It is a widely held view that the juridical and political management of religion should be grounded in fundamental normative…
Law and truth in the German religious constitution
history
From Jefferson to Jeffersonian battles
Among the scholars who have most inspired my work as a political scientist are multiple historians—whether intellectual, legal, or religious.…
From the Founders to Trump: The legalities of “Muslims”
Writing about the image of the “Muslim” at America’s founding, Denise Spellberg writes how debates on religious tests for office…
Muslim fears and Muslim rights
Muslims played a crucial role in determining the full extent of religious liberty in the early history of the United…
The American tradition of tolerance and free speech
Much has happened since Denise Spellberg’s Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an came out in 2013. When I first read it, I treasured…
God in the Enlightenment
In a speech before the Brexit vote, Boris Johnson offered a controversial historical pedigree for his campaign to leave the…
The breaking-in of the gods
In the early pages of my recently published book, History and Presence (Belknap Harvard 2016), I describe something that happened…
On inclusion
In a recent piece in The New York Times’ column The Stone, philosophers Jay L. Garfield and Bryan W. Van…
Secularization histories as cultural-political programs
In a The Immanent Frame post on buffered selves, Charles Taylor commented that “The process of disenchantment, involving a change…
Religious freedom, past and future
For those of us who have been following the Politics of Religious Freedom project on this website and elsewhere, Beyond…