Reverend Mark Hopkins, the former president of Williams College, urged the federal government to pass laws protecting the observance of the Christian Sabbath (Sunday). Hopkins argued that the Fourth Commandment ("Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy") should be embedded in American law in much the same way that commandments prohibiting murder, stealing, and "bearing false witness" were staples of the legal system. If that was not enough to convince naysayers, Hopkins emphasized Jesus' words in Mark 2:27—"The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath"—to argue that the human body was created by God in such a way that it required a day of rest. "Men and animals," Hopkins wrote, "will have a better health and live longer; will do more work, and do it better, if they rest one day in seven, than if they work continuously." Since rest was a human right endowed by God, how could a nation with Christian roots not endorse the Sabbath?We embrace what we like from our past and ignore the very unconstitutional thoughts of Williams's celebrated President. I am left wondering, to an extent, about how "correct" my current constitutional thoughts will seem in 50 years. Perhaps anyone who thinks the government should regulate marriage will be ostracized?
Supreme Court to hear case about emergency abortion care
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The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in another major abortion access
case as it grapples with the aftermath of reversing Roe v. Wade. Follow
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17 minutes ago
I think, though, that we can justly separate what we like about a person from what we don't like; humans never exist in a black-and-white world. Instead, they operate within the historical frameworks of their time. That doesn't excuse the evils they may commit, but it allows us to appreciate and understand the context of their actions and thoughts. Presentism is problematic because it denies historical actors the agency within their own historical frameworks that they undoubtedly possessed, instead judging them by our political standards of today.
ReplyDeleteAlthough we definitely romanticize that which we like about the past. And that too can be problematic; we lose much of the sheer complexity of history, the ability to appreciate a world in which Thomas Jefferson can own hundreds of slaves, can father extramarital slave children, and yet can write the beautifully expressive language against slavery that ultimately never quite made it into our Declaration of Independence. Instead, we mostly get this one- or two-dimensional portrait of a man that does the historical work we want him to do--yet again problematic presentism.