Learning to DisagreeJohn Inazu The following is an introduction followed by an adapted excerpt from John Inazu’s new book, “Learning to Disagree” with permission from Zondervan Publishing, 2024. In past academic work, I have explored the tensions and instability that surround theories of pluralism, the right of assembly, and the religion clauses. Alongside these scholarly…
“Italian Parliament Building” by Marco Verch (CC BY 2.0). In a constitutional democracy, the right to freedom of religion implies that everyone can freely profess, practise, and propagate their faith in various forms, alone or in community with others, in public or private, in worship, teaching, and observance. With this in mind, the political-legal task…
Religious Diversity’s Benefit for DemocracyRobert Wuthnow The following is a modified except from Robert Wuthnow’s Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy (2021), out now from Princeton University Press. Religious advocacy is not the answer to the political challenges confronting the United States at this critical juncture in its history, any more than religious conviction…
Picture by Pawal Czerwinski on Unsplash. Post-colonial Middle Eastern states have failed to achieve national secularization and homogenisation. Nation-building has been obstructed by prevalent transnational communal affiliations. In Lebanon, a power-sharing consociational arrangement preserved the autonomy of sectarian groups in a loose national union. A communitocracy is formed to protect group plurality against forced national…
Picture by Faseeh Fawaz on Unsplash. Nigeria is home to about 250 ethnic groups and culturally diverse communities with different religious affiliations, who speak over 500 different languages. The three dominant ethnic groups are the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo. Nigerians practice Christianity, Islam or an indigenous religion. The country is divided almost equally between the…
Chambers of the US Supreme Court by Carol M. Highsmith. On March 24, for the third time in two years, the Supreme Court sided with a religious inmate on death row who wished to have his spiritual advisor in the room at the time he would be put to death. In the prior cases, the…
Photo of Manhattan by wiggijo on Pixabay (CC0) A virtual conference sponsored by Canopy Forum of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory (CSLR) featuring scholars, experts and practitioners on the topic of religious arbitration. View the full video and browse all essays here. “The Future of Religious Arbitration in the U.S.”…
The Religion of Secularism Reexamined by Leigh Eric Schmidt Excerpted from The Church of Saint Thomas Paine: A Religious History of American Secularism America’s most famous infidel orator, Robert Ingersoll, was a paradoxically religious man. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he skewered his natal faith with a sharp wit and a silvery tongue on…
Legal pluralism, as practiced in Egypt in the 19th – 20th centuries, was made possible within institutional structures, procedural norms, and Islamic legal practice under Khedival rule. Islamic legal practice during Ottoman rule not only made other legal traditions accepted within a pluralist legal order, but also, it made them germane to how the system…
Image by Alexa from Pixabay. A number of years ago, I wrote an article addressing celebrating Thanksgiving according to Jewish law, which was published in Canopy Forum last year. In that article, I noted that most Jewish law authorities accept that: (1) Thanksgiving is an American holiday with secular origins, (2) While some people might celebrate…