“Wife and Child of Bull Plume” by Kathryn Woodman Leighton (Wikimedia PD-US) This article is part of our “200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh: Law, Religion, and Native American Lands” series. If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. In Johnson v. M’Intosh, Chief Justice John Marshall articulated the doctrine of discovery as…
The George Washington Belt, the Two Row Wampum, and the Hiawatha Belt. The Canandaigua, Two Row, and Haudenosaunee Confederacy Wampum Belts. Image by Lindsay Speer, 2008. This article is part of our “200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh: Law, Religion, and Native American Lands” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. “Democracy…
Archbishop Adrian Tync. Wikimedia CC BY-SA 4.0 This article is part of our “200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh: Law, Religion, and Native American Lands” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Shortly before Thanksgiving 2016, Episcopalian priest John Floberg held up a copy of Pope Alexander VI’s 1493 papal bull Inter…
Old Supreme Court Chamber by Michael Savidge (CC BY-SA 4.0). This article is part of our “200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh: Law, Religion, and Native American Lands” series. If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. In 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in Johnson v M’Intosh, the first…
“First Nations dancers watch the Canada Day celebrations in Calgary, Alberta – 2022” by Dwayne Reilander / Wikimedia CC-BYSA-4.0. This article is part of our “200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh: Law, Religion, and Native American Lands” series. If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Many groups and organizations have taken actions…
Indian Creek in Bears Ears National Monument by US Bureau of Land Management. This article is part of our “200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh: Law, Religion, and Native American Lands” series. If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Mother Earth is the wellspring of indigenous culture, religion, and economic life.It forms…
Introduction As historians of religions, we are interested in myths, history, and creation narratives. The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) includes all these elements. The Johnson decision illustrates one of the powerful ways in which Christianity has played a hegemonic role within American law and culture at the expense of…
Photo by Matthew Bedford on Unsplash. 1896. The year seemed to flash in glaring red lights from the text of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision as I was preparing my next lecture for “Law, Religion, and Social Change,” a course that I was teaching at Harvard Divinity School in the fall of…
The Blessings of Liberty: Human Rights and Religious Freedom in the Western Legal TraditionJohn Witte, Jr. The following is excerpted from John Witte, Jr.’s The Blessings of Liberty: Human Rights and Religious Freedom in the Western Legal Tradition, out now from Cambridge University Press. Read Nicholas Wolterstorff’s review of the book here. For the past…
The Polish Contribution to the Global Legal CultureJohn Witte, Jr. The following is excerpted from Law and Christianity in Poland: The Legacy of the Great Jurists, edited by Franciszek Longchamps de Bérier and Rafael Domingo and out now from Routledge. This volume is another signature title in the book series on “Great Christian Jurists in…