Law, Religion, and Freedom: Conceptualizing a Common Right: A New Book Considers Issues Critical to Our Times

Donlu Thayer is a Senior Fellow at the International Center for Law and Religion Studies. Before her retirement at the end of 2019, she was the Center’s Publications Director. This blogpost is modified from Thayer’s Introduction to Law, Religion, and Freedom: Conceptualizing a Common Right, which she edited with Cole Durham and Javier Martínez-Torrón, recently released by Routledge as part of its ICLARS Series on Law and Religion.

In September 2016, some 150 international experts in law and religion from 37 countries met at St. Hugh’s College in Oxford for the fourth conference of the International Consortium for Law and Religion Studies (ICLARS). The event was co-sponsored by the International Center for Law and Religion Studies (ICLRS) of BYU Law School, by the Religion, Law and International Relations Programme of the Centre for Christianity and Culture of Regent’s Park College, Oxford, and by the University of Milan.

The conference was organized with attention to the theme ‘Freedom of/for/from/within Religion: Differing Dimensions of a Common Right?’  Two books were developed from papers delivered at the conference and from subsequent conversations related to the theme: Religious Freedom and the Law: Emerging Contexts for Freedom for and from Religion, edited by Brett Scharffs, Asher Maoz, and Ashley Woolley, and the book introduced here, which provides conceptual frameworks for and queries aspects of the theme.

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Conversation: Digitalization of Religion in Times of COVID-19


Marco Ventura is a professor with tenure in law and religion at the University of Siena and the Director of the Center for Religious Studies at Fondazione Bruno Kessler of Trento

Causing many religious activities to go online and resort to new information and communication technologies, the COVID-19 related lockdown and social distancing is transforming digital religion, a growing reality and research area for the last 20 years, into a mass experience. Quickly, the pre-pandemic niche experience and study is being replaced by a new reality and knowledge of digital religion, associated with controversies over conflicting interpretations of the process. Reacting to the transition into our pandemic-driven new age of digital religion, the four blogs gathered here contribute valuable information and present the many faces of the debate on how good or bad, digitalization of religion is (as well as on how actors should handle such momentous transformation).

In this attempt to briefly introduce the four texts and organize the extraordinary fluidity of digital religion in times of COVID-19, I would like to highlight four key elements of the reality, knowledge, and debate we are confronted with as we try to get ready for the new scenario.

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Prisoners of an Image Secularization as an Epidemic


Paolo Costa is a researcher at the Center for Religious Sciences of Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, Italy.

The post was first published on the Bruno Kessler Foundation’s Center for Religious Studies’ website.

Photographing the Void

What will stay with us after the  COVID-19 pandemic is over is not only the bewilderment at a life change that no sane person could have foreseen only a few months ago or the collective anxiety for an indeterminate and insidious threat impending over mankind. Besides this,  some images have disturbed the consciences of those who, to evoke Max Weber, are still religiously musical despite the inexorable process of the disenchantment of the world.

Some of these images have already gone down in history.

The most evocative ones are the photographs of Pope Francis shot during the extraordinary Urbi et Orbi blessing of March 27. Overlooking a deserted and rain-lashed Saint Peter’s Square, he gave voice to the feeling of disorientation afflicting Christians and non-Christians alike since the beginning of the pandemic with these powerful words:

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