Overview

This updated edition of Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment provides a comprehensive, multidisciplinary overview of the history, theory, law, and comparative analysis of American religious liberty from the earliest colonial period through the most recent Supreme Court cases. In accessible, jargon-free language, the authors present balanced discussions of controversial issues, including the funding of religious schools and charities and displaying religious symbols on government property. Three chapters new to this edition cover the free exercise of religion, religion and public life, and religious organizations and the law. In addition, the authors address seven new cases, and an expanded concluding chapter places the American experience in a global context by comparing contemporary American religious liberty law with international human rights standards.

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9780813344751

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This study of America's ongoing effort to secure religious freedom through constitutional law is invaluable, and illuminating, for students and scholars alike. The key principles that originally informed and inspired that effort are identified and clarified; important ideas like 'church-state separation' and 'liberty of conscience' are unpacked; the twists and turns of the Supreme Court's First Amendment decisions and doctrines are helpfully navigated; and the American model of religious liberty is put in revealing conversation with others around the world. This edition's new and timely treatments of the rights and role of religious organizations, and of present-day attempts to downplay the distinctiveness of religion, make an already indispensable resource even better than it was. --<b>Richard W. Garnett, Notre Dame Law School</b> In this fine, scholarly book... authors John Witte, Jr., and Joel A. Nichols construct for the reader an excellent foundation for understanding the religious issues that have captured the attention of Americans since European settlers first came to these shores. --<b><i>The Law and Politics Book Review</b></i> <b>Praise for Previous Editions: </b>

This new edition of John Witte's indispensable volume, done in collaboration with Joel Nichols, lives up to the standards of the previous volumes. Anyone interested in religious liberty and freedom, besieged in so many parts of the world, will find their narrative of the struggle for religious rights and liberties in American history illuminating. It is impossible to recommend this book too highly. <br> --Jean Bethke Elshtain, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics, The University of Chicago, author most recently of Sovereignty: God, State and Self, her Gifford lectures <br> This book is an extremely valuable, easily readable, history of understandings of free exercise and nonestablishment. In a field in which that history is often portrayed to support one modern outlook or another, the account the authors provide is lucid, full, balanced, and highly persuasive. <br> --Kent Greenawalt, Columbia Law School <br> This study of America's ongoing effor

Author Information

John Witte, Jr., is the Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and Ethics, Alonzo L. McDonald Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University in Atlanta. A specialist in legal history and religious liberty, he has published twenty-three books, ten journal symposia, and 150 professional articles, and has lectured throughout North America, Europe, Israel, Japan, and South Africa. Joel A. Nichols is Associate Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. He holds degrees in both theology and law, and he has authored a dozen articles and book chapters addressing the intersection of theology and religion with constitutional law, human rights, and family law.

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