Announcing: 2021 Summer Associates Program Cohort
We are pleased to announce the cohort of students who will be participating in the Initiative on Faith & Public Life’s 2021 Summer Associates Program.
Pursuing Equal Opportunity: Equality in the 21st Century
Today, equal right to opportunity is a general principle that is far from revolutionary. Since this nation’s founding, brave citizens have fought to realize the country’s goal of preserving equality by ensuring that the rights stated proudly in the Constitution extend to all. Society now operates under the standard of total equality under the law and the license to pursue personal happiness within the bounds of that law.
Beauty Over Utility
In his 2009 documentary “the late Roger Scruton said, “If you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless. . .. Nobody has a use for it because nobody wants to be in it.” A myopic vision toward utility alone seems to be a crime in itself when considering architectural art. The only greater aesthetic crime than this is a utilitarian attitude toward those buildings that must be used, specifically those structures that serve our federal civic institutions.
A Look Back: The Role of Christian Churches in Two Pandemics
Since the outbreak of the coronavirus a year ago, numerous comparisons have been made between this pandemic and the infamous 14th-century bubonic plague. While the black death had a higher mortality rate than coronavirus, and scientific knowledge has made us far better equipped to handle this pandemic, there is still much to be learned from comparing the two and how humanity has responded — especially by exploring religion’s role in each case.
The Right to Revolution: A Closer Look at the Myanmar Military Coup
Throughout its decades of independence, Myanmar, also known as Burma, has battled against repressive military rule, civil war, isolation from global affairs, and widespread poverty. In 2011, the transfer to civilian leadership incited hope for democratic reform. Moreover, the dissolved military junta gave way to a military-installed transitional government and signaled a new era for the Southeast Asian nation.
Reexamining Lochner v. New York
Scholars generally revile the decision in New York v. Lochner (1910) as the product of an activist judiciary; however, the Court employed similar reasoning in cases like Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), a case that guides modern interpretations of substantive due process.
Creative Healthcare Solutions: A Look at Group Prenatal Care
Group care, an innovation that develops an economy of scale, has great potential to advance treatment, especially in primary care and preventive medicine. For patients, implementation has the potential to improve health outcomes as well as increase consumer satisfaction. For healthcare administrators, it has the potential to decrease expenditures.
Polarization and the Political Mind
Organizations, regardless of their religiosity, are making increasingly non-religious moral and ethical arguments in the healthcare arena to combat practices such as abortion, euthanasia, and vaccines. While a lively and important discussion exists concerning the significance of religious freedom, it is pertinent to examine to what extent non-religious conscience claims may be valid, as well as their similarities to and differences from traditional religious conscience claims.
Narrowing the Application of Targeted Sanctions in US Foreign Policy
There is a tendency among policymakers to absolutize situation-specific solutions of historical cases, especially in foreign policy. The temptation to seek the panacea to all our foreign policy woes is great, and mounting domestic pressure further incentivizes the search. The attachment to targeted sanctions is the biggest current example of this problem.
