Word: first
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1960
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...unproductive. The wealth of the church was almost entirely in land, as Bertrand Russell points out, and landowners are borrowers rather than lenders. But when Protestantism arose, its support-especially that of Calvinism-came chiefly from the rich middle class, who were lenders rather than borrowers. Accordingly, first Calvin, then other Protestants, and finally the Roman Catholic Church, decided that charging interest under proper restrictions was not a violation of natural law after all-although usury in the sense of exorbitant interest still...
...Murray thinks that the Bill of Rights was far less a "piece of 18th century rationalist theory [than] the product of Christian history." In fact, to some it may seem that Murray at times regards the U.S. as having sprung directly from medieval Christianity-he calls St. Thomas "The First Whig"-with hardly any help from Protestantism or the Enlightenment...
...revolution. In some ways, as Murray puts it, it was not a revolution but a conservation, in that it revived the old freedom of the church. After the colonial phase of religious fanaticism-of setting up state churches and exiling heretics-the early Americans seemed more interested, with the First Amendment, in providing for the freedom rather than the restriction of religion. Catholics knew that a new era had begun when in 1783 the Vatican asked the Continental Congress for permission to establish a U.S. bishopric and was told that, since the matter was purely spiritual...
Congress had no jurisdiction. For the first time in centuries, the Catholic Church was free to work and witness as it saw fit, without special privileges but also without requiring a whole chain of consent from secular government...
Under the freedom and protection of the First Amendment, the Catholic Church has flourished in America. The statistics are impressive: the Catholic population increased from 1,767,841 in 1850 to 40,871,302 in 1960, four times faster than the American population as a whole. But the new situation of Catholics in the U.S. is much more than figures. The church of 50 years ago was largely a church of immigrants, whose concern was to protect and build their minority religion in a Protestant land while showing their fellow Americans what all-out patriots they were. Today, an increasing...