Image adapted from Wikicommons by DhLeaks44 / CC BY-SA 4.0 “What Theological Roots of Reasonable Doubt Might Teach Us” Peter Wosnik Unlike some esoteric legal terms, the term “reasonable doubt” is familiar to most Americans. Anyone who has sat in jury service in a criminal trial or watched a legal drama has likely encountered the phrase. What many…
Photo by Annett Klingner on Pixabay. This article is part of our “Russia/Ukraine: Law and Religion Perspectives” series. If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. “There is no such thing as a just war: they do not exist!” In a speech at the Vatican Apostolic Palace on March 18,…
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…
Photo by Victor Moussa on adobe.stock.com. The contemporary debate around the right to free exercise of religion — and its limits — focuses overwhelmingly on conservative Christian beliefs about sex, gender, marriage, and reproduction. This is understandable given the vast resources and focus that the Christian right has placed on gaining religious exemptions from laws…
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…
This article is part of our “Russia/Ukraine: Law and Religion Perspectives” series. If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation has cited several issues motivating his invasion of Ukraine. These include the encroachment of NATO upon Russia, Ukraine as an indivisible part of…
Photo of Manhattan by wiggijo on Pixabay (CC0) A virtual conference sponsored by Canopy Forum of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory (CSLR) featuring scholars, experts and practitioners on the topic of religious arbitration. View the full video and browse all essays here. “A Legal Analysis of Religious Arbitration” Ronald Colombo…
Though the COVID health emergency within the U.S. seems to be lessening in intensity, the occurrence of 35,000 COVID hospitalizations per day and 12,000 deaths per week during early March 2022 shows that the crisis is clearly not over. Widespread resistance to public protocols and mandates aimed at halting the spread of the virus has…
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…