The No Religious Test Clause within Article VI, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution is a special text in the field of law and religion, and especially American constitutional law of religion and state. The No Religious Test Clause comes immediately after the Oath or Affirmation Clause requiring that Members of Congress and the…
Cathedral Basilica of St. James in Brooklyn, NY. Source: Jim Henderson / Wikimedia CC0-1.0 The U.S. government designates certain entities as “religious” and enforces different rules on them than on “secular” entities. The two categories find differential treatment in taxes, employment law, and other domains. Americans call this religious freedom. Certain religious organizations have used…
On October 28, 2017, a post appeared on 4chan, an anonymous online message board, alleging Hillary Clinton’s imminent arrest and a subsequent violent national uprising. The poster, whose username was simply the letter “Q,” claimed to be a high-ranking government intelligence officer with access to classified information. Hillary Clinton was not arrested and no subsequent…
When Amy Coney Barrett took the bench November 4 for her third day of oral arguments as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the questions she asked seemed to reveal both her loyalty to her late mentor, Justice Antonin Scalia, and her ongoing interest in abortion rights. The case at hand, Fulton v.…
“I’m just not going to do that. I’m one of these secular homeschoolers. I am not going to join a church to homeschool. I don’t feel comfortable going in that space, which is usually predominantly White, to have my son homeschooled because I am not convinced that the experience will be any different from what…
Introduction This short posting on what the Jewish tradition has to say about Thanksgiving will strike some as surprising — so a word of background might be helpful. Traditional Jews do not celebrate holidays of another religion and have always shied away from even nominally secular holidays that are really about another religion, such as…
When Japan set out to reinvent itself as a modern nation-state in the second half of the 19th century, the new generation of policymakers had to navigate a plethora of foreign concepts as the vocabulary of Western thought was translated into Japanese. While many of these concepts were essentially new philosophical outlooks easily adapted to…
Georgia State Capitol, Atlanta, Georgia. Source: DXR, Wikimedia CC BY-SA 4.0. Currently, all eyes are on Georgia as the state prepares for the runoff elections on January 5th, which will determine which party has control of the Senate. While the battles between Jon Ossoff and David Perdue and Raphael G. Warnock and Kelly Loeffler are…
We the People … in order … to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Because neither the People nor their leaders are angels, the Constitution reflects a Calvinist theological perspective and embodies “obsessive distrust of government — all government…
By the 6th century CE, Christianity was a religion of empire that produced significant codices of imperial law, many of which regulated Jewish practice. Even so, however, Christian polemics against Jewish “legalism” and the perceived burden of the Mosaic-Pharisaic law were commonplace. According to foundational Christian writings, Jesus’s death on the cross and resurrection had…