What do you need to know, to know who Bruce Ledewitz is? These days, you cannot read people without knowing where they are coming from and whether you can trust them. I am a long-time—since 1980—law professor at Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. I grew up in an intensely religious atmosphere. I fell in love with Chasidic Orthodox Judaism in grade school, at the New Haven Hebrew Day School. At the same time, I was raised in large part by Gertrude Falls, a Jehovah’s Witness, who read the Watchtower Magazine to me before I could read it for myself. God was very close when I was young. In High School, at Mt. Hermon School (now Northfield Mt. Herman), I was introduced to the social gospel tradition of Dwight Lyman Moody by Judson Stent and my very close friend, Glyn Jones. In college I learned the strengths and weaknesses of Roman Catholicism at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. Yale Law School was the first major secular influence in my life, especially liberal law and economics as taught by Bruce Ackerman. But even there, I fell under the sway of the great civil rights champion and values realist, Charles Black.
Later, I and my family were active members of Dor Hadash, a Reconstructionist congregation, which you may have heard of because of the horrific synagogue shootings in 2018. And, of course, now I teach at a Catholic University. In the early 2000s, after having lost my faith in God, like so many others, I left Judaism. I now live, very happily remarried, a fully secular life. If you want to know about our grandchildren, you’ll have to email me. Looking back, I can see that I have been led to the question, how can we build a flourishing secular civilization? That is proving much harder than we expected. America, the West and, in some respects, the whole world, are living with the fallout from the Death of God proclaimed by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882. We are still mourning that death. Our public rhetoric remains God-centered or God-substituted. We still love to invoke Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. But we are also subject, increasingly, to a simplistic materialism in which everything is forces and matter, including us, and purpose is an illusion. Life is without ultimate meaning. This between is not a good place to be. Our loss of faith in God is the reason for the breakdown of American public life and the personal tragedies of the deaths of despair. But we have not recognized the spiritual nature of our crisis and, therefore, we are not doing anything about it. That is what I am trying to change. My most recent attempt is the book, The Universe Is on Our Side: Restoring Faith in American Public Life. You can also follow my work on the Hallowed Secularism blog, my biweekly column on current happenings in the Pennsylvania Capital-Star and my Twitter feed.
A more conventional bio follows below.
Bruce Ledewitz is a Professor of Law at Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University. He teaches in the areas of state and federal constitutional law and jurisprudence, specializing in law and religion and law and the secular. Ledewitz is co-director of the Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University’s Pennsylvania Constitution website. In 1981, Ledewitz founded the Allegheny County Death Penalty Project, which he directed for 13 years. He co-founded the Western Pennsylvania Coalition Against the Death Penalty and served from 1985-1990 as secretary of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. He is past winner of the Allegheny County Bar Association Pro Bono Service Award, the Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Liberty Award, the Marjorie Matson Civil Liberties Award and the Inaugural Dr. John & Liz Murray Award for Excellence in Faculty Scholarship in 2012 and then again in 2017.
Ledewitz writes and speaks widely on a variety of legal and religious topics, in both legal journals and popular media. He is the author of four books: American Religious Democracy: Coming to Terms with the End of Secular Politics (2007), Hallowed Secularism: Theory, Belief, and Practice (2009), Church, State, and the Crisis in American Secularism (2011), and The Universe Is on Our Side: Restoring Faith in American Public Life. He is a regular op-ed contributor to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star as well as his own blog, Hallowed Secularism. Ledewitz received his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and his J.D. from Yale Law School.
