archive

Experimenting with religious liberty

Michael A. Helfand (Pepperdine) and Barak D. Richman (Duke): The Challenge of Co-Religionist Commerce. Robert Audi (Notre Dame): Church-State Separation, Healthcare Policy, and Religious Liberty. Frederick Mark Gedicks (BYU) and Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern): Invisible Women: Why an Exemption for Hobby Lobby Would Violate the Establishment Clause. Bruce Ledewitz (Duquesne): Experimenting with Religious Liberty: The Quasi-Constitutional Status of Religious Exemptions. Valerie J. Munson (SIU): Fraud on the Faithful? The Charitable Intentions of Members of Religious Congregations and the Peculiar Body of Law Governing Religious Property in the United States. Ursula Hackett (Oxford): Why Don't America's Most Religious States Support Religious Schools? Yishai Schwartz on how the separation of church and state is still alive — for children, anyway. A large swath of conservative Christendom has convinced itself that the maintenance of religious liberty depends on a for-profit company’s ability to avoid any remote complicity in the supply of contraceptive services that according to an exotic and extra-scriptural theory of human life might risk the further development of a microscopic zygote. Some Christian Right activists have lost hope that a Christian Nation can be achieved in the US through the formal political process, including a high-level GOP operative; they are calling for martyrs and thinking about religious war. Faced with sweeping social change, conservative Christians are walling themselves off from secular society — but when religion isolates itself, both sides lose. Richard Kent Evans reviews Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism by Isaac Weiner.