Religious Diversity’s Benefit for DemocracyRobert Wuthnow The following is a modified except from Robert Wuthnow’s Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy (2021), out now from Princeton University Press. Religious advocacy is not the answer to the political challenges confronting the United States at this critical juncture in its history, any more than religious conviction…
Natural Rights and the First Amendment Religion ClausesVincent Phillip Muñoz The following is a modified excerpt from Vincent Phillip Muñoz’s 2022 book Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses, available now from University of Chicago Press. It is now no more that toleration is…
Religion: Relevant to Public Policy but Shielded from Critical Discussion?David A. Hollinger This essay draws on my new book, Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular (Princeton University Press, 2022). The United States today confronts a remarkable paradox: an increasingly secular society is saddled with an increasingly religious politics. In…
Religious Rhetoric in US Right-Wing Politics: Donald Trump, Intergroup Threat, and NationalismChiara Migliori This is an excerpt reprinted with permission from Religious Rhetoric in US Right-Wing Politics: Donald Trump, Intergroup Threat, and Nationalism by Chiara Migliori copyright © 2022 Palgrave Macmillan. Six years have elapsed since Donald Trump became the President elect of the United States. Since…
Effective Altruism and Religion: Synergies, Tensions, Dialogue Dominic Roser and Stefan Riedener The following is a modified version of the introduction to Effective Altruism and Religion: Synergies, Tensions, Dialogue, an open-access volume published and available at the Nomos eLibrary here. 1. Effective Altruism and Religion: An Intriguing Encounter The effective altruism (EA) movement matters. In…
Crimesploitation: Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Televisionby Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance No reality television program about crime and punishment satisfied a hunger to see inmates as redeemable more than the A&E network’s most watched show, Dog the Bounty Hunter. Over the course of 246 episodes that aired from 2004 to 2012, the show…
Celebrating the Scholarship of Michael J. Perry Forward by John Witte, Jr. The following text is an excerpt from the Emory Law Journal’s new Festschrift honoring the scholarly work of Michael J. Perry, who serves as Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory Law School and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law…
Spiritualizing Humanityby Rafael Domingo Oslé & Gonzalo Rodríguez-Fraile Díaz Review by Mónica García-Salmones After the spiritualism of the Middle Ages and the humanism of the Renaissance, rationalism conquered a large number of Europe’s intellectuals. For rationalists, the separation of God and reason was the only guarantee that would enable humans to occupy the place they…
Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the HeartlandKristy Nabhan-Warren An excerpt reprinted with permission from Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland by Kristy Nabhan-Warren copyright © 2021 University of North Carolina Press. When I first began my ethnographic fieldwork for the book that became Meatpacking…
Religion and the American Constitutional Experimentby John Witte, Jr., Joel A. Nichols, and Richard W. Garnett Thomas Jefferson once described America’s new religious freedom guarantees as a “fair” and “novel experiment.” These guarantees, set out in the new state and federal constitutions of 1776 to 1791, defied the millennium-old assumptions inherited from Western Europe that…