This book explores the application of Scalia’s textualism and originalism to education law and reflects upon Scalia’s teachings and his pedagogy. Education law may seem to be an odd vehicle for considering Scalia’s constitutional approach, but thinking about schools requires attention to political fundamentals―freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, equality of opportunity, federalism, and the proper role of the expert. Legal scholars, philosophers, and political scientists provide both critiques and apologies for Scalia’s approach.
Paul Silas Peterson presents Karl Barth (1886-1968) in his sociopolitical, cultural, ecclesial and theological contexts from 1905 to 1935. The time period begins in 1905, as Barth began to prepare for a speech on the „social question“ (which he held in 1906). It ends in 1935, the year he returned to Switzerland from Germany. In the foreground of Peterson's inquiry is Barth's relation to the features of his time, especially radical socialist ideology, WWI, an intellectual trend that would later be called the Conservative Revolution, the German Christians, the Young Reformation Movement, and National Socialism. Barth's view of and interaction with the Jews is also analyzed along with other issues, such as radical thinking, anti-liberalism, alterity, anti- or trans-historicism, Expressionism, and New Objectivity. The author also addresses specific questions disputed in the secondary literature, such as Barth's theological development, the place of WWI in his intellectual development, his role in the Dehn Case, his reaction to the rise of fascism in Europe, his relationship to 19thcentury modern liberal Protestantism, his relationship to the Leonhard Ragaz-wing of the Religious Socialists, and his relationship to the Weimar Republic.
although Hans Urs von Balthasar’s earliest publication is from 1925, and although he was a mature forty years old in 1945, there is a deficiency in the secondary literature regarding his early literature, its historical backgrounds and non-theological sources. In this study Balthasar is presented in relation to the various contexts in which he was both drawing upon and responding to from the 1920s to the 1940s. The major contexts analyzed here are the broad central European Germanophone cultural context, the Germanophone Catholic cultural context, the German studies context, the French Catholic renewal literature and theology of the early 20th-century, the popular journal Stimmen der Zeit, Neo-Scholasticism, early 20th-century French Catholic culture, Swiss fascism, National Socialist literature, the Renouveau Catholique, the George-Kreis and many others. Balthasar’s early anti-Semitism and some of the problematic aspects of his early work are also addressed in this study. His understanding of the modern age, his relationships with some key intellectual figures and his later reflections on his early work are also introduced. The book offers a comprehensive study of Balthasar’s early intellectual development.
