Prominent Voices Research Articles

The Catholic Press, the Bible, and Protestant Responsibility for the Civil War

The Catholic Press, the Bible, and Protestant Responsibility for the Civil War Mark A. Noll (bio) In his April 3, 1865, diary entry, George Templeton Strong recorded the transcendent exultation he witnessed in New York City when news arrived that Richmond had fallen to Union forces. Strong, a prominent lawyer, founder of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, and a vestryman at Wall Street's Trinity Episcopal Church, immediately secured permission to ring the bells at Trinity in celebration. His diary entry, headed "Petersburg and Richmond! Gloria in Excelsis Deo," underscored the harmony of religious and civic sentiments that fueled the city's jubilation. A great crowd, he wrote, "a rude, many-voiced chorale," repeatedly sang "the last two lines" of the national anthem "with a massive roar." As religious ardor rose with patriotic zeal, the throng also joined in singing the "Doxology" ("Praise God from whom all blessings flow") and "Old Hundred" ("All people that on earth do dwell / Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice").1 Two days earlier, the New York Tablet had also offered a religiously inflected meditation on the end of the nation's bloody civil conflict. Yet, rather than synthesizing civic and Christian jubilation, this Catholic newspaper answered its own question, "Who Are the Loyal Citizens?" with an all-out attack on the nation's Protestants. After detailing errors of belief and practice in various Protestant churches, the Tablet closed with a denunciation that borrowed invective from northern political polemics: "Aggressive Protestantism is essentially rebellious, … its origin is the spirit of secession and revolt, … its history is but a chronicle of insurrection, and…, in short, sedition and mutiny are but fruits of the Lutheran leaven spreading under the specious name of Liberty and Independence into all the ramifications of political, social and domestic life."2 The difference between George Templeton Strong's celebration of northern victory and the Tablet's accusatory indictment reflects the contrarian stance that characterized the nation's Catholic press during the great fratricidal conflict. That stance, in turn, hints at the rapidly maturing presence of Catholics in American public life. For prominent voices within the growing Catholic population, the [End Page 355] war became an occasion for translating an inherited general indictment of Protestantism into a specific charge that the divisiveness of American Protestants imperiled what had now also become the Catholics' country. The best scholarship on Roman Catholicism and the Civil War has expertly charted the main Catholic attitudes of the era. Prominent in that scholarship has been an awareness that even as Catholics divided in their political allegiance—strongly unionist versus anti-Republican unionist versus anguished neutrality versus strongly Confederate—they remained united as a church and united as well in underlying moral convictions, especially in condemning abolitionism of whatever form. In 1945, a pioneering book by the Rev. Benjamin Blied canvassed the era's Catholic press, in which he found a general Catholic disposition in favor of states' rights, along with corresponding opposition to northern abolitionism and Protestant political preaching.3 A more comprehensive dissertation by Judith Conrad Wimmer from 1980 demonstrated that Catholics remained strongly patriotic, though with conflicting sectional loyalties, even as they regularly appealed for peace and unity against all forms of social fragmentation.4 Michael Hochgeschwender's magisterial 2006 Wahrheit, Einheit, Ordnung (Truth, Unity, Order), documented in exquisite detail the factors that sustained a strong stance against abolition before and during the war: "Catholicity, conservativism, thinking fixated on order and unity, anti-British and anti-Protestant stereotypes reinforced each other and built the intellectual context for a fundamentally anti-abolitionist imagination."5 At about the same time, a book and an essay by John McGreevy explained with unprecedented depth why a European context was necessary for understanding American developments. In his account, European conflict between liberal political reformers and a Vatican determined to uphold both its moral traditions and its territorial prerogatives explains why the Civil War spurred American Catholics "to take the offensive and … expose to the public the erroneous doctrines of Protestantism and impiety."6 Then in 2010 appeared George Rable's comprehensive study, God's Almost Chosen People, which for the first time fully incorporated Catholics into a general account of...

Law and Liberation: Critical Notes on Agamben’s Political Messianism

Throughout history, Jewish notions of justice, hope and redemption have inspired political visions within as well as beyond the Jewish tradition. In the past century, examples can be drawn from Ernst Bloch to Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. Also in the present politico-philosophical debate, a number of prominent voices draw explicitly on Jewish sources in their attempts to formulate radical visions. This article engages with one of the more influential figures in this respect, Giorgio Agamben. Although Agamben offers a highly original and constructive reading of Jewish notions of justice, hope and redemption, it will nevertheless be argued that he fails to do justice to an essential element in Jewish conceptions of liberation. In consistently posing ‘law’ as the counterpole to liberation, Agamben disregards the extent to which law, in the Jewish tradition, is constitutive of justice, hope and redemption. Moreover, in equating ‘law’ with coercion and oppression he also fails to recognize the progressive force of the politico-juridical system, which is the target of his critique. (Less)

Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s by Benjamin Kohlmann

Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s, by Benjamin Kohlmann. Oxford University Press, 2014. 228 pages. As Benjamin Kohlmann argues in Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s, the intensity with which many thirties authors criticized the idea of political writing after 1939 has one of the iconic volte-faces in twentieth-century (197). By the end of the decade, numerous authors and intellectuals had already begun to dismiss the politically committed produced during the 1930s. Among the most prominent voices were some who had contributed to this very literature. This dismissal established foundation for postwar representation of the period as literary wasteland (198), view that Kohlmann argues was shared by figures from the American critic, Stanley E. Hyman to the writer and Horizon editor Cyril Connolly, both of whom saw the attempt to politicize literature as failure (199). This response to the decade, Kohlmann argues, continues to inform own standards of critical evaluation. His position parallels that of Valentine Cunningham, who insists that the 1930s are still seen as a sort of unfortunate historical blip or bypass on which writing got snagged and slowed down in the march of the twentieth century from modernism at the very beginning to postmodernism at the end, time when writers were distracted from their proper artistic concerns by crude ideological preferences which history has not sustained (1997, 5). The emphasis on the beginning and the end of the century is reflected in the focus of journals, conferences, professional organizations, job advertisements, syllabi, and publishers' lists. A few authors from the period, such as W. H. Auden, have, as Cunningham puts it, made into the pantheon of the great and good (6), but their standing often depends partly on the claim that they avoided or later rejected the errors of their contemporaries. As Kohlmann argues, while recent neo-formalist criticism has virtually bypassed thirties ... Auden's 'September 1, 1939' and his elegy for Yeats with its resonant warning that 'poetry makes nothing happen' have become touchstones for critics like James Longenbach, Angela Leighton, and Peter McDonald precisely because their air of resignation seems to advocate way to retreat from political action and into the narrower confines of poetic form (12). These poems seem to confirm the idea of engagement as mistake that allowed politics to displace literature, an error that had to be rectified. Auden is important, then, because he achieves distance from the period. Conventional wisdom maintains that the intellectual life of the 1930s was dominated by mass movements, most notably Communism, which stifled writers, imposing on them rigid set of ideas, political positions, and even forms, such as Socialist realism. At the end of the decade, the most talented artists confessed their errors, regaining their creativity, while the rest faded into deserved obscurity. This narrative has multiple origins, but arguably the most important, as Kohlmann suggests, were some of the artists who recanted. Figures such as Stephen Spender had disproportionate impact on perceptions of the decade; their prominence during the 1930s served as guarantee of the value and faith of their interpretations. The individual experience of handful of prominent, disillusioned authors established familiar trajectory of thirties writing--from grandiose political expectations to disillusionment (13)--that came to be seen as characteristic of the period as whole, obscuring the diversity of its writers, political positions, and forms of engagement. There have been numerous attempts to challenge this image of the 1930s and the narrow canon of it sustains. These interventions have valuably complicated and extended our understanding of the decade, drawing attention to wide range of writers beyond the small circle of white, male, public-school educated poets on which influential texts such as Samuel Hynes's The Auden Generation (1976) and Bernard Bergonzi's Reading the Thirties (1978) have focused and undermining the narrative of common experience of political engagement and disillusion. …

The conscience of a fugitive: sheldon wolin and the prospects for radical democracy

Amidst increasing and seemingly intransigent inequalities, unresponsive institutions, and illegible patterns of social change, political theorists are increasingly faced with questions about the viability of democracy in the contemporary age. One of the most prominent voices within this conversation has been that of Sheldon Wolin. Wolin has famously argued that democracy is a ‘fugitive’ experience with an inherently temporary character. Critics have pounced on this concept, rejecting it as an admission of defeat or despair that is at odds with the formation of democratic counter-power. In this article, I push back against this view of fugitive democracy. I do so by contextualizing the idea within Wolin’s broader democratic theory, and especially his idea of the ‘multiple civic self’, in order to give a more coherent form to a conception of citizenship often concealed by the attention given to the supposedly momentary nature of democracy. This all too common misreading of fugitive democracy has significant stakes, because it shapes not only how we approach Wolin’s impact as a political theorist, but also how we approach practices of democratic citizenship and how we think about political theory and political science’s relationship to those practices.

The Reality of Fiction

In the last decade, the playwright and director Gianina Cărbunariu has become one of the prominent young voices in contemporary European theatre. Mihaela, the Tiger of Our Town, which premiered at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, will be performed at the 2016 Avignon festival by Sweden's Jupither Josephsson Company. Other plays include Stop the Tempo, For Sale, Typographic Letters, Solitarity, Metro is Everywhere, and mady-baby.edu (later titled Kebab). The plays have been translated into more than fifteen languages, and they have been performed in Romanian cities and in theatres across Europe, in Berlin, Munich, Paris, Madrid, Brussels, Vienna, Athens, Warsaw, Budapest, Dublin, and elsewhere in Moscow, Istanbul, Santiago de Chile, New York, and Montreal. Cărbunariu has had residencies at the Lark Theatre in New York and London's Royal Court. Her plays and productions have received numerous awards in Romania and in Canada. She is a founding member of the dramAcum independent theatre group in Bucharest. This interview was taped in New York City on December 19, 2015.

Emily Anderson.Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God.

Emily Anderson’s new book examines the profound transformation undergone by members of the Japanese Congregational Church (Kumiai kyōkai) as they adapted their theology and ideology to the new realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book joins a large body of scholarship, both on the intersection of empire and religion, and on the trials faced by Japanese Christians during the Meiji reign (1868–1912). Much of that previous work focused on the clash of worlds: either the moment of mission encounter or the conflict between mission Christianity and existing religious and political interests. In contrast, Anderson presents the Japanese Christians not as converts but as missionaries in their own right. The moment of encounter was internal to the Christians themselves, as they came to embrace ideas of social reform, modernization, and national destiny alongside those of religious conviction. The content chapters follow a fairly well-established chronological arc, proceeding from the reformation of domestic social institutions in the mid-nineteenth century, through Japan’s reimagining of its relationship to both Asia and the West, and finally through the stages of continental expansion and experimentation that culminated in the 1932 formation of the Japanese client state in Manchuria. The first two content chapters examine how Christians faced the question of political loyalty during the late Meiji period. The first of these tests was the crisis created by the promulgation of the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), a ritualized document that blurred boundaries between the political and religious, and prompted Christians such as Kashiwagi Gien to refute old criticisms of Japanese Christians as a domestic fifth column. When such concerns resurfaced during the war against Christian (albeit Orthodox) Russia (1904–1905), prominent voices such as Pastor Ebina Danjō responded by dispelling any hint of divided loyalties: the war represented Japan’s sacred duty to bring civilization to the benighted East, and the duty of Christians was to their nation. Three subsequent chapters look to a different sort of expansion: the sacred mission to bring Christ to the Japanese diaspora in California and Korea, to use Christianity first to civilize and absorb the residents of Korea, and later to neutralize the Korean resistance to Japanese rule that had coalesced in Korea’s 1919 independence movement. The book’s final two chapters echo the question of how Christianity informed and inflected the choices of the 1920s and 1930s, examining two separate movements: one for Tolstoyan agrarianism, and another to create Christian settler villages in Manchuria—two reactions to the reality of military adventurism that, while opposed, nevertheless shared a conviction that Christianity would play a crucial role in shaping Japan’s larger destiny.

With Eyes Wide Open

Life is full of negative events that threaten our self-worth, and we deploy a wide range of potent psychological strategies—such as dissonance reduction, motivated reasoning, downward comparison, self-serving attribution, and outgroup derogation—to defend our egos. People are highly adept at using these psychological immune system strategies while remaining blind to the fact that they have done so. In fact, prominent voices in the field have suggested that this lack of awareness is a necessary condition for the psychological immune system’s efficacy; how else could someone continue to believe a self-serving attribution while being aware that the attribution was generated precisely because it favored him or her? In this article, I outline the argument underlying why awareness might be a threat to the efficacy of the psychological immune system and then closely review the empirical literature for evidence supporting this claim. On the contrary, the data indicate people can and do use these strategies with awareness, intention, and efficacy. I subsequently consider three ways people may achieve the apparent paradox of being aware of their own biased mental processes while also believing the conclusions that result from them. The third of these is a novel conceptual approach to the illusion of objectivity, which highlights the potential for dissociation between the objectivity of our mental processes and of our mental products. Finally, I outline the implications of this work for future theoretical and applied research.

Rethinking America's Grand Strategy: Insights from the Cold War

Abstract: This essay examines the history of the Cold War to illuminate insights that can help assess debates about American grand strategy today. As will be shown, calls for dramatic retrenchment and offshore balancing rest on weak historical foundations. Yet Cold War history also reminds us that a dose of restraint-and occasional selective retrenchment-can be useful in ensuring the long-term sustainability of an ambitious grand strategy. ********** US grand strategy stands at a crossroads. (1) Since World War II, the United States has pursued an ambitious and highly engaged grand strategy meant to mold the global order. The precise contours of that grand strategy have changed from year to year, and from presidential administration to presidential administration; however its core, overarching principles have remained essentially consistent. America has sought to preserve and expand an open and prosperous world economy. It has sought to foster a peaceful international environment in which democracy can flourish. It has sought to prevent any hostile power from dominating any of the key overseas regions---Europe, East Asia, the Middle East--crucial to US security and economic wellbeing. And in support of these goals, the United States has undertaken an extraordinary degree of international activism, anchored by American alliance and security commitments to overseas partners, and the forward presence and troop deployments necessary to substantiate those commitments. (2) This grand strategy has, on the whole, been profoundly productive for both the United States and the wider world, for it has underpinned an international system that has been--by any meaningful historical comparison--remarkably peaceful, prosperous, and democratic. (3) Yet over the past several years, America's long-standing grand strategy has increasingly come under fire. Amid the long hangover from the Iraq War and a painful financial crisis whose effects are still being felt, leading academic observers have taken up the banner of retrenchment. Prominent voices in the strategic-studies community argue the United States can no longer afford such an ambitious grand strategy; that US alliances and security commitments bring far greater costs than benefits; and that American overseas presence and activism create more problems than they solve. The solution, they contend, is a sharp rollback of US military presence and alliance commitments, and a far more austere foreign policy writ large. Scholars such as Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, and Barry Posen have been at the forefront of such calls for restraint or offshore balancing within the academy; mainstream commentators like Peter Beinart and Ian Bremmer have offered similar assessments. (4) These calls for retrenchment have recently been amplified by fears of American decline vis-a-vis rising or resurgent rivals such as Russia and China, and by the emergence of a host of strategic challenges around the world. Basic questions of what America should seek to achieve in international affairs, and whether it should break fundamentally with the postwar pattern of US global presence and activism, are more now robustly debated than at any time since the end of the Cold War. (5) The debate between these two rival schools of thought centers on a series of key strategic questions. Can the US economy sustain the burdens of a global defense posture? Are US alliances net benefits or detriments to American security? Is the US overseas presence stabilizing or destabilizing in its effects? Is democracy-promotion a boon or a burden for US strategic interests? How would an American military retrenchment affect geopolitical outcomes and alignments in key regions? Is the United States in inexorable geopolitical decline? How one answers these questions frequently determines which path one believes America should take in the future. Yet grand strategy is not simply about the future; it is also about the past. …

William Faulkner in the media ecology

William Faulkner in the Media Ecology explores the Nobel Prize-winning author immersed in the new media of his time. Intersecting with twentieth-century technology such as photography, film, and sound recording, these twelve essays portray Faulkner as not only as a writer looking back on the history of the U.S. South, but also as a screenwriter, aviator, and celebrity. This fresh, interdisciplinary approach to Faulkner presents an innovative way of reassessing a body of literary work that has engaged readers and critics for over sixty years. Essays by John T. Matthews, Catherine Gunther Kodat, Stefan Solomon, and Donald M. Kartiganer assess how Faulkner's legacy has been shaped through media adaptation and public commemoration of his work. Jay Watson, Michael Zeitlin, Sarah Gleeson-White, Robert Jackson, and Sascha Morrell consider a range of media relevant to the creation of the writer's stories and ways to recalibrate traditional thinking about his writing. Mark Steven, Peter Lurie, and Richard Godden examine how the vastly different mediations of both cinema and money influenced Faulkner's work. Editors Julian Murphet and Stefan Solomon have brought together some of the most prominent voices in Faulkner studies, along with a number of emerging scholars, to construct a portrait of Faulkner as a thoroughly modern writer, as much attuned to the evolution of the contemporary world as he was to the past.

Transparency and Fiscal Responsibility: Traditional Critics vs. Participatory Budgeting

In the recessionary years following the 2008 financial crisis, prominent voices predicted an imminent crisis in state and municipal finances. The voices – including those of Bill Gates; Josh Ruah; Meredith Whitney; Paul Volcker; and Richard Ravitch – implied that the road to fiscal responsibility lies in reining in the pensions and benefits of public servants. We argue that by painting public employees as the villains, these voices are inserting divisiveness in what should be a universal goal of sound public finances. Instead, we suggest that the road to fiscal responsibility lies with budgetary transparency and widespread public knowledge of state and municipal finances. A key to achieving these objectives is the movement towards participatory budgeting.

Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science. HarperCollins, 2015, xiv + 416 pages, $28.99

Steven Weinberg occupies a remarkable place in contemporary physics as well as being one of its most prominent public voices. He cofounded and named the Standard Model of particle physics, which synthesized the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions into a powerful theory amply confirmed by experiment. He is also a skillful and prolific writer not only of magisterial (and innovative) texts on general relativity and field theory but also of a number of very successful popular books. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, he is one of the most visible and widely respected physicists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, both among his peers and the general public; in these respects, one might compare him to Freeman Dyson. An eminent professor at the University of Texas (and many other places before that), Weinberg has in recent years given a course on the history of physics and astronomy, from which grew his new book, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science. Normally, this journal does not review essentially popular accounts, but Weinberg’s seems a special case because of its author’s eminence and influence and because his book raises important questions about the history of physics, how it is told by physicists and historians, how it is understood by the general public. Weinberg considers that, as a physicist, he can address history with the same vividness that he would bring to a physical problem, starting from first principles to give an account of some complex phenomenon. Indeed, this spirit served him well as he put together the theory that won him fame; he applied the same intellectual independence and freshness to his books on field theory and gravitation, which offered clear and sometimes new syntheses that have taught many physicists a great deal. He applied the same independent judgment to various conceptual issues that emerge from physics. For instance, in a number of writings for the general public he famously championed reductionism over the seductive charms of holism. Blunt and frank, he revels in polemic where he can bring to bear his formidable knowledge of physics, a certain love of contrarian positions, and his skill with words. Thus, his presentation of the history of physics is an event that merits close attention because it presumably will be taken by his peers and the general public as the considered judgment of this eminent physicist about the history of science. Indeed, his interest in history is long-standing; readers of his earlier books will notice how often and how keenly he devotes close attention to the history of the point in question, at times delving into the primary sources and wishing to go beyond often-recounted stories or summary accounts. In that sense, there is much to admire in To Explain the World. Weinberg sets out to explain in some detail the salient history and controversies that formed physics as we now know it, indeed the whole of science. By comparison with many works that stint or even

Realism, Pluralism, and Salvation: Reading Mordecai Kaplan through John Hick

The article surveys Kaplan’s ideas about God and salvation in the light of current debates on religious realism and pluralism. Using definitions formulated by John Hick, one of the prominent voices of religious realism and pluralism, the article’s central argument is that Kaplan was a religious realist who affirmed the ontological existence of God, even though his epistemology dictated the use of a nonrealistic and functionalistic religious language.

Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing. By Joseph W. Williams. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xi + 226 pp. $55.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing . By Joseph W. Williams . New York : Oxford University Press , 2013. xi + 226 pp. $55.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesHistorians of pentecostalism have wrestled to understand how a movement that began in the early twentieth century with a pronounced antipathy to many features of modern American culture transformed into one that moves easily in culture's broad terrain, even as it retains distinctive elements. In the realm of healing, in particular, early pentecostals advocated divine healing by faith through Christ's atonement while ardently rejecting physicians, drugs, and all other aspects of modern medicine. But within two generations, leading pentecostals proclaimed God's superintendence of medical advances and promoted a union of spiritual and medical healing. By the turn of the twenty-first century, prominent pentecostal voices urged the faithful to embrace naturopathic healing regiments, weight-loss and other dietary innovations, and mental healing programs with deep roots in metaphysical religiosity, all baptized with the power and presence of the Holy Spirit and the ongoing conviction that God could bring healing directly through prayer. What had been a movement radically set apart from the world had come to embrace the world's practices and values and combine them with their own. Or so it seemed.In Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing , Joseph Williams offers a fresh, nuanced, and dynamic reading of pentecostal healing. Williams argues that the divine healing of early pentecostals was not so separate as the faithful liked to think. Instead, it contained areas of meaningful overlap with alternative healing programs rooted in metaphysical spirituality. The mental healing of New Thought and Christian Science resonated with pentecostals' conviction that divine healing was guaranteed to those who had faith, which entailed pronouncing and acting out healing after prayer despite contrary symptoms. In concert with naturopathic healing, early pentecostals warned against dietary overindulgence and promoted fasting as a spiritual discipline with significant health benefits, including as a preparatory step for divine healing. Like metaphysical believers of various stripes, pentecostals tended to depersonalize the divine and minimize the gulf between nature and supernature. In relation to healing, God's declared intentions to heal the faithful were fixed in his Word, so the issue became how to tap into this source and actualize divine health. The pentecostal conception of the Holy Spirit as an immanent source of power and abundance often relied on natural and impersonal metaphors, like hydraulics and electricity, further emphasizing shared convictions with metaphysical believers. Although early pentecostals routinely anathematized metaphysical healers along with regular doctors, Williams highlights significant commonalities that linked their healing programs.Many historians have noted that treatment via orthodox medicine in the early twentieth century remained a crapshoot, but by mid-century diagnostic and therapeutic advances had enhanced the social and cultural standing of physicians. Simultaneously, pentecostals were climbing the social ladder and beginning to make peace with the surrounding culture. In this context, Oral Roberts played a crucial mediating role by envisioning the union of divine and medical healing. Even as the Latter Rain movement and postwar healing revivals hearkened back to radical early days of pentecostalism, rife with demonic etiology and anti-medical rhetoric, Roberts represented a larger development in pentecostalism that sought not only peace but union with medicine. …

Identifying Difference, Engaging Dissent: What is at Stake in Democratizing Knowledge?

Several prominent voices have called for a democratization of science through deliberative processes that include a diverse range of perspectives and values. We bring these scholars into conversation with extant research on democratic deliberation in political theory and the social sciences. In doing so, we identify systematic barriers to the effectiveness of inclusive deliberation in both scientific and political settings. We are particularly interested in what we call misidentified dissent, where deliberations are starkly framed at the outset in terms of dissenting positions without properly distinguishing the kinds of difference and disagreement motivating dissent.

Marriage of Necessity: Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty Protections

Since the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Hollingsworth v. Perry and U.S. v. Windsor, the number of states recognizing same-sex marriage has exploded. Even though the Supreme Court “stopped short of deciding whether the Constitution guaranteed a right to same-sex marriage,” the Court’s basic newly enacted legislation as well as judicial decisions recognizing same-sex marriage. The net effect has been to erase a boundary that had largely confined same-sex marriage to the Northeast. In jurisdictions that voluntarily enacted same-sex marriage, religious liberty protections for religious objectors who adhere to a heterosexual view of marriage — exempting them from requirements to facilitate marriages inconsistent with their religious beliefs, by providing a reception hall, for example — proved vital to the legislation’s success. In many Enacting Jurisdictions, more robust protections resulted in successful legislation where a bill with thinner or nonexistent protections had failed just years before. Even though same-sex marriage recognition in the Enacting Jurisdictions has thus far been yoked to religious liberty protections — delivering important gains to supporters and opponents alike — prominent voices on each side now caution against compromise. Buoyed by their recent judicial victories, some supporters have hardened against compromise. With the recent spate of favorable judicial decisions, compromise may simply appear increasingly unnecessary. Opponents are hardening in their stance, too. Far from folding in the face of the momentum carrying same-sex marriage across the country, some thought-leaders urge opponents to double down on their opposition. These opponents see only one way forward: fighting to the bitter end. This Essay contends that we stand at a critical moment in the same-sex marriage movement. A clear-eyed examination of the marriage movement’s success — and the challenges facing it going forward — reveals that both sides will benefit from remaining at the bargaining table, although the gains to each will be different. For same-sex couples, voluntary recognition of same-sex marriage by legislation delivers the benefits and security of marriage today. True, many believe that the juggernaut of lower court decisions requiring same-sex marriage will lead in the near term to a favorable Supreme Court decision. Although that result is increasingly likely, it is nonetheless not assured. Moreover, the unanimity of decisions striking marriage bans may, ironically, delay an ultimate resolution by the Supreme Court, which often declines review until a meaningful circuit split arises. For marriage equality opponents, the voluntary embrace of same-sex marriage permits legislators to consider competing considerations, including concrete ways to permit those who adhere to a traditional view of marriage to continue to do so without facing civil lawsuits or government penalty. Part I shows that same-sex marriage has spread across America through three different avenues: judicial decisions, state laws enacting same-sex marriage, and ballot initiatives — with judicial decisions being fraught with risk for religious dissenters while legislative or popular enactments offer important, if flawed, protections to religious organizations and individuals. Parts II and III document that a “perfect storm” of characteristics favoring marriage equality in jurisdictions that voluntarily embraced same-sex marriage, together with extensive bargaining around religious liberty, nudged same-sex marriage legislation over the finish line. Even with these favorable conditions, marriage equality bills just barely squeaked over the line to enactment, helped by religious liberty exemptions. That advantageous political terrain is now nearly exhausted, as Part IV documents. Going forward, one would reasonably expect more robust religious liberty protections to play a central part in any legislative compromises over same-sex marriage, at least for the near term. Part V evaluates the impulse of some opponents of same-sex marriage to dig in, resisting same-sex marriage at all costs. In part, opponents rely on constitutional bans against same-sex marriage. Constitutional bans may well not survive judicial challenge. However, even without court action striking a ban, constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage do not provide the bulwark against change that some assume since many can be repealed almost as easily as enacting ordinary legislation. Part VI concludes that, in the tougher political terrain that looms, those who care about marriage equality can continue to sew up legislative victories — but the price tag in the short term will be to agree to robust religious liberty protections for dissenters. Those who wish to protect religious objectors from the unintended consequences of same-sex marriage should act with all deliberate speed to lock in robust religious liberty protections, because the window for securing them is almost certainly closing.

To starve or not to starve the beast?

For thirty years, prominent voices have advocated a policy of starving the beast – cutting taxes to force government spending cuts. This paper analyzes the macroeconomic and welfare consequences of this policy using a two-country general equilibrium model. Under several strong assumptions, the policy, if fully implemented, produces domestic output and welfare gains accompanied by losses elsewhere. But negative effects can easily arise in the presence of longer policy implementation lags, utility-enhancing government spending, and productive government capital. Overall, the analysis finds no support for the idea that starving the beast is a foolproof way towards higher output and welfare.

Malaysia’s Development Success Story: Critical Responses in Contemporary Malaysian Novels in English

Malaysia is often hailed as a development success story. However, one criticism of this success story is the over-emphasis on the ideology of economic and capitalist growth by the state in its setting, determining and directing of development. This paper looks into some of the most interesting and critical reflections on development. Representing prominent voices in Malaysian literature in English, K. S. Maniam, Chuah Guat Eng and Yang-May Ooi delve into Malaysia’s development success story through Between Lives (2003), Days of Change (2010) and The Flame Tree (1998), respectively. Through textual analysis, I examine how these writers treat the state’s prevailing ideology of development. Through their creative responses to the rapid development that has occurred in Malaysia, Maniam, Chuah and Ooi offer individual expression and powerful critiques of development, not merely reflecting on the ideology of economic and capitalist growth but also illustrating different perspectives on development based on notions of social justice, democracy and cultural sustainability. That is not to say that they reject development. On the contrary, they acknowledge that development is part and parcel of social, economic and political processes. However, through their treatment of development, they bring to light other equally important issues, thus emphasizing the flaws in adopting a development model that is essentially based on economic and capitalist growth.

Scientists Clash Swords Over Future of GM Food Crops in India

Science sought to shed light on the future of GM food crops in India by bringing together two prominent scientific voices in a debate.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note

Subjectivity, the Person, and Modern Art: Theological Reflections on Jacques Maritain and Charles Taylor

Subjectivity, the Person, and Modern Art: Theological Reflections on Jacques Maritain and Charles Taylor William Dyrness One of the few relatively uncontested observations about modern art is its consistent celebration of subjectivity and personal expression. Both making and experiencing art, since Impressionism at least, has come to be an encounter of persons. To be sure, art still embodies the textures, colors, and sounds that give it a physical existence; but its formation and reception, what we call its aesthetics, necessarily involves personal experience. Modern artists quarrel about many things, but they share the conviction that art, when it is authentic and serious, expresses the freedom and depths of the human self. This personal character of art can take many forms. But they all are some variation on the necessity of artists “to find and define an image of himself (sic) which corresponds most comprehensively to the ‘truth’ that he feels within himself.” Nicholas Cook, who quotes this as a representative view of composer Arnold Schoenberg, goes on to argue that such convictions make the modern work of art (or of music) a “moral entity and not a perceptual one.” To critically engage modern art—Cook thinks this is a 20th century expression of the 19th century art‐religion—the listener or viewer has to accede to the moral claims art makes, even at the expense of enjoyment. One must be willing to personally receive—and now engage—the personal statements that constitute a work of art. The allusion to art‐religion is not incidental for it is a commonplace that art, for many people during this period, has actually replaced religion. But the contemporary form of art‐religion has taken on a peculiar form, different in many ways from its 19th century predecessor. As artist Julian Schnabel has expressed this: Duccio and Giotto were painting in a society in which there was actually belief in God. . . People had religious experiences in front of paintings. The painters were connecting people to something bigger than their individual experiences. I think people still have religious experiences in front of paintings. The only difference today is that the religion isn't organized or prescribed—it's consciousness. To get religion now is to become conscious, to feel those human feelings. The language of consciousness and personal expression resonates well beyond the art gallery and museum, it has in fact become the lingua franca of the modern person. Charles Taylor defined this consciousness in terms of what he calls a modern imaginary. He describes this social imaginary in these terms: The understanding of life which emerges with the Romantic expressivism of the late‐eighteenth century, [is] that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one's own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed from outside, by society, or the previous generation or religious or political authority. I will return to Taylor's argument in a moment, but here I want to point to the challenge the modern artist (and not just the artist!) faces in accounting for the freedom and human depths that she has come to enjoy. All of us expect enrichment from our concerts and exhibitions, but we seldom pause to ask the obvious question: whence this privileging of the personal in the experience of art? More importantly, in the absence of religion, what underwrites these high expectations? Though many have recognized this problem, I will cite two of the more prominent voices. Critic Peter Fuller writing in the 1980s, though not religious, recognized that: A society which has no hegemonising religious beliefs lacks a shared symbolic order, with disastrous effects on both aesthetics and ethics. As that great anthropologist Gregory Bateson (who, like me, was no believer) once saw, the decline since the nineteenth century of the belief in the immanence of god within nature has tended to lead men to regard nature as alien, as unworthy of ethical or aesthetic consideration. Similarly George Steiner has famously claimed that “referral and self‐referral to a transcendent dimension, to that which is felt to reside…outside immanent and purely secular reach, does underwrite created...