The Interactions podcast, a podcast about the interactions between law and religion, is produced by the CSLR and distributed by Canopy Forum. New episodes now available.
Canopy Forum will be hosting a webinar on law, religion, and immigration on October 28th. Read our call for submissions and how to participate.
Our latest series include essays from the Australian Journal of Law and Religion, and topics ranging from Masking Religious Violations, Transnational Christian Nationalism, to IVF and ART, and more by scholars around the globe.
A Church Interior by Pieter Neefs the Elder (PD-US). I wrote this essay following the mass shooting at Minneapolis’s Annunciation Catholic School. Demonization of entire groups has only intensified since then—toward Blacks in the wake of the public-transit stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, and toward transgender people and leftists after the Charlie Kirk assassination. I believe…
Blue Mosque, Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan by Françoise Foliot (CC BY-SA 4.0). The right of women to participate in communal prayers is explicitly affirmed and encouraged within Islamic sources, particularly the Prophetic traditions. Historically, women actively participated in congregational prayers alongside the Prophet and his Companions, praying collectively under the same roof. Across the Sunni legal schools,…
Locke: The Slave Trader and the British Slave TradeGeorge Walters-Sleyon This essay is an adapted excerpt from the fourth chapter of George Walters-Sleyon’s book, The Rush for Black Diamonds, Volume One: From John Locke to Thomas Jefferson—The Transatlantic Slave Trade to Chattel Slavery in the UK and the US (Cascade Books, 2024). Used by permission of Wipf…
An Empowering Civic Education through Law LearningAriel Liberman The following is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Ariel Liberman’s new book, Law as Civic Education: Reimagining a K-12 Curriculum for Democratic Citizenship and Individual Character (Copyright 2025 by Imprint). Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group. At first blush, the notion of teaching something…
Church of St. John at Kaneo, Ohrid by Kallerna (CC BY-SA 4.0). The perception that Christianity is under attack has long animated American political culture. Conservative American Christians even claim that Christians are the most persecuted religious group worldwide. Vice President J.D. Vance recently tweeted that, “All over the world, Christians are the most persecuted…
This image is an AI-generated depiction based on descriptions of similar events. The recent renewed public outrage over a video showing the brutal execution of Bano Bibi and her alleged partner, Ehsan Ullah, has once again brought the issue of honor killings to the forefront. These murders, which were ordered in May 2025 by a…
Italian Chamber of Deputies in Palazzo Montecitorio, Rome, Italy by Palazzo del Quirinale (PD-ItalyGov) Forty years after the Villa Madama Agreement, which redefined relations between the Italian Republic and the Catholic Church, and the first agreement with the Waldensian Table, it has become necessary to reconsider the instruments governing the dialogue between the State and…
Reading the Bible by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (US-PD). During the Protestant Reformation, the Herborn Academy was a Calvinist Reformed institution located in German territory, which was therefore Lutheran. It operated from 1584 until 1817. Herborn was the cradle of covenant theology, also known as federal theology. Due to its adherence to Calvinism, it was never officially…
Courtroom Bench Gavel by Patrick Feller (CC BY 2.0). A new memorandum from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), issued July 28, 2025, has put the spotlight on religious expression in federal workplaces. OPM Director Scott Kupor’s guidance explicitly affirms that federal employees “may seek to ‘persuade others of the correctness of their own…
Monks in Majestic Bhaga Valley, India by Vyacheslav Argenberg © (CC BY 4.0). Breonna Taylor was an emergency room technician in Louisville, Kentucky. Her coworkers said she was calm under pressure, good with patients. She was twenty-six. On the night of March 12, 2020, after her shift, she fell asleep in her apartment watching a…