Today the news broke that Kyle Rittenhouse had been “acquitted on all charges in the shooting deaths of two men and wounding of a third at a Wisconsin protest against racial injustice last year,” as AP put it. I don’t say this glibly: God help us. Rittenhouse, as we would say growing up, was clearly “looking for…
Pope Francis and President Joe Biden at the Vatican, October 29, 2021. Wikimedia (PD-US). The meeting between President Joe Biden and Pope Francis at the Vatican has left us with memorable photographs and an important moment in history. What remains with me most vividly is the fact of the meeting itself, stripped of ceremony and…
Photo by Brad Dodson on Unsplash. One of the most contentious issues in constitutional law is whether governmental action amounts to “an establishment of religion” in violation of the First Amendment. For the past fifty years, the Court has often, but not always, resolved Establishment Clause cases using the three-pronged test established by Lemon v. Kurtzman. Under the…
Photo by Janko Ferlic on Unsplash. In the summer of 2021, the French National Assembly and Senate passed the so-called “anti-separatism” bill, signed into law by Emanuel Macron, ostensibly to protect laïcité, the French secularist doctrine designed to ensure government neutrality toward religion. The new law increases scrutiny by the government of religious associations, bars…
Photo by Tom Hoppe on Unsplash. In the Fall of 2021, Dr. Philip L. Reynolds – a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Medieval Christianity, and Aquinas Professor of Historical Theology at Candler School of Theology – retired. For almost four decades, Reynolds has…
Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash. This is Part II of Laura Ford’s essay on Social Identity Pietism and the First Amendment Balance. The First Amendment Balance & Social Peace In a careful historical study of American cultural and jurisprudential developments relating to First Amendment religious freedom, Philip Hamburger has persuasively argued that the U.S.…
Photo by Marko Beljan on Unsplash. Over the last three decades of work in the fields of law, religion, and human rights, I have been privileged to work with fellow scholars with a range of views on what is known in the United States as “religious freedom.” In my work with scholars outside the U.S.,…
Photo by Darya Tryfanava on Unsplash. This is the final remnant of the Christianity of their ancestors, the last enduring bit of their inheritance: a social gospel, without the gospel. – Joseph Bottum, An Anxious Age (2014) The law commands and requires us to do certain things. The law is thus directed to our behavior and…
Pope Francis speaking at the Presidential Palace in Baghdad, March 5th, 2021. Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0). Any way you look at it, Pope Francis’ March trip to Iraq had the appearances of being rash and even reckless on the surface. This Mideast country has been ravaged by years of war and rocked more recently like…
Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash. When Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule published his article “Beyond Originalism” in The Atlantic last year, his critics saw it as a moment of revelation. The legal right, after decades of hiding behind the mask of proceduralism, had finally reared its true, authoritarian face. Criticism of the article, however,…