John Witte
Biographic Data
| ID | 3835604 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Witte |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Witte |
| SIGNATURE | WITTE J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Emory University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 6 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Human Rights and Orthodox Christianity: Learning from Our Differences
Orthodox Christians have long been wary about the modern regime of human rights, given its common association with liberalism, libertinism, and individualism; its insistence on separating church and state, if not secularizing society altogether; its disastrous effects on post-Soviet Russia; and its growing attacks on majority and minority religions alike. His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, however, has recently e…
Sacrificing Religious Freedom in Europe: Why the Pan-European Courts Need Douglas Laycock
In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the U.S. Supreme Court held that neutral and generally applicable laws would no longer receive strict scrutiny review. Many feared that Smith had severely truncated the protection of the First Amendment Free Exercise Clause. Three years later, however, in a controversial Santerian slaughtering case, Douglas Laycock persuaded a unanimous Supreme Court in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah t…
Law & Religion in a Secular Age By Rafael Domingo
In Memoriam: Johan D. Van der Vyver (1934–2023)
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The Oxford Handbook of Christianity and Law
This volume tells the story of the interaction between Christianity and law—historically and today, in the traditional heartlands of Christianity and around the globe. Sixty new chapters by leading scholars provide authoritative but accessible accounts of foundational Christian teachings on law and legal thought over the past two millennia as well as the current interaction and contestation of law and Christianity on all continents. Several chapt…
Religion in Schools: Learning Lessons from Wales. By Russell Sandberg
Journal Article Religion in Schools: Learning Lessons from Wales. By Russell Sandberg Get access Religion in Schools: Learning Lessons from Wales. By Russell Sandberg. London: Anthem Press, 2022. 134 pp. $24.95 eBook. John Witte John Witte Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Church and State, Volume 65, Issue 4, Winter 2023, Pages …
Faith, Freedom, and Family: New Studies in Law and Religion
Faith, freedom, and family together form the bedrock of a good life and a just society. But this foundation has suffered seismic shocks from vibrant religious pluralism, profound political changes, and new conceptions of marriage. This volume retrieves the major legal and theological teachings that have shaped these institutions and suggests ways to strengthen and integrate them anew. Part I highlights the work of several scholars of law and reli…
Great Christian Jurists in German History
This volume is part of a 50-volume series on »Great Christian Jurists,« presenting the interaction of law and Christianity through the biographies of 1000 legal figures of the past two millennia. This volume presents 26 major German legal scholars from Albert the Great and Eike von Repgow in the Middle Ages to Konrad Adenauer and Stephan Kuttner in the twentieth century. Each chapter analyzes the influence of Christianity on their lives and legal…
The Impact of Religion: On Character Formation, Ethical Education, and the Communication of Values in Late Modern Pluralistic Societies
Late modern pluralistic societies are characterised by an infinitely multi-coloured individuality of their citizens and a wealth of associations and groups. This »plurality«, which is difficult to grasp, is welcomed by many people as a source of freedom, but feared by some people inside and many observers outside as a social chaos. However, this plurality is countered by a limited number of so-called »social systems«, which are to a large extent …
A Tribute to Frank S. Alexander
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Christianity and Democracy in Global Context
In the past, Christianity has had both positive and negative influences on democracy. Christian churches have served as benevolent agents of welfare and catalysts of political reform. But they have also served as belligerent allies of repression and censors of human rights. Christian theology has helped to cultivate democratic ideas of equality, liberty, and responsibility. But it has also helped to perpetuate repressive ideas of statism, elitism…
The Marital Covenant in John Calvin’s Geneva
This article, prepared for a symposium issue on the impact of the Protestant Reformation, analyzes John Calvin’s reformation of Western family law in sixteenth-century Geneva. Calvin depicted marriage as a sacred and presumptively enduring union, but also a conditional and breakable covenant with distinct and discernible goods and goals that couples and communities alike had to support. This covenantal framework gave Calvin new rationales for old…
Law, Religion, and Human Rights in David Little's Thought
David Little has pioneered the study of religion, human rights, and religious freedom during fifty-five years of distinguished scholarly work at Yale, Harvard, Virginia, Georgetown, and the United States Institute of Peace. Starting with his first major book, Religion, Order, and Law: A Study in Pre-Revolutionary England , he has traced cardinal principles like freedom of conscience and free exercise of religion from their earliest formulations i…
Christianity and Family Law: An Introduction
The Western tradition has always cherished the family as an essential foundation of a just and orderly society, and thus accorded it special legal and religious protection. Christianity embraced this teaching from the start, and many of the basics of Western family law were shaped by the Christian theologies of nature, sacrament, and covenant. This volume introduces readers to the enduring and evolving Christian norms and teachings on betrothals …
Christianity and Freedom
In Volume 1 of Christianity and Freedom, leading historians uncover the unappreciated role of Christianity in the development of basic human rights and freedoms from antiquity through today. These include radical notions of dignity and equality, religious freedom, liberty of conscience, limited government, consent of the governed, economic liberty, autonomous civil society, and church-state separation, as well as more recent advances in democracy…
Response to My Critics
It is a relief to survive the strict scrutiny of these five great scholars of history, constitutional law, family law, religious law, and religious liberty. These are the five main disciplines, alo
The Western Case for Monogamy Over Polygamy
For more than 2,500 years, the Western tradition has embraced monogamous marriage as an essential institution for the flourishing of men and women, parents and children, society and the state. At the same time, polygamy has been considered a serious crime that harms wives and children, correlates with sundry other crimes and abuses, and threatens good citizenship and political stability. The West has thus long punished all manner of plural marria…
Christianity and Human Rights: Past Contributions and Future Challenges
This article analyzes the historical sources and forms of human rights in Western legal and Christian traditions, and it identifies key questions about the intersections of Christianity and human rights in modern contexts. The authors identify nine distinctions between different conceptions of rights correlating with at least four types of jural relationships, and they argue that leading historical accounts of human rights attribute “subjective” …
The western case for monogamy over polygamy
"For more than 2,500 years, the Western tradition has embraced monogamous marriage as an essential institution for the flourishing of men and women, parents and children, society and the state. At the same time, polygamy has been considered a serious crime that harms wives and children, correlates with sundry other crimes and abuses, and threatens good citizenship and political stability. The West has thus long punished all manner of plural marri…
A New Magna Carta for the Early Modern Common Law: An 800th Anniversary Essay
This article examines the influence of the Magna Carta on the development of rights and liberties in the Anglo-American common law tradition, especially in the seventeenth century. Originally issued by King John of England in 1215, the Magna Carta set forth numerous prototypical rights and liberties that helped to shape subsequent legal developments in England, America, and the broader Commonwealth. The Magna Carta served as an inspiration for se…
Law, Religion, and Reason in a Constitutional Democracy: Goodman v. Rawls
This article responds to Professor Lenn Goodman's book, Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere11 Goodman L. Religious pluralism and values in the public sphere (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press; 2014). in three parts: Part I evaluates Goodman's argument that John Rawls excludes “comprehensive” religious and moral arguments from public discourse; Part II describes, in light of Professor Goodman's prediction that significant di…
Sex and Marriage in the Protestant Tradition, 1500–1900
The chapter analyses the mainline Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican models of sex, marriage, and family and their gradual liberalization by Enlightenment liberalism. The theological differences between these models can be traced to their grounding in Lutheran two kingdoms doctrines, Calvinist covenantal theology, Anglican commonwealth theory, and Enlightenment contractarian logic. Lutherans consigned primary marital jurisdiction to the territoria…
A Prequel to Law and Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript of Harold J. Berman Comes to Light
The late Harold Berman was a pioneering scholar of Soviet law, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion; he is best known today for his monumental Law and Revolution series on the Western legal tradition. Berman wrote a short book, Law and Language , in the early 1960s, but it was not published until 2013. In this early text, he adumbrated many of the main themes of his later work, including Law and Revolution. He also anticipated a goo…
Church, State and Marriage: Four Early Modern Protestant Models
This Article analyzes four early modern Protestant models of marriage that emerged in place of the medieval Catholic sacramental model. These are the Lutheran social model of marriage in Germany and Scandinavia, the Calvinist covenantal model in Geneva, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland, the Anglican commonwealth model in England and its colonies, and the budding separationist model of marriage developed by John Locke. Theologically, the diff…
Religion and Human Rights: An Introduction
The relationship between religion and human rights is both complex and inextricable. While most of the world's religions have supported violence, repression, and prejudice, each has also played a crucial role in the modern struggle for universal human rights. Most importantly, religions provide the essential sources and scales of dignity and responsibility, shame and respect, restraint and regret, restitution and reconciliation that a human right…
Changes in sexually transmitted disease rates after HIV testing and posttest counseling, Miami, 1988 to 1989
OBJECTIVES. The effects of posttest counseling on acquisition of sexually transmitted diseases in patients at a large urban sexually transmitted disease clinic were studied. METHODS. Comparisons were made of the percentage of patients who had a positive gonorrhea culture (or any sexually transmitted disease) in the 6 months before and after human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) counseling and testing. RESULTS. For 331 patients counseled about a posi…
The performance of charter schools in Wisconsin
How have charter schools in Wisconsin performed relative to traditional public schools? Two analyses provide an answer: First, a comparison of achievement test scores for students in Milwaukee charter and traditional schools from 1998 to 2002 for grades 3 through 10 finds a relative advantage for charter school students using fixed effects and first difference specifications. Second, a methodological approach new to the debate over performance in…
Syphilis and gonorrhea in Miami: Similar clustering, different trends
During the second half of the 1980s, Miami had a syphilis epidemic while gonorrhea rates decreased. To determine whether the direction of these trends truly differed within all population subgroups or whether they resulted from aggregating groups within which trends were similar, records from four sexually transmitted disease clinics from 1986 to 1990 and census data from 1990 were used to compare race-, sex-, age-, and zip code-specific groups. …
The Oxford Handbook of Christianity and Law
This volume tells the story of the interaction between Christianity and law—historically and today, in the traditional heartlands of Christianity and around the globe. Sixty new chapters by leading scholars provide authoritative but accessible accounts of foundational Christian teachings on law and legal thought over the past two millennia as well as the current interaction and contestation of law and Christianity on all continents. Several chapt…
Rights, Resistance, and Revolution in the Western Tradition: Early Protestant Foundations
Over the past three decades, a veritable cottage industry of important new scholarship has emerged dedicated to the history of rights talk in the Western tradition prior to the Enlightenment.1 We now know a great deal more about classical Roman understandings of rights ( iura ), liberties ( libertates ), capacities ( facultates ), powers ( potestates ), and related concepts, and their elaboration by medieval and early modern civilians. We can now…
Recent advances in public health: Immunization
Recent advances in public health: immunization. J J WitteCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.64.10.939 Published Online: October 07, 2011
Soul Wars: New Battles, New Norms
One of the most difficult concepts pertaining to religious freedom is proselytism. Because globalization causes more interaction between religious groups, religious beliefs must now compete in the open marketplace of ideas. Increased religious competition often causes resentment and ecumenism gives way to religious balkanization and conflict. The state struggles to balance one community's right to exercise and expand its faith against another's r…
Ishmael's Bane: The Sin and Crime of Illegitimacy Reconsidered
This essay offers a critical rereading of the western theological and legal doctrine of illegitimacy or bastardy. The author traces the western stigma against bastards to the Bible, particularly to the story of Ishamel, the illegitimate son of Abraham and Hagar. He then shows the systematic discrimination against bastards in classic canon law and in early modern Anglo-American common law, and the slow amelioration of their plight in legal reforms…
Recent advances in public health: Immunization
Recent advances in public health: immunization. J J WitteCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.64.10.939 Published Online: October 07, 2011
The Reformation of Marriage Law in Martin Luther's Germany: Its Significance Then and Now
The Three Uses of the Law: A Protestant Source of the Purposes of Criminal Punishment
In this article, we focus on the interaction of Anglo-American criminal law and Protestant theological doctrine. We argue (1) that the sixteenth-century Protestant theological doctrine of the uses of moral law provided a critical analogue, if not antecedent to the classic Anglo-American doctrine of the purposes of criminal law and punishment; and (2) that this theological doctrine provides important signposts to the development of a more integrat…
Changes in sexually transmitted disease rates after HIV testing and posttest counseling, Miami, 1988 to 1989
OBJECTIVES. The effects of posttest counseling on acquisition of sexually transmitted diseases in patients at a large urban sexually transmitted disease clinic were studied. METHODS. Comparisons were made of the percentage of patients who had a positive gonorrhea culture (or any sexually transmitted disease) in the 6 months before and after human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) counseling and testing. RESULTS. For 331 patients counseled about a posi…
A method for identifying persons at high risk for sexually transmitted infections: Opportunity for targeting intervention
OBJECTIVES. The purpose of this study was to develop a method to identify persons at high risk for acquiring new sexually transmitted infections. METHODS. Computerized medical records from sexually transmitted disease clinics in Dade County, Florida, were used to conduct a retrospective cohort study. For all patients who visited in 1987, risk factors were identified for returning to the clinics within a year with a new sexually transmitted infect…
The Civic Seminary: Sources of Modern Public Education in the Lutheran Reformation of Germany
This Article documents how and why the sixteenth-century Lutheran Reformation helped to build the modern public education system of the West. Rejecting the medieval tradition of church education primarily for and by the clergy, Martin Luther argued that all Christians need to be educated to be able to read the Bible on their own, to participate fully in the life of the church, state, and society, and to prepare for their distinct vocations. Luthe…
School Choice: The Struggle for the Soul of American Education . Peter W. Cookson, Jr
Syphilis and gonorrhea in Miami: Similar clustering, different trends
During the second half of the 1980s, Miami had a syphilis epidemic while gonorrhea rates decreased. To determine whether the direction of these trends truly differed within all population subgroups or whether they resulted from aggregating groups within which trends were similar, records from four sexually transmitted disease clinics from 1986 to 1990 and census data from 1990 were used to compare race-, sex-, age-, and zip code-specific groups. …
Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective: Legal Perspectives
People in Political Science
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Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties
Journal Article Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties Witte JohnJr., Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties. Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 2000. 379 pp. $75.00 (hardback), $29.00 (paperback). Winnifred Fallers Sullivan Winnifred Fallers Sullivan University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Journal o…
Religion and Politics in the Early Republic: Jasper Adams and the Church-State Debate
Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective. Vol. 1: Religious Perspectives
Sharing the Book: Religious Perspectives on the Rights and Wrongs of Proselytism
From Culture Wars to Common Ground: Religion and the American Family Debate
Covenant and Commitments: Faith, Family and Economic Life
Ethicist Max Stackhouse challenges libertarian and liberationist arguments that distort the nature and character of love, sexuality, and commitment. He seeks to recover a covenantal ethic, which would recapture the value of strong family relationships. The Family, Culture, and Religion series offers informed and responsible analyses of the state of the American family from a religious perspective and provides practical assistance for the family's…
The Spirit of Classical Canon Law
Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties
The American Experiment in Historical Context The Theology and Politics of the Religion Clauses The Essential Rights and Liberties of Religion Forging the First Amendment Religion Clauses Religion and the States Before 1947 Religion and the Supreme Court, 1815-1947 Modern Free Exercise Law Modern Disestablishment Law Religious Liberty Doctrine in Miniature Toward an Integration of Religious Liberty Concluding Reflections
Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation
The Lutheran Reformation of the early sixteenth century brought about immense and far-reaching change in the structures of both church and state, and in both religious and secular ideas. This book investigates the relationship between the law and religious ideology in Luther's Germany, showing how they developed in response to the momentum of Lutheran teachings and influence. Profound changes in the areas of education, politics and marriage were …
Human Rights in Judaism: Cultural, Religious, and Political Perspectives
Ishmael's Bane: The Sin and Crime of Illegitimacy Reconsidered
This essay offers a critical rereading of the western theological and legal doctrine of illegitimacy or bastardy. The author traces the western stigma against bastards to the Bible, particularly to the story of Ishamel, the illegitimate son of Abraham and Hagar. He then shows the systematic discrimination against bastards in classic canon law and in early modern Anglo-American common law, and the slow amelioration of their plight in legal reforms…
Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother? Child Marriage and Parental Consent in Calvin's Geneva
Parental consent to engagement and marriage was a major reform that the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation introduced to stamp out the late medieval Catholic toleration of clandestine marriages. John Calvin introduced the doctrine of parental consent to Protestant Geneva both in statutes that he drafted and in cases that he adjudicated as a member of the Consistory court. Calvin and his fellow reformers insisted on the priority of the fathe…
The performance of charter schools in Wisconsin
How have charter schools in Wisconsin performed relative to traditional public schools? Two analyses provide an answer: First, a comparison of achievement test scores for students in Milwaukee charter and traditional schools from 1998 to 2002 for grades 3 through 10 finds a relative advantage for charter school students using fixed effects and first difference specifications. Second, a methodological approach new to the debate over performance in…
Soul Wars: New Battles, New Norms
One of the most difficult concepts pertaining to religious freedom is proselytism. Because globalization causes more interaction between religious groups, religious beliefs must now compete in the open marketplace of ideas. Increased religious competition often causes resentment and ecumenism gives way to religious balkanization and conflict. The state struggles to balance one community's right to exercise and expand its faith against another's r…
Rights, Resistance, and Revolution in the Western Tradition: Early Protestant Foundations
Over the past three decades, a veritable cottage industry of important new scholarship has emerged dedicated to the history of rights talk in the Western tradition prior to the Enlightenment.1 We now know a great deal more about classical Roman understandings of rights ( iura ), liberties ( libertates ), capacities ( facultates ), powers ( potestates ), and related concepts, and their elaboration by medieval and early modern civilians. We can now…
Political science (39 works) · Law (34 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Philosophy (25 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (23 works) · Politics (15 works) · Religious studies (11 works) · Human rights (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Environmental ethics (8 works)