Posted on by Mark Movsesian

The Mattone Center Launches a YouTube Channel & Video Series

I’m delighted to announce that this month the Mattone Center has launched a new YouTube channel. The platform features diverse content, including episodes of the Legal Spirits podcast, a new video series, Landmark Cases in Religious Freedom, panels and interviews , and event highlights. The channel aims to promote engaging discussions and provide valuable insights into the intricate relationship of law and religion. 

One standout feature of the new channel is the animated series, Landmark Cases in Religious Freedom, which examines conflicts between law and religious conscience in American jurisprudence. Each video provides historical context, explains key legal arguments and court decisions, and analyzes the broader societal impact of these pivotal cases. 

The first video in the series, “People v. Philips: An Early Case About Free Exercise,” explores an early precedent from New York on the priest-penitent privilege. It has resonated strongly with viewers, amassing over 30,000 views and counting in the short time since its launch. Here it is:

The response to this first video shows that we are serving a real need. People want to understand how courts balance legal principles and religious faith. As an academic institution, the Mattone Center is uniquely positioned to provide that understanding, and YouTube, which reaches millions of people around the world, offers a new opportunity for us to do so. Scholars shouldn’t confine themselves to academic circles; we should engage with the wider world. That’s exactly what we aim to achieve with this channel.

Please consider subscribing to the channel, so you can receive updates as new material becomes available. Thanks!

Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stores from around the web:

  • The Supreme Court agreed to hear a religious-liberty challenge to a Montgomery County, Maryland policy that ended opt-outs for parents who object to elementary-school instruction involving themes of sexuality and gender identity.
  • This week, in an ongoing battle between Southern Methodist University and the United Methodist Church, the Texas Supreme Court heard oral arguments regarding SMU’s desire to separate from the church.
  • In Secular Alliance v. U.S. Department of Education, the D.C. federal district court dismissed some of plaintiff’s claims regarding a rule prohibiting schools that receive Education Department funding from denying benefits to secular groups due to their religious beliefs.
  • Several Jewish schools in New York have filed suit against the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, alleging that the department discriminated against them under Title VI by interfering with and disfavoring Jewish Studies curricula.
  • In Calvary Chapel Belfast v. University of Maine System, a Maine federal district court refused to issue a temporary restraining order in the Church’s suit against the University. The church alleges that the university’s decision to rescind the sale of a satellite campus to the church constituted Free Exercise and Equal Protection Clause violations.  
  • The American Humanist Association has filed suit against West Virginia for a grant of $5 million to a Catholic trade college, alleging that the grant violates the West Virginia constitution by awarding taxpayers’ money to a Catholic institution.
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Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • The First Circuit heard oral arguments in St. Dominic Academy v Makin and Crosspoint Church v Makin. Both cases stem from the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Carson v. Makin and involve challenges to a Maine statute that provides that schools receiving state funds cannot discriminate based on religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Plaintiffs allege that the Maine law has the effect of excluding certain Christian schools from Maine’s tuition assistance program.
  • In a new complaint in Berkemeir v. Genesee County Museum, the plaintiff alleges that the Genesee Country Museum violated the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses when it fired her because of her belief that the Museum’s Diversity, Equity, Acceptance, and Inclusion program was inconsistent with her sincerely held beliefs.
  • Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill posted Guidance regarding a Louisiana law that requires the display of the Ten Commandments in each public school classroom. Released after a Louisiana Federal District court enjoined five parishes from implementing the new law, the Guidance now requires posting only if the displays themselves or funding for the displays are donated and imposes no punishment if a school does not display the Commandments.
  • In Garner v. Southern Baptist Convention, the Tennessee Court of Appeals at Knoxville held that a defamation suit brought by a Baptist pastor against the Southern Baptist Convention cannot be excluded from judicial consideration under the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine. The Court of Appeals held that the suit did not require the court to resolve any religious disputes or to rely on religious doctrine, but was focused almost entirely on the Baptist Convention’s purported publication of written and oral statements that Mr. Garner was “an individual with an alleged history of abuse.”
  • The Pew Research Center recently published a study of the religious affiliation of members of the 119th Congress. The article reports 86.7% of the members of the Senate and House combined are Christian, of which 55.5% are Protestant, 28.2% Catholic, 1.7% Latter Day Saints, 1.1% Orthodox Christians, and 0.2% Messianic Jewish. Six percent of Congress is Jewish. Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Unitarian Universalists, and Humanist adherents account for less than 1 %. The religious affiliation of 3.9% of Congress is unknown.
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Legal Spirits 065: Reading CS Lewis in Law School

Photo: Reasonable Theology

In this episode, Fordham Law Professors Sean Griffith and Richard Squire join Mattone Center Director Mark Movsesian to talk about their experience leading a discussion of CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity in a student reading group this past semester. Sean and Richard discuss their goals in establishing the group, their students’ response to Lewis–in particular, his defense of natural law and Christian ethics–and the value of taking Christianity seriously as a matter of faith and intellect at a 21st-century American law school. A fascinating and wide-ranging discussion. Listen in!

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Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New History of the Religion Clauses

From Oxford University Press, here is a new history of the religion clauses, Free Exercise: Religion, the First Amendment, and the Making of America, focusing especially on the social and cultural context at the time of the Framing, and foregrounding the experience of marginalized religious communities like Jews and Catholics, among others. The author is historian Chris Beneke of Bentley University. Oxford’s description follows:

CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW RESPECTING AN ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION, OR PROHIBITING THE FREE EXERCISE THEREOF. Those words, scratched on parchment in 1789, open the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. From them, countless interpretations have been drawn. As a consequence, an astonishing variety of activities in modern America-prayer after football games, Bible reading in classrooms, company healthcare policies, the baking of wedding cakes, and Ten Commandment displays around courthouses-have been alternately authorized, prohibited, or modified.

In this compelling historical account, Chris Beneke explains how the religion clauses came into existence and how they were woven into American culture. He brings prominent early national figures to life, including George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Paine, while chronicling the First Amendment’s relationship to defining social conditions like slavery, civility, family life, and the free market. Beneke probes what kind of nation America was when the religion clauses were framed and what kind of nation it was becoming.

Going beyond traditional church-state scholarship, Beneke also demonstrates how white women, African Americans, Roman Catholics, Jews, and nonbelievers widened religious liberty’s application and illuminated its boundaries. In doing so he makes a groundbreaking contribution to both constitutional history and the history of American pluralism.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

The Waldensians and the History of Italian Church-State Relations

The Waldensians are, if one may put it this way, the indigenous Protestants of Italy. Their history goes back centuries and, although their numbers are quite small, they represent a not insignificant part of Italy’s religious culture. A new book from Generis Publishing, Nationalism and Separation of Church and State: Protestant Contributions in Catholic Italy, argues that the group influenced the thought of the 19th Century liberal prime minister, Count Cavour, and thus had an effect on church-state relations during the Risorgimento. The author is Ottavio Palombaro of New College Franklin in Tennessee. Here’s the publisher’s description:

The recent rise of debates concerning Christianity, nationalism and separation of church and state require going back to the roots of such concepts. The advent of modern nationalism meant either the embracement of a positive form of separatism according to the American Revolution, or of a drastic form of separation according to the French Revolution. While the modern state of Italy dealt with the tension between church and state largely through drastic separation, there were some exceptions. Here I intend to investigate what role the Calvinistic understanding of relations between church and state did play through the political involvement of the Waldensians during the movement for Italian independence called Risorgimento (1848-1870). The Calvinistic view of civil government, as stated during that era by the Reformed Pastor Alexandre Vinet, was a determinant factor in the political stand that Waldensian Church took during these times for example through pastors such as Giuseppe Malan or Paolo Geymonat. Their ideas were also reflected beyond the Waldensians in the thought of the first Italian prime minister Camillo Benso conte di Cavour in his formula “free church in a free state.”

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A Natural Law Framework for Evangelicals

As readers of this blog know, natural law has re-emerged as an important part of contemporary jurisprudence, especially among Catholic legal scholars. Evangelical scholars have shown interest in the subject, too, as evidenced by this forthcoming book from InterVarsity Press, Hopeful Realism: Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics. The book addresses, from an Evangelical perspective, one of the thorniest practical problems with natural-law reasoning in a society like ours. How does one make a persuasive natural-law argument in a pluralistic society where people’s priors differ so greatly? The authors are political theorists Jesse Covington (Westmont College), Bryan T. McGraw (Wheaton College), and Micah Watson (Calvin University). The publisher’s description follows:

A Natural Law Framework for Evangelicals Today

During a time when political conversations are marked by deep polarization and difficult decision-making, what resources do evangelicals have to think critically and theologically about public life?

For political theorists Bryan T. McGraw, Jesse Covington, and Micah Watson, a crucial resource is to be found in natural law, a rich tradition of Christian political thought often neglected by evangelicals. Grounded in the hope and realism of the gospel, their evangelical natural law theory is deep in moral conviction yet oriented toward practical political decision-making. Relevant to all dimensions of political life, they show how an evangelical natural law framework can speak into debates about the economy, family life and marriage, violence and war, and religious freedom.

Hopeful Realism is a generous guide for evangelicals concerned with bringing their theological commitments to bear on their political judgments. A volume that brings together robust theory with practical cases, Covington, McGraw, and Watson show how evangelicals can participate as evangelicals in a pluralistic, often polarized, democracy.

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Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • The Second Circuit recently heard oral arguments in Miller v. McDonald. The lower court upheld New York’s removal of religious exemptions for vaccine requirements, rejecting free exercise claims by Amish communities.
  • An individual filed suit in a Michigan federal district court alleging discrimination by a theater that was hosting a Harris campaign rally. Plaintiff is a Muslim American who was running for the House of Representatives; his complaint alleges he was escorted out of the theater by the Secret Service based on his religion and ethnicity. 
  • The Ninth Circuit held that a law in California, which disqualified religious backed institutions form being state certified special needs schools, is unconstitutional.
  • In Texas, the Board of Education adopted a curriculum in elementary schools which implements optional Bible based education.
  • Legal experts vow to appeal a decision coming from India’s Supreme Court, which recently overturned a long standing policy that prohibited taxing the income of nuns and priests within government funded Catholic institutions.  
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Collection of Primary Sources on Islamic Law

From Cambridge University Press, here is a new source book on Islamic Law, Islamic Law in Context: A Primary Source Reader. The book covers Islamic legal reasoning generally and several topics specifically, such as diet, family life, contracts, and criminal law. The editors are scholars Omar Anchassi (Universität Bern) and Robert Gleave (University of Exeter). The publisher’s description follows:

This volume surveys the diversity of Islamic legal thought and practice, a 1500 – year tradition that has been cultivated throughout the Islamic world. It features translations of Islamic legal texts from across the spectrum of literary genres (including legal theory, judicial handbooks, pamphlets) that represent the range of temporal, geographic and linguistic contexts in which Islamic law has been, and continues to be, developed. Each text has been chosen and translated by a specialist. It is accompanied by an accessible introduction that places the author and text in historical and legal contexts and explains the state of the relevant field of study. An introduction to each section offers an overview of the genre and provides a useful bibliography. The volume will enable all researchers of Islamic law – established academics, undergraduate students, and general readers – to understand the tremendous and sometimes bewildering diversity of Islamic law, as well the continuities and common features that bind it together.

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Legal Spirits 064: A City Upon a Hill

Ever since President Ronald Reagan popularized the phrase in the 1980s, American leaders have referred to the United States as the “shining city on a hill.” Reagan adapted the phrase from John Winthrop, the 17th century governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who himself took it from the Gospel of Matthew. But the message has changed down the centuries. What began as a warning to carry out faithfully a mission from God became a boast about the United States and the benefits of human freedom. In this episode, Notre Dame historian Don Drakeman explores the original meaning of Winthrop’s text (Don argues it was in part a sales pitch to Puritan investors!) and its meaning today. Both are part of the American tradition: which meaning is the “real” one? Listen in!

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