A Free Exercise SurpriseDonald Drakeman The following is an introductory essay to Donald Drakeman’s upcoming book, The Free Exercise Clause and the Rights of Conscience (Harvard University Press, 2026). Drakeman’s work will be available for purchase November 2026. I hadn’t expected to write a book about the Free Exercise Clause. My work on the religion…
The Religious Left: What It Does and How It Can Do BetterRobert Wuthnow Material excerpted from The Religious Left: What It Does and How It Can Do Better by Robert Wuthnow © 2026 by New York University Press. Excerpted with permission from the publisher. Generations of readers have been amply informed about the Religious Right.…
Twentieth-Century Redlining Map from the National Archives. In the United States, the narrative of belonging has long been told through access to housing and home. Although the over-regulation of physical residences, presence of racial restrictions, and rejection of land rights have done substantial social and economic damage, these harms also communicate a broader message: “you…
Moses and Aaron with the 10 Commandments by Aron de Chaves (PD-Art). This piece was originally published on Divided Argument, a legal blog on April 22nd, 2026. Sometimes a case is meta. Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District, the Fifth Circuit’s recent Ten Commandments decision, aptly captures how deep into the wilderness our religious…
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…