The Interactions podcast, a podcast about the interactions between law and religion, is produced by the CSLR and distributed by Canopy Forum. 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 the Ten Commandments in schools, Immigration, IVF and Christian Nationalism.
Photo by Asher Koralik, Dan Hadani collection / National Library of Israel / The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection (CC-BY-4.0) The campaign for the next Israeli Knesset is unfolding in two contexts. One is the shadow of conflict and failure: populist judicial reform that brought hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets from January to October of 2023,…
Why So Many Churches Are Turning To Bankruptcy to Reorganizeby Pamela Foohey The following is an introductory essay to Pamela Foohey’s forthcoming book, Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive (University of Chicago Press, 2026). Foohey’s book will be published on September 21, 2026. I never meant to write a book…
Sanctuary in America: How Activists Defied the Government and Defended Immigrants–and Why It Still MattersLloyd D. Barba and Sergio M. González This article includes excerpts from Sanctuary in America: How Activists Defied the Government and Defended Immigrants—And Why It Still Matters by Lloyd D. Barba and Sergio M. González and published by Oxford University Press in…
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, visited the migrant hotspot in Lampedusam, Italy © European Union, 2026 (CC BY 4.0). I would like to read Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s Heaven Has a Wall from the perspective of Mediterranean Europe, and more specifically from Italy. My aim is to ask what happens when the…
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…