Western bookstores today are full of small boxes that advertise “Voodoo Revenge Kit” on the front. Their short descriptions encourage anyone who wishes to harm a cheating lover and curse a difficult boss to buy this product. Companies now sell t-shirts, mugs, buttons and key chains with “voodoo dolls,” and bound figures with needles through the heart. Novels, newspapers, and movies have, for over a century, produced representations of human sacrifice, cannibalism and devil worship as rituals central to the practice Obeah, Vodou and Santeria. U.S. televangelist Pat Robertson even remarked that the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010, was God's retribution on Haitians for practicing voodoo and making a “pact with the devil.” Remarkably, few people recognize that these depictions are, to a large degree, linked to slavery and racism, which continue to leave their stain on the past and present laws of American and Caribbean nations.

John Calvin was a student of law before he was a systematic theologian. Although he soon left behind a career in the law, his legal training and orderly mind are evident in his theological writings. While we must be wary of the simplistic and misleading assumption that the Institutes of the Christian Religion reads like a lawyer's treatise, we cannot deny that certain habits of mind dating from his law school days remained with Calvin when he turned to writing a comprehensive exposition of Christian doctrine.

Scholars debate the extent to which particular elements of the Institutes were influenced by Calvin's legal training. Certainly the law of God is a prominent theme throughout the Institutes and especially in Calvin's treatment of the uses of the law and the Decalogue. But Calvin's familiarity with law and the legal system is demonstrated most clearly in a portion of the Institutes that has rarely received scholarly attention. Lodged within his treatment of civil government are several sections where Calvin discusses the attitude Christians should adopt towards the secular legal system. In these sections, and in his later commentary on The First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, Calvin argues that a Christian is not barred from making use of the secular legal system, but warns against resort to litigation unless the Christian can bring the proper inner disposition — love — to the proceeding. Calvin's analysis is rooted in his reading of I Cor. 6:1-11, but also evinces a keen understanding of legal practice and of the psychological and moral costs of litigation.

The destruction of the state, the end of law, the dissolution of society, in which terms we can sum up the political situation today, what are these if not the end of the bourgeoisie as a class capable of guaranteeing order, of creating and keeping alive a state?

Antonio Gramsci, quoted in

J. Joll, Antonio Gramsci 77

(1977).

Oppression, it has been said, breeds resistance and struggle. This is a basic law of human development from time immemorial. Like everybody else, the oppressed and exploited peoples of South Africa yearn for and dream of freedom and justice. Though the intensity of their struggle ebbs and flows, crucial junctures have occurred during which years are the equivalent of decades in terms of the intensity of their resistance. During these critical periods, illusions, which otherwise could linger and foster acquiescence, die. It is this state of affairs that has existed since September 1984 when the South African regime moved its troops into the black townships in an attempt to crush popular resistance to apartheid. Eight months later, having failed to do so, the South African government declared a state of emergency on July 21, 1985. Since then, with the exception of a brief period in early 1986, the country has been under continuous rule by emergency power. The powers themselves have been expanded and made more draconian as the regime attempted not only to suppress resistance but to destroy alternative structures organized by the resistance.

In his July 1985 speech before the American Bar Association House of Delegates, Attorney General Edwin Meese provoked a storm of controversy by suggesting that the Supreme Court's decisions ought to be guided by a “jurisprudence of original intention.” This position of constitutional interpretation, coined “originalism” by the constitutional scholar Paul Brest, was considered by Meese to be “the only reliable guide for judgment.” Accordingly, the Reagan administration would press the High Court to adopt such a hermeneutical approach by selecting nominees who espoused intentionalist views—most notably in the nomination of William Rehnquist and Robert H. Bork to be Chief Justice and Associate Justice respectively.

In a highly unusual public reaction to the Attorney General's remarks, Justice William Brennan, the High Court's senior justice with 31 years of service, commented that Meese's call for a “jurisprudence of original intention” arose from “a debate about how to read a text ….” However, the very question of hermeneutical approach (which even Robert Bork took seriously) struck Mr. Meese as “liberal dogma;” for the Attorney General, reading constitutional provisions is just not problematic. “The meaning of the constitution can be known,” he insists. Justices must simply resist the temptation to superimpose their own agenda upon the nation's founding documents. Advocating the “common sense” approach of epistemological empiricism, Meese seems to suggest a literalist reading of the constitution which effortlessly brings to light its meaning “deposited” by the Framers.

In January of 1897 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, invited an audience at Boston University's School of Law to reconsider the relationship between morality and the common law. Hoping to persuade his listeners that law ought to be kept quite distinct from morality, he explored several areas of the law in which the confusion of law and morality was particularly troublesome. “Nowhere is the confusion between legal and moral ideals more manifest than in the law of contract. …” According to Holmes, “the duty to keep a contract at common law means a prediction that you must pay damages if you do not keep it—and nothing else. …” Furthermore, and as if to anticipate the objections of those who might tend to see moral obligations entailed in contracts, he added: “But such a mode of looking at the matter stinks in the nostrils of those who think it advantageous to get as much ethics into the law as they can.”

In Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir, W. D. Ehrhart suggests the spiritual meaning of his Vietnam tour—the growing gulf between the ideals with which he had enlisted, and his actual combat experience—using the metaphor of a world exploding into pieces. He begins his Vietnam story with an incident that occurred virtually at the end of his tour, when he was nearly killed by a rocket grenade in Hue: “[S]uddenly the world was in pieces. I never heard the explosion. Only the impact registered.” By repeating these same words near the end of his memoir, Ehrhart frames his entire story within this metaphor of a world blown apart, with an impact that registers over the remainder of his life.

While the language with which he tells this story is quite straightforward and even prosaic, while his own lexicon does not include terms like “spiritual,” Ehrhart’s work is a chronicle of contemporary spiritual struggle. In our radically non-religious culture, fundamental spiritual questions and insights are often disguised in “secular” garb, and discovered—particularly by young people—only when worldly conventional wisdom is brought into question.