Quite hard in fact, as I am slowly finding out. Well, I resolve to say something regularly here in this blog about my general musings on law, history, politics and food in order to stimulate the writing part of my brain. Hopefully, this will translate to a thousand words or so every day for the dissertation. I have identified some primary sources I need to dig deeper into. Ergo, a trip to the pertinent library will probably be squeezed in somewhere somehow this coming March. Maybe sometime after my Grand Canyon trip.
If you build it, they will come. Or so says the movie Field of Dreams. Well, this isn’t a movie. Far from it. But one can always dream. My first chapter is going to be about Imposed Constitutions and the Paradox of Religious Liberty. There will be four (or maybe actually just three) constitutions I will look at – Philippines, Japan, Iraq and Afghanistan – each of them correspond to a certain period of American thought and see how those interwoven ideas about religion, law, politics and economics contributed to the emergence of the religious liberty ideal entrenched in these constitutions.
Book(s) I am reading now: This time for a History graduate seminar: Revolutionary Backlash, Women and Politics in Colonial America; the (eternal) Federalist No. 10 and (the magisterial) Gordon Wood, Creation of the American Republic
(Sometimes I wonder why I even wonder how come I never get anything related to the dissertation done).
