Nuremburg Trials Protocols by David Shay (CC BY 3.0 DEED) Prologue Rabbi Dr. Emanuel Rackman (b. 1910, d. 2008) was a unique figure in the Orthodox Jewish community. Besides his well-known intellectual brilliance, he was involved with nearly every important Orthodox organization in America for many decades and then moved to Israel to be the…
Oklahoma City’s Skyline by Oklahoma City Convention and Visitors Bureau (CC BY-SA 3.0). The school choice movement spurred on by Milton Friedman’s highly influential 1955 essay, The Role of Government in Education, affords parents greater opportunities to select where their children can be educated. A key component in this movement are charter schools. Charter schools…
Photo by Andrew Tan on Pixabay (CCO). Debates over affirmative action in higher education have raged for years. Supporters of the programs argue that they promote inclusion, while opponents believe that they are nothing more than reverse discrimination. A recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has banned the use of racial preferences in admissions…
Street sign of Max Weber Square. Cholo Alemen on Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA-3.0) Editorial Note: Page numbers in the text refer to the prior publication linked in the text. In an earlier article in this publication on Robert A. Yelle’s book, Sovereignty and the Sacred, I claimed that Yelle fails to take seriously the distressing theoretical and…
Photo of Ukrainian Flag from Pixabay Religious freedom is ominously shrinking in Ukraine. Unlike Moscow, post-Soviet Kiev used to tolerate the various rival Eastern Orthodox Christian jurisdictions. But Kiev is now blatantly persecuting the UOC (Ukrainian Orthodox Church), favoring the OCU (Orthodox Church of Ukraine). Ukraine’s parliament has passed the first reading of a bill…
Picture of a dome at the Cathedral of Peter and Paul, Petergof, Russia. Taken by Author. Expressing the position of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) regarding the conflict in Ukraine, the media predominantly concentrates on the stance articulated by Patriarch Kirill, a longtime ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin. In his capacity as the head…
Panorama of “Religious Liberty” Statue in Philadelphia by Andrey Bobrovsky (CC BY 3.0 Deed). Since its founding, the United States has had a unique national commitment to religious liberty, most notably exemplified in the First Amendment to the Constitution. Ratified in 1791, it serves as the primary basis for the nation’s legal recognition of religious…
View of the Lys river in the centre of Ghent, Belgium by Joaquim Alves Gaspar (CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed). In July 2023, the government of the Netherlands abruptly collapsed amid a heated disagreement over migration. At the core of this debate was an attempt to limit the right of child refugees from war zones to…
Home of Carl Schmitt in Plettenberg-Pasel (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0). Editorial Note: Page numbers in the text refer to the prior publication linked in the text. There is, apparently, a new surge of interest among scholars of religion and law in the theory of sovereignty proposed by the twentieth-century German legal philosopher, Carl Schmitt…
Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C by King of Hearts (CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed). As the world celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the December 10, 2023 International Human Rights Day, a group of scholars have submitted the following reflections on religious freedom and comparative law. The twentieth century…