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 hosted a virtual conference regarding the recent court filing of the Internal Revenue Service, which introduced a reinterpretation of the Johnson Amendment. The conference recording and essays will be published here.
Read essays here from our latest webinar on Law, Religion and Immigration. Our other series include essays on topics like Religious Violations, Transnational Christian Nationalism, IVF, and more.
Supreme Court of Pakistan by Guilhem Vellut (CC BY 2.0). The pursuit of justice is often described as a journey toward truth, yet in the context of Pakistan’s legal landscape, that journey is frequently stalled by the heavy burdens of delay, exorbitant costs, and procedural complexity. As the backlog of cases in the superior and…
Photo of Santa Muerte iconography. Photo taken by author. In March 2009, Mexican soldiers razed more than forty public shrines to Santa Muerte in Nuevo Laredo and Tijuana, pulverizing cement and plaster images of La Huesuda under the treads of military bulldozers. The spectacular demolitions—repeated in subsequent years, including in Coahuila under President Enrique Peña…
Why Religious Freedom Matters: Human Rights and Human FlourishingAllen D. Hertzke The following is an excerpt from Allen D. Hertzke’s upcoming book, Why Religious Freedom Matters: Human Rights and Human Flourishing (April 2026). Reprinted here with permission from University of Norte Dame Press. Imagine a social force, a potent “X Factor,” that underpins democracy, bolsters civil…
Reformist Prison Theology: God The Slave, God The Prisoner George Walters-Sleyon This essay is an adapted excerpt from the twelve chapter of George Walters-Sleyon’s book,The Rush for Black Diamonds, Volume Two: Chattel Slavery to Penal Slavery in the US and the UK, 1865 to Post-1970 Realities (Cascade Books, 2025). You can view an excerpt from Volume…
Christianity and the Making of Irish Law: Violence, Virtue and ReasonDavid H. McIlroy (ed.) The following essay introduces the new book, Christianity and the Making of Irish Law, Violence, Virtue, and Reason (Routledge, 2026) by the volume’s editor, David H. McIlroy. The volume is now available for purchase via Routledge. Ireland, “the Isle of Saints”,…
Karakoram Mountains in Pakistan by King Elliot (CC BY-SA 4.0). Since its founding in 1947, Pakistan’s trajectory on women’s rights has been marked by a persistent tension between constitutional promises of equality and periods of legal ambiguity. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan affirms women’s equal status before the law, political participation, and…
New York City Skyline by Janusz Sobolewski (CC BY 2.0). Recently, a number of us on staff at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, ranging from Gen Z to Baby Boomers, had the occasion to take stock of different generations and their perspectives on human rights. Baby Boomers are old enough to…
The West Virginia State Capitol Building by O Palsson (CC BY 2.0). Since 2020, a foster family from West Virginia fostered, and eventually adopted, three girls. In 2023, the girls’ newborn biological brother, M.B., was immediately placed with the foster family. Notably, the foster family are members of an Old Order Amish community. M.B.’s guardian ad…
Carlo III di Borbone visiting the Pope Benedetto XIV in the coffee-house of the Quirinale, Rome (US-PD). As the eighteenth century unfolded, theories aimed at limiting the Roman Catholic Church’s authority, shaped over the previous centuries and influenced by humanist and natural law thinking, started to really take hold in the religious policies of some…
New York, New York by Mario Hains (CC-BY-SA-3.0). In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public, and within five days, the chatbot had acquired one million users. By January 2023, it had become the fastest-growing consumer application in history, with over 100 million monthly active users. The artificial intelligence could write essays, debug code,…