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…
A Complicated Choice: Making Space for Grief and Healing in the Pro-Choice MovementKatey Zeh Reprinted with permission from A Complicated Choice: Making Space for Grief and Healing in the Pro-Choice Movement by Katey Zeh copyright © 2022 Broadleaf Books. Uncovering the Culture of Shame, Stigma, and Silence around Abortion As I shared in the preface,…
The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracyby Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry Excerpt from The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy The chaos of the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, was bewildering for many. The riot was also a riot…
Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chancesby Catherine Keller As the fires, floods, and droughts of climate change spiral around a planetary pandemic and intensify political precarity, the ancient symbol of apocalypse keeps finding new life. It pulses — quite apart from continuous fundamentalist deployments — across secular news sources (the “Insect Apocalypse,” “the…
The Blessings of Liberty by John Witte Reviewed by Nicholas Wolterstorff In the course of his long and distinguished career as a legal historian, John Witte, Jr. – who holds a named professorship at Emory University and is director of the university’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion – has authored and co-authored…
Protestant Globalism and Human Rightsby Gene Zubovich Excerpt from Before the Religious Right (University of Pennsylvania Press 2022) Before the rise of the Christian Right, American ecumenical Protestants dominated the political landscape of the United States. Ecumenical Protestants, sometimes called “liberal” or “mainline” Protestants, had regular access to the corridors of power. For example, on…
Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers by Charles McCrary The following material is excerpted and lightly adapted from the introduction and eighth chapter of Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (Chicago 2022). In 2020, legislators in Iowa introduced a bill that would define the phrase “bona fide religious purpose,” from the state’s 1965…