“Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Cost of the Law“Major G. Coleman The following is an adapted excerpt from Major G. Coleman’s book, The Cost of Racial Equality (Cascade Books, 2025). Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers, www.wipfandstock.com Martin Luther King Jr. was not speaking metaphorically when he said, “The practical cost of change for…
Bangly Regency, Bali, Indonesia by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas (CC BY-SA 3.0). Indonesia’s constitutional order reflects one of the most ambitious contemporary efforts to govern religious diversity through law. As an archipelagic state encompassing over 17,000 islands and hundreds of ethnoreligious communities, Indonesia has long confronted the institutional challenge of recognizing religious authority within a plural legal…
Internal Revenue Service Building in Washington, D.C. Photo from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive. This article is part of our series on Law, Religion, and The Johnson Amendment. If you’d like to explore other articles in this series, click here. Some time around twenty years ago, when I was a lawyer instead of a law professor, I…
A Woman Reading by Ivan Kramskoi (PD-Art). The right and responsibilities of parents regarding their children’s religious education form a foundation of religious freedom. In many legal systems, this right is considered an implicit component of the broader freedom of religion or right to education. However, a specific, explicit constitutional guarantee for parents’ right to…
FAN Members hold vigil during the Supreme Court hearing by Ilovestfrancis (CC BY-SA 3.0) This article is part of our series on Law, Religion, and Immigration. If you’d like to explore other articles in this series, click here. Nomos, Narrative, and the “Alien” Law is more than a system of codified rules. A world of law, as…
Tonto National Forest by Janet Ward (CC BY 2.0). Among the Supreme Court’s most significant decisions on religious exercise this term was the decision not to act. The case—Apache Stronghold v. United States—was relisted 17 times before the Court issued a denial of certiorari indicating they would not hear the case. The conflict involved a…
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…
Italian Chamber of Deputies in Palazzo Montecitorio, Rome, Italy by Palazzo del Quirinale (PD-ItalyGov) This paper summarizes and translates into English the article, Democrazia e religioni oltre il concordato e le intese: verso una declinazione partecipativa nei rapporti tra Stato e confessioni religiose?, published in the Italian Law & Religion Journal, Stato, Chiese e pluralismo…