The George Washington Belt, the Two Row Wampum, and the Hiawatha Belt. The Canandaigua, Two Row, and Haudenosaunee Confederacy Wampum Belts. Image by Lindsay Speer, 2008. This article is part of our “200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh: Law, Religion, and Native American Lands” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. “Democracy…
1896. The year seemed to flash in glaring red lights from the text of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision as I was preparing my next lecture for “Law, Religion, and Social Change,” a course that I was teaching at Harvard Divinity School in the fall of 2005. The course was intended to…
Banning Black Gods:Law and Religions of the African Diaspora Danielle Boaz This excerpt is adapted from Banning Black Gods: Law and Religions of the African Diaspora and was recently published by Penn State University Press (2021). Introduction In 2003, Toronto police officers suspected that two Jamaican-Canadian brothers were involved in a series of murders that plagued…
This article is part of our “At Home and Abroad” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan open their edited volume At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion (Columbia University Press, 2020) with an epigraph: Is it, perhaps, possible that there…
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…
A virtual conference organized in partnership with Brigham Young University Law School, Emory University Law School, Notre Dame Law School, St. John’s University School of Law, and the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law. View the full video and browse all essays here. Section E. Theological Implications/Reflections (Stephanie Barclay, moderator) “Through the Eyes of…
Yoga class, Lightning in a Bottle, 2016 / Photo courtesy of author. When I was conducting research for my new book I spent nine years in multiple field sites with people who largely identified as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). These people were seeking expansive spiritual experiences, and I followed them through networks of transformational…
The May 25, 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, despite his multiple cries of, “I can’t breathe,” has compelled me to turn to Black theologian James H. Cone for a personal lesson in rebellion. Having spent over a decade working in the civil rights field, and three times as many teaching theology, I…
I live in Los Angeles, California, near what seems to me to be one of the most dangerous intersections in South LA, Vermont and Gage. On any given day, the intersection looks like any other intersection in the city. But to live in this area is to know, there are underlying factors that make this…
In an interview with Krista Tippet’s theology podcast On Being, prominent civil rights activist and public theologian Ruby Sales considers the role of Black Christianity and Black folk religion in her community organizing. Despite being reared in the Black Baptist tradition, Sales explains that she “lost her religion” during her first protest. When God failed…