US Supreme Court by John L. Marino. 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…
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) (License). As the Covid-19 pandemic seems to be loosening its grip on most regions of the world, at least in its deadliest…
Picture by Boris Stefanik on Unsplash. 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…
Picture by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash. 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…
Orthodox Church in Moscow, Russia by Jacqueline Macou on Pixabay. 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…
The U.S. Constitution was enacted “in Order to form a more perfect Union,” and serves as the founding generation’s clarion call to all succeeding generations: The union isn’t perfect, and we must do our part to make it more so. When it comes to protecting religious freedom for all, that means building on the promise…
Chambers of the US Supreme Court by Carol M. Highsmith. On March 24, for the third time in two years, the Supreme Court sided with a religious inmate on death row who wished to have his spiritual advisor in the room at the time he would be put to death. In the prior cases, the…
Picture by Boris Stromar on Pixabay. In fall 2017, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado. The key question was whether a Christian baker’s First Amendment free speech or religious free exercise rights permitted him to refuse to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple in violation of Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination…
A revealing episode For two years, governmental restrictions on communal worship during the Covid crisis have been a central issue on the law and religion agenda, drawing academic, judicial, and popular attention. Across the globe, governments responded to the pandemic by limiting religious meetings, as well as other public gatherings, in the interest of public…
Image: “Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill on Unity Day 2016-11-04” by The Presidential of Russia Press and Information Office / Wikimedia This article is part of our “Russia/Ukraine: Law and Religion Perspectives” series. If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. I live in Kharkiv, a large city in eastern…