New York City Skyline by Janusz Sobolewski (CC BY 2.0). Recently, a number of us on staff at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, ranging from Gen Z to Baby Boomers, had the occasion to take stock of different generations and their perspectives on human rights. Baby Boomers are old enough to…
The West Virginia State Capitol Building by O Palsson (CC BY 2.0). Since 2020, a foster family from West Virginia fostered, and eventually adopted, three girls. In 2023, the girls’ newborn biological brother, M.B., was immediately placed with the foster family. Notably, the foster family are members of an Old Order Amish community. M.B.’s guardian ad…
New York, New York by Mario Hains (CC-BY-SA-3.0). In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public, and within five days, the chatbot had acquired one million users. By January 2023, it had become the fastest-growing consumer application in history, with over 100 million monthly active users. The artificial intelligence could write essays, debug code,…
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…
Nature (AI) by Alan Warburton (CC BY 4.0). In 2014, users on LessWrong, an internet forum, encountered a post by a user named Roko, who posited that humanity would invent a superintelligence. This superintelligence would have the power to create fully accurate computerized simulations of people, essentially ending death. The AI, knowing that its creation…
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…
St. Andrew’s Catholic Church in Roanoke, Virginia by Joe Ravi (CC-BY-SA 3.0). With the election of Leo XIV, who chose his name in an acknowledgment of Leo XIII, the pope of Rerum Novarum, Catholic Social Teaching (CST) might be back in an even stronger way. Hence, there were great expectations for the apostolic exhortation, Dilexi…
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…
A Church Interior by Pieter Neefs the Elder (PD-US). I wrote this essay following the mass shooting at Minneapolis’s Annunciation Catholic School. Demonization of entire groups has only intensified since then—toward Blacks in the wake of the public-transit stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, and toward transgender people and leftists after the Charlie Kirk assassination. I believe…