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  • First, Define Your Terms0

    Two significant, and not unrelated, news stories broke in June. Pat Robertson, a religious and cultural juggernaut for the past five decades, died at 93. And a state charter school board in Oklahoma approved the nation’s first religious charter school. Taking the Oklahoma story first, consider these two facts. Under Oklahoma law, all charter schools

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  • Can We Talk?0

    Talking to people we disagree with is hard. We should do it anyway. Disagreement is nothing new. As long as there have been choices, there have been differences of opinion. While it has always been gratifying to engage with like-minded people, there seems to have been a fundamental shift in recent years: a reluctance, or

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  • Be Careful What You Wish For0

    Illustration by Michael Glenwood Would the Texas Ten Commandments proposal have passed constitutional muster? And more importantly, how will future “Ten Commandments laws” fare? The recent attempt by legislators in Texas to mandate the posting of the Ten Command­ments in a “conspicuous place” in all public school classrooms reflects emerging fallout from the Supreme Court’s

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  • Adventures in Christian Authoritarianism0

    Book Review In his recent book, Common Good Constitutionalism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022), Harvard University law professor Adrian Vermuele lays out a provocative judicial philosophy. It’s an approach some call “bold” and “thought-provoking” and others simply describe as “dangerous.” Adrian Vermeule, the controversial professor of law at Harvard University, first described his judicial philosophy—common-​good

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  • A Religious Freedom Wake-up Call0

    Religious liberty is a long-standing American value. Yet this freedom to worship or act upon religious conscience without unnecessary interference by the government is also a principle taken for granted, misused, and underappreciated. There is growing concern that this trend will continue or worsen.  The latest edition of the Religious Freedom Index shows that some

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  • The Man in the Tiger Chair0

    Nury Turkel was born in China, a member of an oppressed ethnic and religious minority. Today he is a Uyghur American attorney and chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent government agency that monitors religious freedom violations around the world. In this excerpt from his recently published book, No Escape: The

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