When Shrugging is Not an Option
- May/June 2025
- April 30, 2025
Asma T. Uddin is an internationally renowned American-Muslim scholar, author, constitutional lawyer, and religious freedom advocate. As a lawyer, she has defended the religious freedom rights of Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Native Americans, and Jews. But with her 2019 book, When Islam Is Not a Religion, Ms. Uddin opened a national conversation about Christian perceptions
READ MORECan we protect both public health and freedom of religious conscience when it comes to vaccine mandates? We’re almost two years into the pandemic caused by COVID-19, and among the many still-contested questions is how businesses and organizations can best protect both their employees and their communities.Vaccine mandates are still generating pushback and vaccine hesitancy
READ MOREIn the West we often take technology for granted. We grow frustrated when the internet at home or the office goes down, even if only for a few moments. We grow impatient when we can’t quickly find what we are looking for online. We become outraged when technology companies seem to routinely misapply their content
READ MORENigeria is the most populous country in Africa, the continent’s largest democracy, and is poised to become the third-largest country in the world by 2050. Based on these facts alone, one would think the country is on a path to prosperity. But in fact Nigeria is teetering on the edge of political and social dysfunction
READ MOREIn my previous job as a religious freedom advocate on Capitol Hill, I once got into conversation with someone whose approach to advocacy, frankly, defied common sense. He represented a minority faith, the Sikhs—a numerically tiny religious community that’s a mere footnote in the religious demographics of most countries. Yet, despite their small numbers, they
READ MOREHow do gender and sexual minority students really fare at Christian colleges and universities? This is a key question in Hunter v. U.S. Department of Education, a legal challenge to the religious exemption to Title IX’s provisions forbidding colleges to discriminate on the basis of sexuality and gender. The Religious Exemption Accountability Project (REAP), an
READ MORESam Brownback has a habit of defying expectations. His childhood on his parents’ farm in the tiny community of Parker, Kansas—population 277— offered few hints he would someday represent his state in the U.S. Congress, first in the House of Representatives and later in the Senate, before coming home to serve as the state’s forty-sixth
READ MOREIn late-seventeenth-century England, many children of nonconformist parents experienced the horror of religious persecution. In these rarely told stories of faithful suffering, we can trace the fragile roots of a growing social acceptance of a new idea: religious tolerance. Religious liberty in the Anglo-American tradition has its origins in the seventeenth century, but emerged only
READ MOREGrowing up in the 1980s, like countless elementary school students before me, I played dodgeball whenever going outside was not an option. We chose teams, lined up in the gym, and hurled soft(ish) balls at each other, and whoever did not get hit was crowned the victor. It was just one of the many Darwinian
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