The Jon Rowe Archives

There is a quotation from the British jurist William Blackstone oft-cited in the "Christian Nation" debates that relates to Christianity's relationship to the common law, and also a notion of "higher law." (This notion of "higher law" has been termed...

I wrote this in 2010. Here is the "quotation" from Livingston, I uncovered:
Hence the motley junction of king-craft and priest-craft (the most fatal engine ever invented by Satan for promoting human wretchedness) usually called the alliance between church and state, but in reality a most atrocious conspiracy between two public...

John Adams' eccentric and nuanced opinions of the Bible/Christian religion are especially prone to "out of context," cherry picking for various sides in the historical political-theological culture wars, wishing to "score points."
For instance, he once wrote to Thomas Jefferson:...

When discussing the Old Testament, Adams ranks which version he prefers; though he notes he thought all translations contained errors. As he wrote to his father on July 7th, 1814:
I promised you that I would answer your questions of my opinions with regard to the Bible, and of my acquaintance with it—I have not studied the Canon of the Old Testament, because to my deep and constant regret I do not understand the languages in which...