Traditionalist Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and other cultural developments in the United States wonder why they are being forced to bracket their beliefs in order to participate in public life. This situation is not new, says Steven D. Smith: Christians two thousand years ago faced very similar challenges.Picking up poet T. S. Eliot’s World War II–era thesis that the future of the West would be determined by a contest between Christianity and “modern paganism,” Smith ar...

Were America's founding ideals religious or secular?In this timely and well-researched book, law scholar Steven D. Smith makes the case that the United States of America was founded on a providentialist view—the belief that God actively directs the destinies not only of individuals but of nations. Smith shows how this providentialist perspective was pervasively, officially, and unapologetically expressed in essential public documents like the Declaration of Indepen...

Traditionalist Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and other cultural developments in the United States wonder why they are being forced to bracket their beliefs in order to participate in public life. This situation is not new, says Steven D. Smith: Christians two thousand years ago faced very similar challenges.Picking up poet T. S. Eliot's World War II–era thesis that the future of the West would be determined by a contest between Christianity and "modern paganism," Smith ar...

Questions of religious freedom continue to excite passionate public debate. Proposals involving school prayer and the posting of the Ten Commandments in schools and courtrooms perennially spur controversy. But there is also a sense that the prevailing discourse is exhausted, that no one seems to know how to think about religious freedom in a way that moves beyond our stale, counterproductive thinking on this issue.In Getting over Equality, Steven D. Smith, one of the most important ...

This book considers how the modern concept of “conscience” turns the historic commitment on its head, in a way that underlies the decadence of modern society.Steven D. Smith’s books are always anticipated with great interest by scholars, jurists, and citizens who see his work on foundational questions surrounding law and religion as shaping the debate in profound ways. Now, in The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity, Smith takes as his s...

Familiar accounts of religious freedom in the United States often tell a story of visionary founders who broke from the centuries-old patterns of Christendom to establish a political arrangement committed to secular and religiously neutral government. These novel commitments were supposedly embodied in the religion clauses of the First Amendment. But this story is largely a fairytale, Steven D. Smith says in this incisive examination of a much-mythologized subject. He makes the case that t...

Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law discusses legal, political, and cultural difficulties that arise from the crisis of authority in the modern world.Is there any connection linking some of the maladies of modern life—“cancel culture,” the climate of mendacity in public and academic life, fierce conflicts over the Constitution, disputes over presidential authority? Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law argues that these diverse problems ar...

Sexy, scintillating, and sometimes scandalous, Greek epigrams from the age of the Emperor Justinian commemorate the survival of the sensual in a world transformed by Christianity. Around 567 CE, the poet and historian Agathias of Myrina published his Cycle, an anthology of epigrams by contemporary poets who wrote about what mattered to elite men in sixth-century Constantinople: harlots and dancing girls, chariot races in the hippodrome, and the luxuries of the Roman bath. But amid this ban...

The Roman sophist Claudius Aelianus, born in Praeneste in the late second century CE, spent his career cultivating a Greek literary persona. Aelian was a highly regarded writer during his own lifetime, and his literary compilations would be influential for a thousand years and more in the Roman world. This book argues that the De natura animalium, a miscellaneous treasury of animal lore and Aelian's greatest work, is a sophisticated literary critique of Severan Rome. Aelian's fascination w...

“A real page turner: a must read for devotees of America’s struggle for Liberty, and for scholars and students of the Military Art of Leadership. Joining history and modern management thought in one volume—illuminating great men in the crucible of crisis and combat: from the strategic to the tactical, from the political to the logistical. Here is a compelling, expert-telling of the Revolutionary War in its critical human dimension: Leadership. Steven Smith and Kevin Dougherty’s col...

Is the United States Constitution the embodiment of certain principles? The four authors of this book for a variety of reasons, and with somewhat different emphases, believe the answer is no. Those who authored the Constitution no doubt all believed in liberty, equality, and, with caveats, republican self-government values, or if you will, principles. But they had different conceptions of those principles and what those principles entailed for constituting a government. Although the Consti...

A study of how Francis Marion delivered the leadership and strategy to defeat the British in the South Carolina Lowcountry campaigns."Dougherty and Smith have produced an excellent study of Marion as a commander for history enthusiasts, their work deserves to garner equal attention from those in the business community, business schools, public sector management, and the military."— Journal of the American Revolution