CSLR Silver Anniversary Conference Materials Posted Online
Transcripts, webcasts, DVDs, and news coverage of "From Silver to Gold: The Next 25 Years of Law and Religion" are now available online. The conference (October 24-26, 2007) celebrated the silver anniversary of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion (CSLR) at Emory University. Twenty-five internationally renowned scholars explored the issues of law and religion that the world is likely to face in the next quarter century.  

Currie Lecture in Law and Religion: The Most Reverend Wilton D. Gregory
The Most Reverend Wilton D. Gregory, Archbishop of Atlanta, will deliver the CSLR's annual Currie Lecture in Law and Religion October 7, 2008, 7:30 p.m. at Emory Law School's Tull Auditorium. Archbishop Gregory will reflect on the difficult moral and legal questions currently challenging the Catholic Church. The event is free and open to the public. Co-sponsor is The Aquinas Center of Theology at Emory. The Currie Lecture was founded in 1986 with a generous grant from Overton and Lavona Currie.  



Six New Books Tackle Love, Church-State, Islamic Law
CSLR scholars have released six new volumes on topics ranging from love in early African America to the role of mainline churches in policy-making to the future of Islamic law:

• Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari`a (Harvard University Press) by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im
• The Classical Foundations of the American Constitution: Prevailing Wisdom (Cambridge University Press) by David J. Bederman
• Love and Marriage in Early African America (Northeastern University Press) by Frances Smith Foster
• God and Government in the Ghetto: The Politics of Church-State Collaboration in Black America (University of Chicago Press) by Michael Leo Owens
• Public Pulpits: Methodists and Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument of Public Life (University of Chicago Press) by Steven M. Tipton
• The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge University Press) by John Witte, Jr.

CSLR Scholars Respond to Archbishop Rowan Williams' Remark on Shari`a
Michael J. Broyde, Martin E. Marty, and John Witte, Jr. published opinion pieces about Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' recent comment that accommodating some aspects of Islamic law (Shari`a) into British law is unavoidable. Broyde's piece, "There Can Be Only One Law of the Land," appeared in The Jewish Daily Forward February 20. Broyde is a CSLR senior fellow and professor of law at Emory. Marty made the controversy the focus of his February 25 e-mail column, Sightings. Marty, Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, has served as a CSLR visiting professor and frequent lecturer. Witte's article, The Future of Marriage, ran in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution February 24. Witte is Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and CSLR director. Read more.

Witte Receives Awards for Religious Liberty and Teaching
John Witte, Jr., Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and CSLR director, has won the 2008 National First Freedom Award for his contribution to advancing religious liberty in the United States. The Council for America's First Freedom presented the award January 16 in Richmond, Virginia. Read more. Christian Science Monitor article. Witte also took Emory's Crystal Apple Award for the second consecutive year. Students select faculty for this exceptional teaching honor annually. Read more. 


Alexander Advocates Land Reform in Post-Katrina Louisiana
CSLR Founding Director Frank S. Alexander, a national expert in affordable housing and urban redevelopment, is helping Louisiana reform its abandoned housing laws in light of the "legal storm" that followed Hurricane Katrina. "The trilogy of hurricanes in the fall of 2005 was, unfortunately, only the first of the storms that dramatically reshaped the landscape of Louisiana," said Alexander, a professor of law at Emory who leads the CSLR project on Affordable Housing and Community Development. "A second major storm hit the state and this time altered not the geographic landscape but its legal landscape, with equally far reaching results." Read more.

Green to Explore New Religion and Human Rights Horizon
M. Christian Green, a 1995 graduate of Emory Law, has returned as the CSLR Alonzo McDonald Family Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow, where she will assess religious human rights issues of the last decade at the national, regional, and international levels. Her work is part of a three-year CSLR project titled "Law, Religion, and Human Rights in International Perspective" funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, Inc.

Tributes to Harold J. Berman Available Online
Tributes to Harold J. Berman, Emory's first Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, are available online. Berman died November 13, 2007, in New York City. Considered the father of law and religion scholarship, he wrote 25 books and more than 400 articles, and delivered over 1,000 lectures in 40 countries during his long and productive life. His prize-wining book, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (1983), has been published in German, French, Chinese, Russian, Polish, Spanish, Italian and Lithuanian translations.  Obituary. Memorial Service Program. Interview (2007).