on 20th-century American politics and international affairs.

 Religion and Science: Conflict or Harmony? -- Francis S. Collins, the former director of the Human Genome Project, discussed why he believes religion and science are compatible and why the current conflict over evolution vs. faith, particularly in the evangelical community, is unnecessary.

 The Political Obligations of Catholics -- the Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, archbishop of Denver and author of Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life (2008), argues that Catholics should take an active, vocal and morally consistent role in public debates, particularly on issues such as abortion, the death penalty and other matters they consider central to social justice.