Adopted in 1950, Article 17 of the Indian Constitution legally abolished untouchability---the ancient Hindu system of social discrimination---forbade its practice…
Religious freedom as crisis claims
church and state
Beyond establishment
Religious freedom and religious establishment have come to mean many things to many people. This is, in part, because of…
Catholic bishops on religious liberty
Last week the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and its Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty released a lengthy statement…
Christian genealogies of religious freedom
As a historian of religion, much of my recent work has focused on tracing the genealogy of what we call…
Hope, tragedy, and prophecy
It is hard not to be convinced by Akeel Bilgrami’s careful, patient, and generous exposition in “Secularism: Its Content and…
The world that Smith made
There is much that could be said about the history of the Catholic Church and its dedication to the defense…
Hosanna-Tabor in the religious freedom Panopticon
Michel Foucault famously describes Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as a “cruel, ingenious cage” to be understood not as a “dream building…
Religious freedom, minority rights, and geopolitics
Conventional wisdom has it that religious liberty is a universally valid principle, enshrined in national constitutions and international charters and…
The naked public sphere?
In light of Rick Santorum's recent comments on religion and the public sphere, we asked a small handful of scholars…
The contraception mandate
In what is latest in a series of conflicts between the Obama administration and the Roman Catholic Church, a recent…