St. Mary’s Academy, Image Courtesy of SNJM Archives. This week, the first of the state of Oregon’s public schools will open their doors to a new school year. Teachers will reenter their classrooms to unfamiliar students, filled with the emotions of the fall’s start. In the next few weeks, the state’s private schools will join…
Photo by Asher Koralik, Dan Hadani collection / National Library of Israel / The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection (CC-BY-4.0) The campaign for the next Israeli Knesset is unfolding in two contexts. One is the shadow of conflict and failure: populist judicial reform that brought hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets from January to October of 2023,…
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, visited the migrant hotspot in Lampedusam, Italy © European Union, 2026 (CC BY 4.0). I would like to read Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s Heaven Has a Wall from the perspective of Mediterranean Europe, and more specifically from Italy. My aim is to ask what happens when the…
Museum of the Bible by Ajay Suresh (CC BY 2.0). People have different ideas of religion, and what makes religion important; people, furthermore, have different ideas of how religion is being oppressed in society. Thus, if one were to, say, form a commission focused on religious liberty–why don’t we call it the Religious Liberty Commission…
The Baths of Caracalla in Rome, Italy by Vyacheslav Argenberg (CC BY 4.0). Democratic systems in the contemporary world are often interpreted through the paradigm of secularization, understood as “the emergence of a civilization in which the holders of sacred knowledge no longer possess a monopoly over spiritual production, and in which civil society, emancipated…
The Expulsion of Adam and Eve by After Domenichino, Italian, 1581-1641 (US-PD-Art). The Religious Right was a consortium of mostly evangelical pastors and public activists who saw modern American culture as godless and degenerate, and sought the regulation of many social issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and pornography. Over time however, the Religious Right…
Aerial of Kigali Convention Center by Emmanuel Kwizera (CC BY-SA 4.0). I approached attending the recent African Consortium for Law and Religion Studies (ACLARS) 2026 Rwanda conference on “Law, Religion and Youth in Africa” with some amount of trepidation. For someone who was studying law and religion, particularly human rights law, at the time of…
Twentieth-Century Redlining Map from the National Archives. In the United States, the narrative of belonging has long been told through access to housing and home. Although the over-regulation of physical residences, presence of racial restrictions, and rejection of land rights have done substantial social and economic damage, these harms also communicate a broader message: “you…
The world premiere of Puccini’s “Suor Angelica”, Metropolitan Opera, New York City, 1918 by White Photo Studio. This paper summarizes and translates into English the chapter Suor Angelica: il suicidio tra teologia e diritto, from the book Puccini in Law: Raccolta di studi in occasione dell’anno pucciniano, edited by Domenico Di Micco, Mario Riberi, and…
Constitutional Court of South Korea by Wei-Te Wong (CC BY-SA 2.0) Within five years, three of Asia’s major democracies stopped treating adultery as a crime. South Korea’s Constitutional Court struck it down in February 2015 in 2009 Hun-Ba 17; India followed in 2018, Taiwan in 2020. The pattern is usually filed under a familiar heading—traditional…