Essays

In September of this year, the president of Georgetown University, John DeGioia, issued a formal apology for the 1838 sale of 272 slaves. When compared with other universities built on...

On September 13, 2016, Clemson University’s head football coach Dabo Swinney was asked what he would do if one of his players refused to stand for the national anthem. San...

In the past ten to fifteen years, discussions around the contested role of religion in the political public sphere have often centered on Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, for many...

This adapted excerpt is republished with permission of the publishers—Hurst in Europe; OUP in North America—from Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion, edited by Nadia Marzouki, Duncan McDonnell, and Olivier...

In “Teaching Calvin in California,” a recent piece in The New York Times, Jonathan Sheehan argues that students in secular college classrooms can learn a lot from studying theology. The...

Politicized religion seems to have a new enemy: Moral relativism is denounced by believers of all stripes as a threat for contemporary societies, and, in particular, for contemporary democracies. A...

  In his landmark essay, Nomos and Narrative, the late legal scholar Robert Cover wrote about the jurispathic function of courts—that is, its ability to quash other commitments and forms...

Last month, the image of three police officers standing over a woman on the beach in Nice, supervising the removal of her “burkini” (a wetsuit-like swimming costume favored by some...

My new book, The Politics of Islamic Law, presents an approach to the study of religion, comparative politics and law that begins with the contradiction and ambiguity produced by the...

In the early pages of my recently published book, History and Presence (Belknap Harvard 2016), I describe something that happened to me many years ago which became a touchstone for...

I was recently asked to speak about the current state of US religious freedom law. I guess it somehow seemed appropriate to do that in Indiana—at ground zero in the...

The United States is unique among nations in claiming a heritage of religious freedom and a mission to spread it overseas.  This is difficult to dispute.  What has become hotly...