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,…
US Center Chapel, located at the Geographic Center of the Lower 48 States in Lebanon, Kansas. From Jimmy Emerson, DVM (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). During the Super Bowl, Jeep ran an ad that featured singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen in a chapel. Not at a political rally, not at a demonstration, but in a tiny chapel in the…
Photo by David Beale on Unsplash. No one has heard a peep from this chorister in nearly a year. Trained in law, religion, and the law of religious freedom, there was a time early in the pandemic when I wondered whether the social distancing mandates being adopted by state and, in some cases, municipal governments…
Photo by Trnava University on Unsplash. Three weeks ago, in the case of South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, the United States Supreme Court stayed the enforcement of California’s occupancy limits on worship services during the pandemic. At some level, there is nothing new here, as the Court had done the same in a…
Image by Hans from Pixabay. The millstone was an integral tool needed to grind grain to make bread and sustain life, and during Biblical times, it was deemed that taking someone’s millstone would be like taking his or her life in pledge. It has been analogized as an instrument of death, a wrath of severe…
Photo by Jorge Alcala on Unsplash. Constitutional Theology is the intersection of theology with constitutional theory. Constitutional Theology recognizes that the constitutional design will reflect society’s beliefs about the nature of humanity or those who rule. At the same time, it acknowledges that, if the constitutional system is to work, a faith’s interactions with the…
Photo by Min An. A selection of our most popular essays over the past year. You can browse all of our content here! “Decisions You Have Never Made Before: Medical Improvisations in a COVID ICU” by AnonymousApril 16, 2020 “Defiant Congregations in a Pandemic: Public Safety Precedes Religious Rights” by Robin Fretwell Wilson, Brian A. Smith, and…