Religion & Law

The reviewer--Professor of Law and English, Cornell University; Mellon/LAPA Fellow in Law and Humanities and Visiting Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University--says that "[t]hese comments were initially presented at the book celebrations in honor of Steve Shiffrin held at Cornell Law School in November of 2009. Discussions with copanelists Sally Gordon and Kent Greenawalt, as well as with Steve himself, helped shape the final version of these remarks."

The abstract:

This essay comments on Steve Shiffrin's The Religious Left and Church-State Relations. It contends, on the one hand, that Shiffrin has valuably brought to the fore various reasons why religious believers might resist close relations between church and state. On the other hand, it argues that no fundamental connection exists between the "religious Left" and a particular position on church-state relations and that religious liberals will not necessarily be more persuasive than secular liberals in arguing against positions espoused by religious conservatives.



[Paper downloadable here.]