Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-fv566 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T11:52:38.561Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2015

Extract

The essays that follow were originally presented at a conference held in connection with the bicentennial of Georgetown University. The topic, the constitutional status of claims for exemption based on religion from general legislation, fit well into the bicentennial's theme “Learning, Faith, Freedom.” The connection between claims based upon faith and the freedoms we exercise could be illuminated by a scholarly examination drawing upon the disciplines of law, history, and theology.

The historical studies provide an overview of the background of the religion clauses of the first amendment, and a case study of the implementation of the principles of those clauses in the nineteenth century. Father Curry's essay stresses the inconsistency between the articulated principles of nonestablishment and free exercise, and the actual practices in the colonies and early republic. By bringing the historian's sense of the complexity of experience to the subject, he provides a useful corrective to the lawyer's usual effort to rely too heavily on historical experience to justify contemporary positions about the meaning of the first amendment. At the same time, Father Curry does not hesitate to say that the inconsistencies between historical practice and principles should probably be resolved in favor of principles, on the ground that practices were unreflective and habitual, whereas principles were articulated in the midst of controversies that required Americans to think seriously about the nature of their most fundamental commitments.

Type
Georgetown Symposium on Church and State and Society and Law Colloquium
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. The conference was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Georgetown University Office of the Bicentennial. I would like to thank Maeva Marcus, June Jones, and Kathleen Lesko for their assistance in presenting the conference.

2. See Tushnet, , “Of Church and State and the Supreme Court”: Kurland Revisited, 1989 Sup. Ct. Rev. 373Google Scholar.

3. 495 U.S. —, 110 S.a. 1595 (1990).