American Splendor by Harvey Pekar
Religion, Public Life, and the American Polity brings together ten essays exploring the continuing vitality of religion in American public life. Featuring contributions by leading political scientists and legal scholars, the volume locates current debates within the broader contexts of history, society, and constitutional theory. The book opens with an investigation of the contending positions on church-state relations in current American thought. The next section offers fresh reappraisals of the thinking of the Founders, especially the contributions of Madison and Jefferson; some important challenges to conventional wisdom - including the common view of Jefferson as a strict separationist - emerge from this section. The essays in the third section examine the relationship between religion and the law, showing that the courts' decisions in First Amendment cases reveal a tendency toward incoherence and majoritarian bias. In the final section, the discussion extends to the more indirect and subtle ways in which religion and American liberal culture influence each other - for better and for worse. Taken together, these essays shed a much-needed light on how the state can accommodate the multiplicity of faiths held by its citizens, especially as those faiths take on public expression beyond the institutional church.
Harvey Pekar, a native of Cleveland, was best known for his autobiographical slice-of-life comic book series American Splendor, a first-person account of his downtrodden life. He was also a jazz critic whose reviews were published in the Boston Herald, the Austin Chronicle, and Jazz Times. He did freelance work for the critically acclaimed radio station WKSU and appeared many times on Late Night with David Letterman.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780345468307 |
| ISBN 10 | 0345468309 |
| Title | American Splendor |
| Author | Harvey Pekar |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Random House USA Inc |
| Year published | 2003-07-29 |
| Number of pages | 320 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |