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.
The St. Ignatius Cathedral in Shanghai in Shanghai, China (National Cathedral Church of China) by 钉钉 (CC-BY-SA4.0) In September 2018, the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China signed a historic, but largely secret Provisional Agreement on the appointment of Catholic bishops in China. Provisional treaties made by the Holy See are signed, but…
ChatGPT Rendering of AI via Wikimedia Commons (US-PD). In recent decades, philosophers have intensely debated the meaning of personhood and what it means to be human. Some have sought to blur the lines between human beings and non-human animals, while others challenge the distinction between humans and machines. The rise of “enhanced humans” and AI…
Last page of the Union of Utrecht, 1579, Nationaal Archief (US-PD) This article is part of a forthcoming series on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning volume on The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn pointed to five major sources that helped drive the American revolutionaries…
“Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome” by Giovanni Paolo Pannini, 1758 (US-PD-Art). This article is part of a forthcoming series on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The issue of the cultural foundations of the Founding Fathers and of American constitutionalism in general is, perhaps, more apparent than real and, in any case,…
St. Mary’s Academy, Image Courtesy of SNJM Archives. This week, the first of the state of Oregon’s public schools will open their doors to a new school year. Teachers will reenter their classrooms to unfamiliar students, filled with the emotions of the fall’s start. In the next few weeks, the state’s private schools will join…
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…