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Publication Date

5-2015

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Professor Jack Sammons has been a widely celebrated teacher, community activist, and distinguished member of the bar. He is also a prolific scholar; perhaps the most prolific scholar the Mercer University School of Law has ever seen. My interest in the body of Jack's work, and hence my focus here, is on what I consider to be the core of his scholarly agenda. I would like to caution that this is my reading of Jack's work as a corpus. I am not entirely sure that Jack would agree with this reading (especially later on when I will make some connections to philosophical positions I am not sure he would necessarily endorse), but I hope this will be perceived as a friendly interpretation. It is certainly meant in that vein.

How would we characterize the corpus of Jack Sammons' work? What kind of scholar is he? Is he a philosopher of religion? Is he a legal theorist? Is he a rhetorician? He is all of these things and more, of course. I will not focus on any of these domains in what follows, however. Instead, I want to make the claim that Jack is at base an ethicist. The one patent theme I see running throughout his work is his the ethical engagement of those embedded in discursive communities: art, law, philosophy, politics, and religion. Jack has written about all these areas, of course, but the common thread-on my reading-is ethics. Virtually all of his work relates to moral reasoning by those operating within one or more of these communities. To borrow a phrase from our mutual friend Linda Berger, Jack's scholarly work is ethics "all the way down."

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