Picture by Dave Adamson on Unsplash. This article is part of our “Kennedy, Carson, and Dobbs: Law and Religion in Pressing Supreme Court Cases” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. This essay was originally published in First Things before the Supreme Court decided Kennedy v. Bremerton. Though all eyes…
Picture by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash. This essay is based on the author’s 2021 Minnesota Law Review article “The Nineteenth Amendment as a Generative Tool for Defeating LGBT Religious Exemptions.” Since the U.S. Supreme Court held that marriage equality is the law of the land in 2015, American society has been embroiled in a cultural…
Picture by Narcis Ciocan on Pixabay. On December 17, 2021, the U.S. Department of State’s Office of International Religious Freedom issued a joint statement on behalf of the International Religious Freedom and Belief Alliance (IRFBA), condemning the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses in several countries, and calling on governments worldwide, inter alia, to release prisoners, end…
Religion and the American Constitutional Experimentby John Witte, Jr., Joel A. Nichols, and Richard W. Garnett Thomas Jefferson once described America’s new religious freedom guarantees as a “fair” and “novel experiment.” These guarantees, set out in the new state and federal constitutions of 1776 to 1791, defied the millennium-old assumptions inherited from Western Europe that…
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…
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…
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…
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…