Pete Hegseth’s confirmation as Secretary of Defense (US-PD). On February 27, 2026, President Donald Trump launched Operation “Epic Fury.” Within a day, the United States had killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 170 people at the Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, and, alongside Israel, begun a war with Iran. From the beginning, the…
Oxford MS Pride parade. Photo by Author. On the evening of her birthday in July 2022, Stephanie Lee called the Oxford, Mississippi Police Department to request a wellness check. Her child, Jimmie “Jay” Lee, a 20-year-old public policy student at the University of Mississippi, had not called that morning as he always did. Jay was…
Florence Nightingale. Coloured lithograph. Source: Wellcome Collection (Public Domain Mark). When we think of the story of human evolution, we often focus on the dramatic, “sexy” storylines: battles for physical or social dominance, hunting large game, and finding mates. But a significant subplot in our shared human story is cooperation. Our ability to cooperate toward…
Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, Washington, DC by G. Edward Johnson (CC BY 4.0). At a Nashville rally in 2015, Donald Trump declared that mass shootings like one that had recently occurred at an Oregon community college would never happen if teachers were armed and able to defend themselves and their students. He went on to…
Anasuya Feeding the Hindu Trinity, painting on the wall of the Krishna-Sudama Temple of Porbandar (CC0 1.0). In The Illusion of the Repugnant Client: Hindu Ethics in American Legal Practice, I argued that the concept of an inherently repugnant client is incoherent from a dharmic perspective, that the Hindu-American lawyer’s svadharma demands zealous representation of…
Aerial view of the House of the Good Shepherd via Denver Public Library (Public Domain). When the Indiana Women’s Prison History Project endeavored to study the “oldest” women’s prison in the United States they pointed not only to the Indiana Reformatory Institute for Women and Girls—the oldest state penitentiary built exclusively for women—but the Home of the…
Why Religious Freedom Matters: Human Rights and Human FlourishingAllen D. Hertzke The following is an excerpt from Allen D. Hertzke’s upcoming book, Why Religious Freedom Matters: Human Rights and Human Flourishing (April 2026). Reprinted here with permission from University of Norte Dame Press. Imagine a social force, a potent “X Factor,” that underpins democracy, bolsters civil…
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,…