The Interactions podcast, a podcast about the interactions between law and religion, is produced by the CSLR and distributed by Canopy Forum. New episodes now available.
Canopy Forum hosted a virtual conference regarding the recent court filing of the Internal Revenue Service, which introduced a reinterpretation of the Johnson Amendment. The conference recording and essays will be published here.
Read essays here from our latest webinar on Law, Religion and Immigration. Our other series include essays on topics like Religious Violations, Transnational Christian Nationalism, IVF, and more.
Weak Thought and the LawThomas Jared Farmer The following is an excerpt from Thomas Jared Farmer’s upcoming book, Gianni Vattimo: Philosopher, Communist, Catholic, Nihilist. Farmer’s book is now available for pre-order. Excerpted with permission: Copyright (c) 2025 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved. Page numbers refer to publications linked in the text.…
St. Andrew’s Catholic Church in Roanoke, Virginia by Joe Ravi (CC-BY-SA 3.0). With the election of Leo XIV, who chose his name in an acknowledgment of Leo XIII, the pope of Rerum Novarum, Catholic Social Teaching (CST) might be back in an even stronger way. Hence, there were great expectations for the apostolic exhortation, Dilexi…
Shah Faisal Mosque, Islamabad, Pakistan via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). The Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s legal system presents a distinctive pluralistic model, intertwining secular common law inherited from British colonial rule with Islamic jurisprudence, or fiqh, under a single constitutional framework. The 1973 Constitution declares Islam as the state religion and mandates that all…
AI image made by the author to demonstrate Aldous Huxley‘s writing. “Mysticism” – the experience of union with ultimate reality – is often described as a summum bonum of human religious experience, and a central feature of the psychedelic experience. Indeed, in describing psychedelic experiences, “mystical experience” is one of the most frequent terms…
United States Department of Defense Building (US-PD). The executive order of President Trump to turn the Department of Defense into the Department of War is profoundly ominous. Especially when combined with the president’s desire to eliminate the United States Institute of Peace, thereby discouraging a search for alternatives to war, and to portray the U.S. military as “ruthless,” as both he and…
A Church Interior by Pieter Neefs the Elder (PD-US). I wrote this essay following the mass shooting at Minneapolis’s Annunciation Catholic School. Demonization of entire groups has only intensified since then—toward Blacks in the wake of the public-transit stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, and toward transgender people and leftists after the Charlie Kirk assassination. I believe…
Blue Mosque, Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan by Françoise Foliot (CC BY-SA 4.0). The right of women to participate in communal prayers is explicitly affirmed and encouraged within Islamic sources, particularly the Prophetic traditions. Historically, women actively participated in congregational prayers alongside the Prophet and his Companions, praying collectively under the same roof. Across the Sunni legal schools,…
Locke: The Slave Trader and the British Slave TradeGeorge Walters-Sleyon This essay is an adapted excerpt from the fourth chapter of George Walters-Sleyon’s book, The Rush for Black Diamonds, Volume One: From John Locke to Thomas Jefferson—The Transatlantic Slave Trade to Chattel Slavery in the UK and the US (Cascade Books, 2024). Used by permission of Wipf…
An Empowering Civic Education through Law LearningAriel Liberman The following is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Ariel Liberman’s new book, Law as Civic Education: Reimagining a K-12 Curriculum for Democratic Citizenship and Individual Character (Copyright 2025 by Imprint). Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group. At first blush, the notion of teaching something…
Church of St. John at Kaneo, Ohrid by Kallerna (CC BY-SA 4.0). The perception that Christianity is under attack has long animated American political culture. Conservative American Christians even claim that Christians are the most persecuted religious group worldwide. Vice President J.D. Vance recently tweeted that, “All over the world, Christians are the most persecuted…