Tag: Penn

Principle Above Politics: Conscience Is Forever

  

Bill Clinton was acquitted of impeachment charges in February 1999. The next month, I was in Washington, DC, attending a conference on constitutional history. It included a session in the chamber of the Supreme Court. I was thrilled to be there. Years before, while earning my doctorate at American University, I had worked in the Supreme Court history office and had even sat in on one of the cases presented to the Court. The thrill, though, disappeared as I listened… Read more »

The Christian Witness to the World

  

The arrival of Pope Francis in America takes me back in my thoughts to an earlier era when a pope who grew up under communism and understood the horrors of socialist practices worked with an American president who was a Protestant (with a Catholic father) and a British prime minister who was tutored all her early years by her Methodist shopkeeper father (and who later said that C. S. Lewis was one of her spiritual mentors) to overthrow the Soviet… Read more »

The Wisdom of William Penn

  

One of the more remarkable men in the history of colonial America has to be William Penn. He was imprisoned in England for his divergent religious views: he was a Quaker. Yet he was granted a huge tract of land in the New World that eventually became the state of Pennsylvania. How does someone go from a member of a persecuted group to a crown-ordained proprietor? It had to do with his father, Admiral William Penn, who was instrumental in… Read more »