Celebrating the Scholarship of Michael J. Perry Forward by John Witte, Jr. The following text is an excerpt from the Emory Law Journal’s new Festschrift honoring the scholarly work of Michael J. Perry, who serves as Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory Law School and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law…
On June 24th, the Supreme Court reversed the nearly 50-year-old legal precedent protecting the right to safe abortions in overturning Roe v. Wade. While the outrage and fear this decision caused was widespread, taking many forms, my own mind returned to my 13th birthday. It was the day I received my purity ring. As a young…
Orthodox Christianity does not have a good reputation on human rights, and indeed Orthodox theologians are deeply divided on human rights, with both strong supporters (such as Stanley Harakas and Archbishop Anastasios Yannoulatos) and strong opponents (Christos Yannaras and Vigen Guroian). Countries of Orthodox tradition such as Russia and Romania have supported violations of human…
Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) have periodically received attention in mainstream media outlets for their religious affiliations and anti-abortion positions. This past week, Abigail Abrams and Vera Bergengruen released an article in Time magazine outlining the insidious rhetoric these clinics use to attract pregnant people seeking abortions. They claim to offer free counseling and pregnancy tests.…
Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the HeartlandKristy Nabhan-Warren An excerpt reprinted with permission from Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland by Kristy Nabhan-Warren copyright © 2021 University of North Carolina Press. When I first began my ethnographic fieldwork for the book that became Meatpacking…
In fall 2017, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado. The key question was whether a Christian baker’s First Amendment free speech or religious free exercise rights permitted him to refuse to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple in violation of Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act. The Court’s decision in June…
Image: “Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill on Unity Day 2016-11-04” by The Presidential of Russia Press and Information Office / Wikimedia I live in Kharkiv, a large city in eastern Ukraine right on the Russian border. Kharkiv is a totally Russian-speaking city and occupies a prominent place not only in Ukrainian, but also in Russian…
Daniel Bell (1919-2011), a leading American sociologist, declared in his 1960 essay collection, The End of an Ideology, that the mainstream ideologies that had shaped the global political landscape since the nineteenth century exhausted their momentum by the 1950s. Among them included ideologies that had contributed to World War II: communism, fascism, and Nazism. The…
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 torture, home raids, all forms of…
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…