Identifying proper boundaries for religious liberty in American public life continues to be a hot-button issue. Stories of friction between religious groups and other members of society have pervaded the headlines, and such conflicts aren’t going away anytime soon. Over the last few years, the Supreme Court has ruled on a number of cases in…
Religious traditions that are not historically rooted in the Christo-European culture face particular legal and political challenges that are unprecedented in the post-World War II-era. Despite the establishment of supranational bodies responsible for the promotion of human rights standards and the advancement of civil liberties, liberal democracies have failed to introduce and maintain a robust…
A number of states, such as Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee, have recently passed laws targeting transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) girls and young women, barring them from participating in girls’ and women’s competitive sports. The state of Arkansas also recently passed a law (Arkansas HB1570) criminalizing gender-affirming medical care to (TGNC) youth, such as the…
Following the murder of eight people in Atlanta, six of them Asian-American women, news broke that the killer Robert Aaron Long had been expelled from his church. At first, speculation about the killer’s motives had focused on the Asian-American identity of the majority of his victims. Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, members of…
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that it was last term, rather than this term, when the U.S. Supreme Court heard Fulton v. Philadelphia, the case involving religious foster-care agencies who refused to place children with same-sex parents. Imagine, too, that the justices accepted the Fulton plaintiffs’ invitation to overrule Employment Division v.…
“Even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten.” — Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, 141 S. Ct. 63, 68 (2020) One can only imagine what James Madison, lead advocate of the First Amendment Religion Clauses, or other American Founders, would say if they could witness the status of religion freedom in the…
Do Muslims pray even when they are not required to by “shari’a”? Or is being a Muslim a matter of performing exclusively compulsory religious acts, punctually and “to a T,” lest one get punished by the dreaded, bearded, and scowling “shari’a”? For reasons that we need not review here, outside of Muslim countries, we read…
The study of religion has a long history of service to Western imperial ambitions. Recent decades have seen religious scholars wrestle with the implications of this colonial legacy for the future of the field. This essay, divided into two parts, will explore the connections between religion and colonialism. First, I will give a brief history…
US Center Chapel, located at the Geographic Center of the Lower 48 States in Lebanon, Kansas / Flickr Jimmy Emerson, DVM CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 During the Super Bowl, Jeep ran an ad that featured singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen in a chapel. Not at a political rally, not at a demonstration, but in a tiny chapel in…
No one has heard a peep from this chorister in nearly a year. Trained in law, religion, and the law of religious freedom, there was a time early in the pandemic when I wondered whether the social distancing mandates being adopted by state and, in some cases, municipal governments would be experienced by some as…