August 30, 2012 - LAW AND RELIGION FORUM

The Lumen Christi Institute will host a lecture by our friend Rick Garnett (Notre Dame), “Religious Freedom in America Today,” in Chicago on September 26. The description of the lecture follows. If you’re in Chicago, make sure to go. Rick is one of America’s leading law and religion scholars and always has something valuable to say. Details are here.

As President Clinton observed, “religious freedom is . . . our first freedom.” It was central to the Founders’ vision for the American political community. They did not always agree about what religious freedom means or requires, but they knew that it matters, and that it should be respected in policy and protected by law. James Madison, the Father of our Constitution, hoped that America’s religious-liberty experiment “promised a lustre to our country.” This lecture will take stock of this experiment and consider the rights of religious believers and institutions and their roles and voices in American public life today.

Mark and I are excited to announce that our guest blogger for the month of September will be Donald Drakeman. Don is an enormously talented person: an extremely successful entrepreneur and also an absolutely superb historian and legal scholar. Currently, he is a Venture Partner in Advent Venture Partners as well as a fellow in health management of the Judge Business School at Cambridge University. If you have not read his book, Church, State, and Original Intent (CUP 2009), you should do so immediately (a post about the book is here). For a sampling of his more recent work, take a look at his excellent piece, co-authored with Joel Alicea, The Limits of the New Originalism. Welcome, Don!

And thanks also to the great Steve Smith, whom we’ve enjoyed having. You can find his posts by clicking on his name at the right. We look forward very much to having Steve back with us from time to time.