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 organizing an online book symposium regarding Donald L. Drakeman’s upcoming book: The Free Exercise Clause and the Rights of Conscience. Read more about the event here.
Read essays here from our latest webinar on Law, Religion and the Johnson Amendment. Our latest series include essays from Derecho en Sociedad. Other series feature current topics like Immigration, IVF and Christian Nationalism.
Museum of the Bible by Ajay Suresh (CC BY 2.0). People have different ideas of religion, and what makes religion important; people, furthermore, have different ideas of how religion is being oppressed in society. Thus, if one were to, say, form a commission focused on religious liberty–why don’t we call it the Religious Liberty Commission…
Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish CitizenshipLila Berman The following excerpt is from Who Is American?: Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship © 2026 by Lila Corwin Berman. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. In her recently published book Who Is American, Lila Corwin Berman draws on case law, statutes, and…
The Baths of Caracalla in Rome, Italy by Vyacheslav Argenberg (CC BY 4.0). Democratic systems in the contemporary world are often interpreted through the paradigm of secularization, understood as “the emergence of a civilization in which the holders of sacred knowledge no longer possess a monopoly over spiritual production, and in which civil society, emancipated…
The Expulsion of Adam and Eve by After Domenichino, Italian, 1581-1641 (US-PD-Art). The Religious Right was a consortium of mostly evangelical pastors and public activists who saw modern American culture as godless and degenerate, and sought the regulation of many social issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and pornography. Over time however, the Religious Right…
A Free Exercise SurpriseDonald Drakeman The following is an introductory essay to Donald Drakeman’s upcoming book, The Free Exercise Clause and the Rights of Conscience (Harvard University Press, 2026). Drakeman’s work will be available for purchase November 2026. In October, Canopy Forum will host an online book symposium to discuss Drakeman’s work. Read more about…
Aerial of Kigali Convention Center by Emmanuel Kwizera (CC BY-SA 4.0). I approached attending the recent African Consortium for Law and Religion Studies (ACLARS) 2026 Rwanda conference on “Law, Religion and Youth in Africa” with some amount of trepidation. For someone who was studying law and religion, particularly human rights law, at the time of…
The Religious Left: What It Does and How It Can Do BetterRobert Wuthnow Material excerpted from The Religious Left: What It Does and How It Can Do Better by Robert Wuthnow © 2026 by New York University Press. Excerpted with permission from the publisher. Generations of readers have been amply informed about the Religious Right.…
Secular-Christian Social Justice: Climate, Race, and Gender in the 21st CenturyNoa Ben-Asher Material excerpted from Secular-Christian Social Justice: Climate, Race, and Gender in the 21st Century by Noa Ben-Asher © 2026 by New York University Press. Excerpted with permission from the publisher. In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, a distinctive vocabulary has emerged…
Twentieth-Century Redlining Map from the National Archives. In the United States, the narrative of belonging has long been told through access to housing and home. Although the over-regulation of physical residences, presence of racial restrictions, and rejection of land rights have done substantial social and economic damage, these harms also communicate a broader message: “you…
The world premiere of Puccini’s “Suor Angelica”, Metropolitan Opera, New York City, 1918 by White Photo Studio. This paper summarizes and translates into English the chapter Suor Angelica: il suicidio tra teologia e diritto, from the book Puccini in Law: Raccolta di studi in occasione dell’anno pucciniano, edited by Domenico Di Micco, Mario Riberi, and…