1896. The year seemed to flash in glaring red lights from the text of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision as I was preparing my next lecture for “Law, Religion, and Social Change,” a course that I was teaching at Harvard Divinity School in the fall of 2005. The course was intended to…
Introduction: Easter with the Easterns? The Christmas season hadn’t even begun when Pope Francis announced a potential change to future Easters: if Eastern Christians unite around a single date for celebrating the holiday, he said, Catholics will adjust their calendars accordingly. This might be mistaken for a minor scheduling matter, but it reflects a key…
“War is the greatest plague that afflicts humanity, it destroys states, it destroys families, and even religion…Any scourge is preferable to it,” observed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Many people in the world have used religion to instigate violent conflicts but these religious roots of conflict are often disregarded. A perennial question that has arisen throughout…
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (1921) “By nonetheless granting relief, the Court goes astray. . . . That renders the Court’s emergency docket not for emergencies at all.”Justice Elena Kagan, Louisiana v. American Rivers (2022) Hitler’s Lawyer About a decade ago, the name of a particular twentieth-century political theorist…
This article is part of our “Clothed in Religion: Law and Religious Attire/Garb” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. The Italian legal system embraces a positive concept of secularism and, in general, demonstrates a positive attitude towards the use of religious symbolism by individuals irrespective of the denomination to…
Religious discourse in multicultural environments has enormous potential to enrich our larger society, especially in matters related to healthcare. It can allow religious communities to ensure that their values are both heard and considered. The introduction of different religious views also provides context and counterpoints in public debate over issues in healthcare. Context within the…
Meatless Fridays were once one of the most visible markers of Catholic identity. For most of the American faithful, they are now observed only in the special liturgical season of Lent. US bishops should impose it as a weekly matter once again. The pastoral hopes that caused them to do otherwise have gone unfulfilled. Meatless…
In May of 2022, the news broke that the US Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) had released an independent report investigating the SBC’s handling of sexual harassment and assault by clergy and other employees of SBC-affiliated churches. The report described an institution that prioritized avoiding liability, was callous and offensive towards victims, resisted reforms, and that…
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. 2021-2022 was a blockbuster Supreme Court term for opponents of church-state separation. In the course of a few short months, the Court stripped women of…
Conflict and Religion Is religion a conflict dimension in today’s Ethiopia? Does it have an impact on the ongoing armed confrontations in the country? Some observers think so, but I disagree. Ethiopia, the second-most populated country in Africa, with approximately 112 million people, is, indeed, torn by violent conflict, notably since November 2020, when an…