Do Discretionary Religious Exemptions Violate The Establishment Clause? (Draft, University of Missouri School of Law, Research Paper No. 2017-13) The Establishment Clause is not violated when government enacts regulatory or tax legislation but provides, concerning these new burdens, an accommodation for those holding conflicting religious beliefs or practices. In an unbroken line of cases now spanning a century, […]
Faith, Football, and the First Amendment: Threading the Needle between Establishment and Free Exercise — Courts are being faced with determining when a coach’s expressive conduct around the football field is “private” speech expressing the views and emotions of the individual, or “public” speech expressing the views of the school and the state. This paper sheds […]
Loving the Sinner: Evangelical Colleges and Their LGB Students — From Quinnipiac Law Review 35:147 (2017), 70 pages. In his Obergefell dissent, Chief Justice Robert wrote: “Hard questions arise when people of faith exercise religion in ways that may be seen to conflict with the new right to same-sex marriage.” This article looks at one […]
Margaret Atwood on Christianity, The Handmaid’s Tale, and What Faithful Activism Looks Like Today: This detailed interview with the author whose novel has received renewed interest may offer students a way to consider how religion and theological themes are treated in literature. The teacher could easily assemble a course around this and other selected novels […]
Why Does the Bible Require New Mothers to Atone after Childbirth? — Leviticus 12-13 says that when a woman gives birth, she is impure for several weeks, after which she must offer two distinct sacrifices: an “olah,” or burnt offering, and a “ḥatat,” or sin offering. This article offers some different views on the text. How might […]
What’s It Like To Be A Squirrel? This brief update (including a great 2 min video of a squirrel with a GoPro!) on Thomas Nagel’s famous essay on consciousness can introduce students to the problem of consciousness, subjectivism, objectivism, and the difficulties of arriving at a common baseline for reality. Students in apologetics should be […]
Reinhold Niebuhr, Washington’s Favorite Theologian: This not entirely sympathetic essay on Reinhold Niebuhr can introduce students to an important modern theologian and to themes in modern world affairs and theology. We may find reasons to agree, disagree, and probe further into this essayist’s views: Individuals were capable of overcoming sin, he [Niebuhr] argued, but groups were […]
Why Religion Is More Durable Than We Thought In Modern Society: (See also the Pew study) Check both the audio and the text versions of this NPR coverage of the Pew data on religion and more education. The new consensus of sociologists and demographers is that modernization and secularization are indeed related, but in complex ways. A […]
In America, Does More Education Equal Less Religion? On one hand, among U.S. adults overall, higher levels of e ducation are linked with lower levels of religious commitment by some measures, such as belief in God, how often people pray and how important they say religion is to them. On the other hand, Americans with college […]
No, The American Church Isn’t ‘in Exile’: Among the many discussions about Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option is this contribution from David Congdon. Students can find links to other commentaries and points of view, using this piece as a point of departure for their own assessment. Says Congdon, “Many Christians have already put down their weapons […]
