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…
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…
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 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…
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…
US Supreme Court by John L. Marino. 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. The Supreme Court has long recognized the individual human conscience as sacred territory. One of the most famous…