This article examines the rise of ecclesial units in US prisons, wherein inmates are trained and certified for Christian evangelism as state-assigned inmate field ministers. Unlike general religious education programs in public prisons, these newer units, referred to within prison communities as God pods, function as ecclesial training centers for Christian ministry undertaken by matriculated state prisoners. The author contrasts the work of inmate field ministers with that of public chaplains governed by mandates of religious neutrality. Drawing from on-site and archival research, the author contends that these new programs instantiate Christian doctrine as government speech while imposing religious tests for public benefits upon state prisoners. The author profiles recent case law advancing a history-and-tradition standard for Establishment Clause cases, while noting the long-standing expectation of religious neutrality by public institutions. The author highlights recent scholarly accounts of US prisons as imbued with Christian theology amid a broader defunding of secular rehabilitation. While religious entrepreneurs have long delivered Christian programming in public prisons, new ecclesiastical units institutionalize Christian doctrine as state rehabilitation, raising urgent questions about religious liberty in the carceral sphere and the future of faith-based programming.

Douglas Laycock’s theory of substantive neutrality has had much to say about contemporary debates in U.S. law and religion, particularly for courts and scholars grappling with the problem of religious exemptions from general laws. It is fair to say that the U.S. Supreme Court has in many respects adopted Laycock’s approach in free exercise cases. But Laycock’s work on the Establishment Clause side has unfortunately been less influential on the Supreme Court. In the context of Establishment Clause challenges to government-sponsored religious expression, Laycock has argued that the government endorsement of religion through official sponsorship of religious speech violates substantive neutrality because government endorsement of religion encourages religious belief without leaving room for private individual choice. But the court has moved away from any consideration of endorsement or substantive neutrality in cases considering challenges to official religious expression, focusing instead on vaguely-described historical practices and understandings. In this article, the author explains the correctness and insightfulness of Laycock’s theory, which elucidates and justifies the Supreme Court’s now-abandoned endorsement doctrine and explains why the Supreme Court’s current approach to the issue of official religious speech is much more problematic than the substantive neutrality approach.

It was a puzzle to the British and has been a puzzle to historians ever since, why the American colonists, who enjoyed a degree of liberty, political autonomy, and even low taxation that was the envy of subjects in the home country, would join in a risky revolution to sever ties with the nation of their origin. The answer, according to Edmund Burke, was in large part religion. “Religion,” he explained to fellow members of Parliament in his “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies,” always a “principle of energy,” was “no way worn out or impaired” in North America—and that religion was of a particular kind. Burke wrote: “The religion most prevalent in our Northern Colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.” Of all faiths, this hyper-Protestantism, wrote Burke, is “the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.” This article sets out the ecclesiological, experiential, and theological differences among the largest Protestant denominations in Revolutionary America and the ways in which these differences contributed not just to the revolutionary spirit, but to the democratic and republican strands of revolutionary and constitutional thought in the new United States. The biggest contrast was between members and clergy of the Church of England, who were most involved to remain Loyalists, Reformed Protestants (Congregationalists and Presbyterians), who inclined toward republicanism, and Baptists, who were the most democratic and individualistic.

This festschrift essay honors the academic life and work of Douglas Laycock, one of the most important scholars and advocates in American law and religion. This essay offers tribute to a mentor from whom I took three classes and an independent study in law school, for whom I worked as a research assistant, and with whom I have remained in close conversation during my two decades in the academy. It also offers an insider’s account of Laycock’s intellectual project and influence—punctuated with stories, observations, and nuggets of wisdom drawn from a close reading of his scholarship and briefs. This essay traces Laycock’s career from his early academic work to his later role in landmark Supreme Court litigation, ultimately seeing Laycock’s deepest legacy as lying not only in the doctrines he helped shape, but in a model of intellectually serious, cross-ideological engagement that both inspires us and calls us to account.

Since the early centuries of Christianity, the pope has had help in governing the universal church. Throughout history, the power of the Roman Curia has been centralized in a curia of cardinals—at the expense of diminishing the role of the college of bishops. The Second Vatican Council’s contributions to the episcopate and the role of the laity inspired, if only in part, the reforms of Paul V and John Paul II. Praedicate Evangelium, the apostolic constitution authored by Pope Francis, emphasizes the pastoral dimension of the curia, the participation of the bishops, and the co-responsibility of all the faithful. It recognizes, for the first time in church history, the possibility that lay people can, in some cases, direct dicasteries. This historic statement is, however, a starting point for reform. Synodality and decentralization may require further changes both in the Roman Curia and at the diocesan level. In addition, there is an urgent need for the institutions and individuals involved in the central governance of the Catholic Church to ensure respect for the law, transparency, accountability, and anything that could constitute an abuse of power.

This article deals with late antique Jewish and Christian discourse on social hierarchy, martyrology, and attitudes toward the law and the commandments. I place Jewish and Christian attitudes to martyrdom in late antiquity within the larger system of the commandments. Beyond the circumstantial connections between martyrdom and the affirmation or violation of laws, I argue that martyrdom constitutes an important lens for the examination of the rule of the law and for the negotiation of socio-religious hierarchies. I argue that the elevation of martyrdom creates inner tension vis-à-vis the idea of life-long righteousness based on adherence to the law. I discuss the construction of martyrdom as the final and ultimate commandment, necessary for reaching a state of perfection. Through addressing a case where martyrdom is presented as competing with, if not substituting, a life according to the law, I discuss the theme of an upside-down world, which appears in both Christian and Rabbinic literature, concerning martyrs. In this framework, I discuss the view of martyrdom as a kind of stairway to heaven—an instrument for rapid advancement allowing to overtake those who lived according to the law—and the unique perception of law and martyrology in the fourth-century Syriac-Christian Book of Steps, which places the martyrs below the perfect.

The concept of mercy is often proposed as an antidote to the punitive excesses of our current criminal justice system. But this concept is typically presented in generalized, abstract terms that seem unworkable as a pragmatic decision strategy. Its religious origins and associations only add to this impression. In fact, however, if the biblical accounts of mercy are interpreted using the narrative strategy that is featured in current scholarship, an eminently practical decision protocol emerges from these accounts. This protocol diverges from the common or popular view of mercy. It omits the demand for contrition or gratitude on the part of the wrongdoer, viewing this as an effort to exercise domination rather than extending mercy, and minimizes compassion on the part of the decision maker due to its tendency to merge into favoritism. Instead, the protocol recommends that the decision maker deal with the wrongdoer on a direct personal level, suppress any emotional responses such as anger or indignation, and consider the collateral consequences of the proposed punishment. The author describes the way the protocol can be derived from leading biblical narratives about mercy, including the expulsion from the garden, the mark of Cain, Christ and the adulteress, and the prodigal son. He expands on this derivation by analyzing the book of Jonah, rejecting the common view that this work is a satire and treating it instead as a profound inquiry into the nature of mercy. He concludes by applying the protocol he has derived to policy level decisions in the criminal justice system, specifically judicial sentencing, administrative parole and the use of restorative justice.

This article discusses the significance of the extensive data-gathering procedures incorporated into recent synodal preparations and how they advance Pope Francis’s commitment to forging a church informed by a dialogue between theological ideas and empirical realities. Drawing on my prior case analysis of the Synod on the Family, I argue that despite the limits in place then on lay participation in the formal synod discussions, the diversity of the laity’s self-reported experiences penetrated the bishops’ deliberations. This achievement is in part a function of the synod communication structure whereby participants are allocated to shared-language groups, thus avoiding self-selection based on a priori doctrinal or country-specific biases; the resulting (forced) dialogue with difference helps foster the gradual development of more inclusive doctrinal framings as seen in the post-synodal Amoris Laetitia. In a historic expansion, the Synod on Synodality formally includes lay voting participants and therefore lay perspectives will directly shape the synod proposal outcomes. Like the bishops, lay Catholics do not speak with one voice, and thus the task of finding moral consensus will still necessarily require respectful mutual listening and reciprocal dialogue.