Natural Rights and the First Amendment Religion ClausesVincent Phillip Muñoz The following is a modified excerpt from Vincent Phillip Muñoz’s 2022 book Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses, available now from University of Chicago Press. It is now no more that toleration is…
body of water under cloudy sky during sunset by Storiès on Unsplash. Conflict and Religion Is religion a conflict dimension in today’s Ethiopia? Does it have an impact on the ongoing armed confrontations in the country? Some observers think so, but I disagree. Ethiopia, the second-most populated country in Africa, with approximately 112 million people,…
Religion: Relevant to Public Policy but Shielded from Critical Discussion?David A. Hollinger This essay draws on my new book, Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular (Princeton University Press, 2022). The United States today confronts a remarkable paradox: an increasingly secular society is saddled with an increasingly religious politics. In…
Bible, Church, Wedding (Pixabay) In the course of calling out anti-Semitism in American law – a very valid concern – Dr. Mia Brett’s recent Canopy Forum article argues that “Christian religious belief is the justification for many civil rights challenges we are seeing now.” Among them? Efforts to ban abortion, which “rest…on Christian religion.” Although legal justifications for prohibiting abortion “might pretend to have…
Picture by Mostafa Meraji (CC BY-SA 4.0) Contemporary efforts to regulate religious schools are unjust and bound to fail. Emerging legislation in Australia and the ongoing judicial controversy in the United States over the freedom of officials in faith-based schools to hire staff and admit students who share their values present serious challenges to educators in…
Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. This article is part of our “Kennedy, Carson, and Dobbs: Law and Religion in Pressing Supreme Court Cases” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. For the past 60 years, American education has been governed by…
Religious Rhetoric in US Right-Wing Politics: Donald Trump, Intergroup Threat, and NationalismChiara Migliori This is an excerpt reprinted with permission from Religious Rhetoric in US Right-Wing Politics: Donald Trump, Intergroup Threat, and Nationalism by Chiara Migliori copyright © 2022 Palgrave Macmillan. Six years have elapsed since Donald Trump became the President elect of the United States. Since…
In 1925, on Day 7 of the infamous “Scopes Monkey Trial” (The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes), defense attorney Clarence Darrow interrogated prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan on the witness stand. His purpose was to discredit Bryan’s (and many Protestants’) view that the original author of Genesis understood the six days of creation…
Picture by Ted Eytan (CC BY-SA 2.0) This article is part of our “Kennedy, Carson, and Dobbs: Law and Religion in Pressing Supreme Court Cases” series. If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Kennedy v. Bremerton was heard by the Supreme Court in 2022. But the case truly began in…
Picture by Claire Anderson on Unsplash. This article is part of our “Kennedy, Carson, and Dobbs: Law and Religion in Pressing Supreme Court Cases” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. I was unhappy, but not surprised, to see Canopy Forum including Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case…