In this essay, I recount the history of the founding and early years of the Journal of Law and Religion from its origins in the Committee on Religion and Law through the editorial transitions in 1988 that led to a second phase of JLR’s history. In recounting this history, I focus on the exceptional scholars who brought JLR into existence and nurtured its growth during those early years, creating, in the process, not only new academic endeavor but a community and a kind of family.

The state of the Free Exercise Clause in U.S. constitutional law is uncertain. With an opportunity in Fulton v. Philadelphia to clarify the vitality of the current standard from Employment Division v. Smith, the United States Supreme Court has declined to do so. The lasting impact of Smith has been to move away from directly requiring government justifications for infringing free exercise. Instead, courts now use neutrality and general applicability as heuristics for government justification. Yet, relying solely on neutrality and general applicability to proxy for government justification when infringing religious exercise distracts courts from conducting a fact-based inquiry. This article demonstrates how more scrutiny of the legislative facts in free exercise doctrine may serve as a viable alternative to Smith’s flawed approach for evaluating government justifications. The author first shows empirically how more factual scrutiny—directly requiring the government to justify its actions with evidence—can benefit government and religious claimants and then discusses the normative advantages of a fact-intensive approach to constitutional scrutiny. During a moment of sharp division over religious freedom and other competing rights, factual scrutiny can be a powerful tool for handling free exercise challenges and promoting responsible religious freedom.

This article discusses the significance of the extensive data-gathering procedures incorporated into recent synodal preparations and how they advance Pope Francis’s commitment to forging a church informed by a dialogue between theological ideas and empirical realities. Drawing on my prior case analysis of the Synod on the Family, I argue that despite the limits in place then on lay participation in the formal synod discussions, the diversity of the laity’s self-reported experiences penetrated the bishops’ deliberations. This achievement is in part a function of the synod communication structure whereby participants are allocated to shared-language groups, thus avoiding self-selection based on a priori doctrinal or country-specific biases; the resulting (forced) dialogue with difference helps foster the gradual development of more inclusive doctrinal framings as seen in the post-synodal Amoris Laetitia. In a historic expansion, the Synod on Synodality formally includes lay voting participants and therefore lay perspectives will directly shape the synod proposal outcomes. Like the bishops, lay Catholics do not speak with one voice, and thus the task of finding moral consensus will still necessarily require respectful mutual listening and reciprocal dialogue.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was concerned about both poverty and race, inextricably linked because of the long and brutal history of racial injustice in housing, employment, and education. What Dr. King called the beloved community reflected a vision of a world built on peace, human dignity, and shared material abundance for all people. To explore this linkage of poverty and race, I employ two related Christian theological concepts: the universal destiny of the goods of the earth and the social mortgage that encumbers all private property to ensure the equitable provision of those goods to all and for all generations. I analyze the ways in which the universal destiny of goods can be mediated through U.S. property law by structuring the ownership and use of land and buildings within the context of social obligation. But while the law has the capacity to ensure ownership, security, and infrastructure for all, U.S. society has failed to make the necessary payments on the social mortgage that would create this reality—a failure due primarily to severe racial and economic injustices, both historical and contemporary. Yet there is hope: I present examples that offer glimpses of the beloved community.

After its initial founding by the Council on Religion and Law at Harvard, the Journal of Law and Religion had its first life at Hamline University School of Law beginning in 1983. This essay is a history of its second life—from 1987/1988 to 2013—describing the vision and the people who pursued that vision through the journal in those years and some of the roundtables and symposia it published.

This article examines the evolution of the Russian Orthodox Church’s identities and political alignments from the post-Soviet era to the present in three chronological phases. First, the author explores the church’s varied post-Soviet identities shaped by experiences of repression, collaboration, dissidence, and emigration from 1991 to approximately 2010. The author identifies key legislative and political developments between 2010 and 2021 that have aligned the Russian Orthodox Church with the autocratic state. Finally, the author analyzes the shifting stance of the Moscow Patriarchate on Ukraine from 2014 to 2022, including Patriarch Kirill’s support for Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine since 2022, which is interpreted as a continuation of the church’s historical role as a collaborator during Soviet times. The author argues that the church’s contemporary role is confined to providing ritualistic and spiritual legitimization for state ideology, perpetuating a logic of authority, control, obedience, and dichotomous friend/enemy thinking reminiscent of Soviet-era security services. Through this analysis, the author reveals how the state and church leadership of the past decades has strategically positioned the church in preparation for conflict.

The Muslims of South Asia are more than five hundred million people, distributed between Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, and there are more Muslims in South Asia than in any other region in the world. After Indonesia, which is the largest Muslim country in the world, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are the second, third, and fourth largest Muslim countries, respectively. Although the prevalent approach in the study of Islam is to consider its so-called Arab character as central, the Muslims in pre-Partition India constituted the largest body of Muslims in the world, and the vast political and intellectual influence exerted by South Asian Muslims on the wider Muslim world is often neglected. Many of the most important political, intellectual, and spiritual developments within Islam have had their origins, or have flourished, in South Asia, and Muslims from the region have played important roles in the global history of Islam, including during the colonial period, in resistance to colonial rule, and in intellectual responses to and dialogue with Western thought. Pakistan was specifically created to provide a homeland for South Asia’s Muslim population and its trials and tribulations over the past seventy-five years have been carefully watched by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Muslims constitute India’s largest minority, with an often uneasy—to say the least—relationship to the majority. In the context of the three books under discussion, I explore issues, such as secularism, modernity, and religion, and their impacts on the conception of the nation-state that was promoted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an expression of political modernity.

This article is a response to Christians in public and private life who favor policies, employ rhetoric, and view migrants in ways that contravene their faith traditions. Speaking primarily from the perspective of Christian migrant-serving, faith-based organizations in the United States, the author examines their challenges, sources of consolation, and understanding of migrants in light of their work and religious touchstones in an era of political polarization and unprecedented forced displacement. He outlines an inclusive path forward, rooted in a commitment to the common good, to solidarity with the displaced, and to a deeper understanding of the hopes, aspirations, and gifts of migrants.

Expressivist theories of law focus not only on what legal arrangements do but also what they communicate. The expressivist view has gained special currency in the context of religious establishment. Even when governmental involvement with religion is not coercive or does not materially violate anyone’s rights, it may nevertheless be undesirable by virtue of expressing a preference for a certain religion or a privileged status for certain religious groups over others. The existing literature, however, lacks an equivalent expressivist analysis of the related but distinct domain of free exercise of religion. What is expressed when a religious individual or group is granted special relief from the legal requirements that would otherwise apply to them? I argue that just like religious establishments, religious exemptions not only implicate rights and material interests but also have important expressive dimensions that both help account for their value and impose limits on their desirability.

This article foregrounds the Western Apache fight to save the sacred site of Chi’chil Biłdagoteel, or Oak Flat, which at this writing is threatened by a proposed copper mine. Like many other Native peoples, Western Apaches have historically resisted colonial suppression by reconfiguring ancestral traditions to make them legible to authorities as religion. In their current struggle, Western Apaches are restoring and repairing their relationships with the sacred landscapes of their ancestral homelands. The controversy over Oak Flat also demonstrates how US religious freedom law continues to impose an implicitly Christian model for religion and how Western Apaches today are pushing back against that model even as they necessarily use it to claim the protected status that religion enjoys in the United States. Chi’chil Biłdagoteel thus illuminates the ongoing paradoxes of US religious freedom law, the privileges that Christianity still holds within this legal regime, and the ongoing vibrancy of living Apache religion.

US and UK courts define religion as a belief system dealing with existential concerns, which is separable from politics, and need not be theistic. Where does this concept of religion come from? Some scholars trace it to the advent of the Protestant Reformation when religion became a matter of competing theological propositions. My analysis of both John Calvin and Roger Williams shows that those Protestant thinkers emphasized the view that religion is essentially a belief system. However, Protestantism cannot explain all of the features of the US and UK concept of religion. It is because of the liberal belief in individual rights and in popular sovereignty that early liberals like Roger Williams and contemporary courts embrace the separability of religion from politics. These courts also reject the view that religion is necessarily theistic given their liberal commitment to treating citizens that subscribe to certain non-theistic ideologies as equal citizens to citizens with theistic ideologies.