Via Larry Solum, I see that Dan Kahan has posted a draft of the Harvard Law Review Foreword for the fall, Neutral Principles, Motivated Cognition, and Some Problems for Constitutional Law. Readers here will know that neutrality is a currently favored family of approaches to religious liberty, and Professor Kahan even quotes a tract from the McCreary County case as one of the piece’s epigraphs. Read more
Chaves’s American Religion: Contemporary Trends
Sociologist Mark Chaves (Duke) has published American Religion: Contemporary Trends (Princeton UP). The book is a study of religious trends in the United States, seemingly akin to Robert Putnam and David Cambell’s American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. Chaves “challenges the popular notion that religion is witnessing a resurgence in the United States–in fact, traditional belief and practice is either stable or declining. Chaves examines why the decline in liberal Protestant denominations has been accompanied by the spread of liberal Protestant attitudes about religious and social tolerance, how confidence in religious institutions has declined more than confidence in secular institutions, and a host of other crucial trends.” — MOD