Preface
Part One
1. Euripides on the Use and Abuse of Revelation in the Service of
the Political Order
2. The Divine, an Unsettling Duality, and the Conduct of One’s
Life:
Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos Revisited
3. On Aristophanes’ Clouds
4. Socrates’ Dangerous Piety
5. Plato on the Divine in Human Affairs
6. Maimonides and Others on Faith, Philosophy,
and Governing Principles
7. Conscience and Citizenship
8. El Greco and His Successors
9. Miguel de Cervantes on Death, the Divine, and
the Proper Ordering of Human Affairs
10. Thomas Hobbes on Church and State
11. John Milton’s Paradise Epics and the Divinely-Ordained
Redemption of the Human Race
12. Challenges Posed by the Aztecs
13. The Holocaust and the Divine Ordering of Human Affairs
ii. Part Two
1. Nature and the Divine in the Declaration of Independence
2. Benedict Arnold, Providence, and the Fates of Citizens and of
Nations
3. Benjamin Franklin and the Workings of the Divine – At Least in
America
4. “In the Year of [What] Lord?”
5. Political Symbols and the Sacred in the United States
6. Thomas Jefferson and Religious Liberty
7. Abraham Lincoln and the Almighty
8. Presidential Invocations of the Divine
9. Presidential Farewell Addresses
10. Revelation, Human Understanding, and the Ordering of
the Good Life: The “Mormon” Movement
11. Revelation and the Use of the United States Postal
System: The “I Am” Movement
12. An Earth Elsewhere?
13. Yearnings for the Divine and the Natural Animation of
Matter
Appendices
A. The Declaration of Independence (1776) <>
B. The United States Constitution (1787)
C. The Amendments to the United States Constitution (1791–1992)
D. On the “Destiny” of the Jews in Eastern Europe (1939–1945)
D (1) God, Please Choose Somebody Else (2000)
D (2) In Eastern Europe, Anti-Semitism Is a Kind of Religion
(2000)
E. Martin E. Marty, George Anastaplo on the Christian Heritage
(2010)
F. George Anastaplo, On the Human Soul and Eternity (2010)
G. Christopher A. Colmo, George Anastaplo’s Appeal to Nature
(2012)
H. George Anastaplo, Reflections upon Any Trial for Impiety Not
Only of Socrates But Also of Us (2013)
I. George Anastaplo, Life and Death in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address (2013)
J. Harry V. Jaffa, Foreword for George Anastaplo’s Further Thoughts
on Abraham Lincoln: Discourse on Chance and Public Life (2013)
K. Roger H. Hildebrand, On the Use by Physicists of Life-like Words
(2013)
L. John Van Doren, Silence at Delphi (2013)
M. Roster of Cases Drawn On
About the Author
George Anastaplo is currently Lecturer in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago, Professor of Law at Loyola University of Chicago, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science and of Philosophy at Dominican University.
This work is the fifth in a proposed ten-volume set of essays that
Anastaplo seeks to author. The previous volumes are Reflections on
Constitutional Law (2007), Reflections on Freedom of Speech and the
First Amendment (2007), Reflections on Life and Death and the
Constitution (2009), and Reflections on Slavery and the
Constitution (2012). The first half of the current work consists of
13 essays that run the gamut from Euripedes to Socrates and El
Greco to Hobbes, with a concluding chapter on the human sacrifices
by the Aztecs and Mayans. The second half examines unorthodox
religious movements in the US such as the Mormons and the 'I Am'
movement. Thirteen appendixes include the Declaration of
Independence, the US Constitution, and a number of lesser-known
essays and reflections by Anastaplo and others. Although the
breadth of coverage in this work is expansive, the author ties all
the topics together with religion and the divine by asking, as did
Hamlet, 'Who's there?' Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students
and research faculty.
*CHOICE*
Anastaplo's genius lies in his capacities for discovering
interconnections linking the most disparate inquiries—in a single
afternoon he may ask of a gathering of physicists why
masses attract and of a survivor of Nazi imprisonment what had been
the happiest day of his confinement. His "Reflections"
upon replies elicited from decades of such
inquiry provide guidance to thinking through the dependence of
political principles upon religious belief as well as to
understanding how changes in religious beliefs result
from political experience.
*John Alvis, professor and director, American Studies Program,
University of Dallas*
No one but George Anastaplo could range so wide—from the Greek
classics to contemporary unorthodox religious movements in the
United States, from Aztec human sacrifices to the human problems
posed by modern physical sciences—without for a moment dulling the
edge of his unmistakable voice, a voice full of passion,
indignation, skepticism, reason, and an unreasonable hope that the
human race will not go on forever making the same stupid mistakes.
Reflections on Religion, the Divine, and the Constitution, the
fifth in a projected series of ten volumes of essays, is rich in
insights, opinions, and disturbingly persuasive arguments.
*Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of
the History of Religions, University of Chicago Divinity
School*
George Anastaplo challenges us to question what we believe that we
know and to recognize what our way of life depends upon. In his
Reflections on Religion, the Divine, and the Constitution, he
employs unexpected and unorthodox manifestations of our religious
passions to make us aware of the relationship between our
understanding of the divine ordering of the universe and the
constitutional order under which we live. The inquiries provided
through the "constitutional sonnets" of this volume offer us the
opportunity to cast off the chance objects that our circumstances
have provided for our religious passions and to replace them with
what is truly enduring.
*Laurence D. Nee, St. John's College*
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