View of the Lys river in the centre of Ghent, Belgium by Joaquim Alves Gaspar (CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed). In July 2023, the government of the Netherlands abruptly collapsed amid a heated disagreement over migration. At the core of this debate was an attempt to limit the right of child refugees from war zones to…
Home of Carl Schmitt in Plettenberg-Pasel (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0). Editorial Note: Page numbers in the text refer to the prior publication linked in the text. There is, apparently, a new surge of interest among scholars of religion and law in the theory of sovereignty proposed by the twentieth-century German legal philosopher, Carl Schmitt…
Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C by King of Hearts (CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed). As the world celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the December 10, 2023 International Human Rights Day, a group of scholars have submitted the following reflections on religious freedom and comparative law. The twentieth century…
“Facade and fountain of the United States Supreme Court Building” by Sunira Moses (CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed). This article is part of our “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act at Thirty” series. If you’d like to explore other articles in this series, click here. Few Supreme Court opinions in recent generations have produced such swift and near-universal condemnation…
Religious Accommodation and its LimitsFarrah Raza On what grounds should religious accommodation claims be limited? When do religious claims harm the autonomy of others? This book proposes an original model of religious accommodation which can be applied in secular liberal democracies where religious diversity has been a hotly contested issue. Addressing the complex question of…
Liverpool Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool, UK by Michael D. Beckwith (CC0 1.0 Deed). Over the last two decades, the world-wide Anglican Communion, one of the largest denominational gatherings of Christians in the world, often appears in secular news related to the intensity of its internal conflicts. These debates often center around questions which have roiled…
“Okotie Eboh Street, Lagos, Nigeria” by Obinna Okerekeocha on Unsplash. Blasphemy is the “act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence for God” and laws upholding blasphemy as a crime fail to respect the human right to freedom of expression and freedom of religion. Deborah Emmanuel Yakubu (also known as Deborah Samuel) was…
“Artificial Intelligence” from Pixabay (License) This essay is the first installment of a three-part series by the author on this topic. Read the second and third installments in this series. In a forthcoming article, “May a Kohen in a Same Sex Relationship Duchen,” I analyze whether a man in a same-sex relationship may engage in…
Religion and Identity in an Age of IndividualizationTed A. Smith Excerpted from The End of Theological Education by Ted A. Smith (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Individualized Religion Social theorists have sometimes described modernity as relegating religion to the private sphere. A range of legal and cultural disestablishments did unhook religion…
Mazah Hills, Jos, Nigeria. Photo by Victor Salami Oyale (CC BY-SA 4.0). In 2022, I was invited by Harvard Divinity School at Cambridge for a conference titled “Ecological Spiritualities” to present my paper, on African eco-spirituality. While preparing the paper with a focus on the Indigenous experience, I carried out a survey which revealed that, although several…