“Contemporary Homeschooling: Black Children’s Best Interests, Freedom from Religion, and Anti-Racism” by Cheryl Fields-Smith and Andrea L. Dennis

This article is part of our “Children and Education Rights” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. “I’m just not going to do that. I’m one of these secular homeschoolers. I am not going to join a church to homeschool. I don’t feel comfortable going in that space, which is

“Opening the Doors to Perception” By Matthew P. Cavedon

“Opening the Doors to Perception” Matthew P. Cavedon This past Election Day saw a shift in the treatment of psychedelics, with voters in Oregon and the District of Columbia legalizing their use. This comes a year after Denver decriminalized them. Psychedelics’ ability to alter perceptions of reality – in ways that are often quasi- or

“Thanksgiving and Traditional Jewish Life: Celebrating American Holidays and Jewish Law” by Michael J. Broyde

Introduction This short posting on what the Jewish tradition has to say about Thanksgiving will strike some as surprising — so a word of background might be helpful. Traditional Jews do not celebrate holidays of another religion and have always shied away from even nominally secular holidays that are really about another religion, such as

“Reflections on Fratelli tutti: Something Old, Something New, Much Ado about Not too Much” by Charles J. Russo

This article is part of our “Fratelli Tutti: Reflections on Pope Francis’s Call for Fraternity in Law and Religion” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. On October 3, 2020, Pope Francis took the unusual step of traveling to the birthplace, home, and tomb of his namesake, Saint Francis

“Religion-Making in Japan’s Courts of Law” by Ernils Larsson

When Japan set out to reinvent itself as a modern nation-state in the second half of the 19th century, the new generation of policymakers had to navigate a plethora of foreign concepts as the vocabulary of Western thought was translated into Japanese. While many of these concepts were essentially new philosophical outlooks easily adapted to

“Pope Francis, Fratelli tutti, and the Quest for a ‘Civilization of Love” by Robert Fastiggi

This article is part of our “Fratelli Tutti: Reflections on Pope Francis’s Call for Fraternity in Law and Religion” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. On October 3, 2020, the vigil of the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, Pope Francis issued his third papal encyclical. The title,

“Constitutional Grace: Securing the Blessings of Liberty Through Dignity and Forgiveness” by William E. Thro

We the People … in order … to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Because neither the People nor their leaders are angels, the Constitution reflects a Calvinist theological perspective and embodies “obsessive distrust of government — all government

“Universalist Response to Particularistic Regression: Political Philosophy behind the Pope Francis Encyclical Fratelli tutti” by Mikhail Minakov

This article is part of our “Fratelli Tutti: Reflections on Pope Francis’s Call for Fraternity in Law and Religion” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. The modern history of humanity is driven by several contradictions, one of them being the conflict between universalism and particularism. In a nutshell,