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 and the Australian Journal of Law and Religion, are publishing a set of essays that address the impact of “nones”–individuals who do not identify with any particular religion–on law, politics, religion, and society.
Our latest series include essays on Masking Religious Violations, Transnational Christian Nationalism, IVF and ART, and a collaboration with the journal, Derecho en Sociedad. Explore our latest series by scholars around the globe.
Image adapted from Wikicommons by DhLeaks44 / CC BY-SA 4.0 “Perfectionist Prophecy, Imperfect World” Matthew P. Cavedon I recently wrote about Patrick O’Neill, a Catholic activist convicted of vandalizing a nuclear submarine base. The number of connections I have to his case is so high that this article could almost just be my list of disclosures. Here it…
Image adapted from Wikicommons by DhLeaks44 / CC BY-SA 4.0 “Vatican Criminal Reforms Ignore Glaring Problems Even as Jurisdiction Expands Worldwide” Matthew P. Cavedon On February 16, Pope Francis announced changes to the Vatican’s criminal code. These alter court procedures to protect a few defense rights and make punishment more merciful. They come alongside recent expansions in the…
Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash. This article is part of our “What’s Wrong with Rights?” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Contemporary discussions of rights tend to be about where to place a caesura between acceptable and unacceptable kinds of rights. This caesura is primarily a…
Photo by Ravi Pinisetti on Unsplash. The New Age of Rights In the 1990s, the European Union (EU) seemed to be done. The Old Continent was pacified. Soviet imperialism had melted away. European dictatorships — from Portugal to Spain, from Greece to Romania — had ended. European citizens could travel from Italy to the Netherlands,…
Image adapted from Wikicommons by DhLeaks44 / CC BY-SA 4.0 “Which King’s Bay? Religion against the Rules in Nuclear Civil Disobedience” Matthew P. Cavedon It is commonplace to understand religion as a building block of identity. We define our personalities in light of any number of characteristics – our religion, nationality, politics, ethnicity, sex, disabilities, and so on.…
The Intellectual Property of Nations: Returning to Our Beginnings in Christian LegalityLaura Ford An Overview by Laura Ford Laura Ford’s The Intellectual Property of Nations will be published by Cambridge University Press in June 2021. The Church is based on the knowledge of the one eternal God, who as such became man and thereby proved…
Photo by Tom Gainor on Unsplash. This article is part of our “Chaos at the Capitol: Law and Religion Perspectives on Democracy’s Dark Day” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. We are shocked. Morally outraged. How could a U.S. president, touting “law and order,” incite a blatant attack on “American democracy”…
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash. This article is part of our “Chaos at the Capitol: Law and Religion Perspectives on Democracy’s Dark Day” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. “Onward, Christian soldiers!Marching as to war,With the cross of Jesus Going on before.” Though this began as a song for a…
Photo by Mohammed Nasim. This article is part of our “What’s Wrong with Rights?” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Nigel Biggar’s publications are predictable, but never uninteresting: predictable in that he is unashamedly a conservative moral philosopher who self-defines as a professional Christian ethicist, a description which seems…
Image adapted from Wikicommons by DhLeaks44 / CC BY-SA 4.0 “Subjective Beliefs, Social Judgments, and Witch Killers” Matthew P. Cavedon In a 1992 abortion decision, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, a plurality of the U.S. Supreme Court held: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and…