John von Heyking

Law and Religion: A Critical Anthology

Few issues arouse as much passionate debate as the relationship between church and state. Political parties and coalitions have long jockeyed for position in the battle to either keep the two separate, or to unify them in one nation indivisible from God. While the battle has been raging in the political arena, figures from academia, the media, and myriad other vantage points, have commented on the context and constitutionality of laws governing religious expression. In Law and Religion, Stephen M. Feldman brings together the many perspectives that have shaped policy on this important national issue. In giving voice to the political left and right, as well as to cultural, philosophical, sociological and historical perspectives, the book serves as an even-handed treatment of an issue all too often clouded by biases. Contributors ranging from Stanley Fish to Richard John Neuhaus explore issues extending from religious morality and religious freedom, to fundamentalism, the separation of church and state, religion and public schooling, and liberal political theory. Comprehensive in scope, Law and Religion will stand as an important reference for anyone seeking to further understand this complex and highly emotional topic.

A Cosmion of Greatness: Introduction

ABSTRACT This essay introduces a review symposium on the recently published The Eric Voegelin Reader, edited by Charles R. Embry and Glenn Hughes. First, it introduces the other review essays by Barry Cooper, Steven McGuire, Wolfgang Leidhold, Lee Trepanier, and Brendan Purcell. Second, it evaluates how well the Reader represents and introduces Voegelins body of work. Third, it considers the nature of Voegelins approach to political science and its significance.

Introduction: Symposium on Statecraft and Friendship in Transformative Times

Aristotle claims lawgivers give more weight to friendship than to justice. He elaborates by pointing out that friends do not depend upon justice, while the practice of justice seems to depend on the practice of friendship. His paradoxical thoughts on friendship suggest a twofold significance of friendship for politics. First, friendships are needed to sustain the legal and constitutional bonds of political society, analogous to the way a legal order depends on a virtuous citizenry to uphold the law. Because virtue is prior to law, so too is virtue friendship prior to a polity’s legal order. Second, virtue friendship is a higher moral good than is the moral good sought by political society. Aristotle indicates this when he claims that like-mindedness (homonoia) is similar to friendship. Political friendship is in some sense predicated upon virtue friendship. Friendship therefore is both a tool for politics, practiced in various ways by statesmen and citizens, but it also seems to be the purpose of politics in some sense, even standing above politics. Modern political science disputes Aristotle’s claim concerning friendship’s significance for politics. Universal laws replace friendships just as law displaces the virtues it once depended on. For similar reasons, impersonal institutions and historical and social forces displace individual personalities and persons. The reasons for this shift are many, but the tendency of modern political science to pattern itself after the physical sciences seems influential. German political scientist Tilo Schabert explains:

Political Friendship in Churchill's Marlborough

ABSTRACTThis article examines Winston Churchills biography of his ancestor, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, as a character study and as a statement of Churchills own fundamental political wisdom. It argues that Marlboroughs capacity for friendship is key not only as a tool for statecraft, but as its very purpose. It examines Marlboroughs friendship with Eugene of Savoy as the backbone of the alliance against Louis XIV. It also considers Churchills purpose of writing the biography as an expression of friendship as the fundamental purpose of politics.ABSTRACT This article examines Winston Churchills biography of his ancestor, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, as a character study and as a statement of Churchills own fundamental political wisdom. It argues that Marlboroughs capacity for friendship is key not only as a tool for statecraft, but as its very purpose. It examines Marlboroughs friendship with Eugene of Savoy as the backbone of the alliance against Louis XIV. It also considers Churchills purpose of writing the biography as an expression of friendship as the fundamental purpose of politics.

Hermes as Eros in Plato’s Lysis

This article examines how Plato uses mythological symbolisms in the Lysis, specifically those of Hermes, to show how our experience of the good makes possible our capacity to love our friend as an individual, and in so doing overturns the static dualities usually associated with Plato’s ‘metaphysics’. Instead of appealing to allegedly impersonal ideas, Plato refigures Greek mythological understandings of Hermes to signal, first, that friendship is a movement of divine love in which human beings participate and to which they are reoriented so that they may behold their friend as an individual, as a person, and second, that this reorientation is needed to place the dialectical inquiry into friendship upon proper starting points. Instead of eclipsing the individual in the shadow of impersonal ideas, Plato appeals to Hermes, the most human, most creative and thus most political, of Olympians, whose name means windfall [hermaion], to show how we must open ourselves up to the divine in order fully to love our friend as an individual person.