Since 2017, the Russian government has attempted to “liquidate” Jehovah’s Witnesses as a religious organization. Branding Jehovah’s Witnesses an “extremist” group akin to a terrorist organization, the Russian government has confiscated the organization’s property. Witnesses have been beaten and jailed. This persecution has been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights, which recently imposed…
“Klan display their robes at the U.S. Capitol: 1925” by Washington Area Spark. Until the Civil Rights movement in the twentieth century, courts interpreted laws as non-discriminatory if they applied equally to all, no matter their impact. Segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, and “Sunday Laws” were all constitutional because they all applied to both white and Black…
Statue of Richard Hooker on Exeter Cathedral Close (Rob Brewer) Richard Hooker (1554-1600) is credited — alongside Thomas Cranmer — as the most important theologian of the English Reformation. The six books of his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity issued a defense of the Elizabethan Church of England against more radical Protestants, calling for further reform. Hooker’s conception…
Nigeria is home to about 250 ethnic groups and culturally diverse communities with different religious affiliations, who speak over 500 different languages. The three dominant ethnic groups are the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo. Nigerians practice Christianity, Islam or an indigenous religion. The country is divided almost equally between the Muslims who live predominantly in the…
Social media forms part of the fabric of 21st century global life. A form of speech, social media allows communication with a potentially vast audience. Unsurprisingly, many people use it to disseminate religious views or ideas. While such proselytising (as part of a broad freedom of religion or belief (FoRB)) typically causes little concern, some…
This article is part of our “Kennedy, Carson, and Dobbs: Law and Religion in Pressing Supreme Court Cases” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. The Supreme Court has long recognized the individual human conscience as sacred territory. One of the most famous expressions of this principle comes from Justice…
Vice President Mike Pence meets with Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini of Italy in the Roosevelt Room of the White House Monday June 17, 2019 (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen) As the Covid-19 pandemic seems to be loosening its grip on most regions of the world, at least in its deadliest form,…
One sunny spring day in 2018, I walked into work to find a flier asking its readers “are you tired of feeling bad for being white?” The flier advertised a white supremacist organization called “The Right Stuff” with links to its website. I was surprised and quite concerned to find it there, wondering what it…
This essay is based on the author’s 2021 Minnesota Law Review article “The Nineteenth Amendment as a Generative Tool for Defeating LGBT Religious Exemptions.” Since the U.S. Supreme Court held that marriage equality is the law of the land in 2015, American society has been embroiled in a cultural and legal conflict over the appropriate…
Orthodox Christianity does not have a good reputation on human rights, and indeed Orthodox theologians are deeply divided on human rights, with both strong supporters (such as Stanley Harakas and Archbishop Anastasios Yannoulatos) and strong opponents (Christos Yannaras and Vigen Guroian). Countries of Orthodox tradition such as Russia and Romania have supported violations of human…