Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash. I. According to their nature, ideas, as purely abstract concepts, are radical intrusions into material existence. They are that which drive us to re-examine and potentially upend our lives on the basis of wholly immaterial considerations. Though there may be both conscious and unconscious gains made for a person’s…
MRI Imaging by Raspbery Vibe. (CC0). If someone is an addict, does that mean he or she is immune from moral responsibility? From substance addiction to addictive behaviors, many addicts blame others, attributing their addiction problem to a source outside their control. A recent example is the case of Robert Aaron Long, the gunman responsible…
Photo by Prisilla Du Preez on Unsplash. Identifying proper boundaries for religious liberty in American public life continues to be a hot-button issue. Stories of friction between religious groups and other members of society have pervaded the headlines, and such conflicts aren’t going away anytime soon. Over the last few years, the Supreme Court has…
Photo by David Monje on Unsplash. Religious traditions that are not historically rooted in the Christo-European culture face particular legal and political challenges that are unprecedented in the post-World War II-era. Despite the establishment of supranational bodies responsible for the promotion of human rights standards and the advancement of civil liberties, liberal democracies have failed…
Photo by Margaux Bellott on Unsplash. A number of states, such as Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee, have recently passed laws targeting transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) girls and young women, barring them from participating in girls’ and women’s competitive sports. The state of Arkansas also recently passed a law (Arkansas HB1570) criminalizing gender-affirming medical care…
Photo by Shifaaz shamoon on Unsplash. This article is part of our “Law and Religion Under Pressure: A One-Year Pandemic Retrospective” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Following the murder of eight people in Atlanta, six of them Asian-American women, news broke that the killer Robert Aaron Long had…
Photo by Silvestri Matteo on Unsplash. This article is part of our “Law and Religion Under Pressure: A One-Year Pandemic Retrospective” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that it was last term, rather than this term, when the U.S. Supreme Court…
Image by Romy from Pixabay. This article is part of our “Law and Religion Under Pressure: A One-Year Pandemic Retrospective” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. “Even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten.” — Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, 141 S. Ct.…
Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash. Do Muslims pray even when they are not required to by “shari’a”? Or is being a Muslim a matter of performing exclusively compulsory religious acts, punctually and “to a T,” lest one get punished by the dreaded, bearded, and scowling “shari’a”? For reasons that we need not review here,…
Photo by rolf neumann on Unsplash. The study of religion has a long history of service to Western imperial ambitions. Recent decades have seen religious scholars wrestle with the implications of this colonial legacy for the future of the field. This essay, divided into two parts, will explore the connections between religion and colonialism. First,…