True Family Lecture: “The Great Awakenings of American Religious Freedom: Evaluating the Latest Supreme Court Teachings”
True Family Lecture: "The Great Awakenings of American Religious Freedom,"
Our speaker is Professor John Witte, Woodruff University Professor, McDonald Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Law and Religion Center at Emory University.
The first True Family Lecture on September 4 will map the new great awakening of American religious liberty, highlighting distinctive teachings that cut across the United States Supreme Court’s recent cases. Professor Witte will explain how religious freedom is a precious gift of God to protect, not a prerogative of one political party to brandish. He will also warn of the ample challenges that remain and outline how a people of faith might use this religious freedom wisely to love and serve all their neighbors, not least those of different faiths. In his second lecture on September 5, Professor Witte will explore the founding era in an effort to discern the original understanding of the First Amendment and to test whether and to what extent the Supreme Court’s current religious freedom jurisprudence lives up to this “original” understanding. Please join us for this very special lecture series.
Professor Witte's two lectures are the inaugural True Family Lectures, an endowed lecture series designed to produce scholarly manuscripts related to the principles and practices of American Constitutionalism.
This event is open to the communities of Holy Cross College, Saint Mary's College, and the University of Notre Dame, as well as the general public. Lunch will be available at 12:00 noon.
Biography of Professor John Witte, Jr.
John Witte, Jr. is Woodruff University Professor, McDonald Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Law and Religion Center at Emory University. A leading scholar of legal history, human rights, family law, and law and religion, he has delivered 425 public lectures worldwide and published 325 articles and 45 books, in 15 languages. His most recent monographs include the following, published with Cambridge University Press: The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy (2015), Church, State, and Family (2019), The Blessings of Liberty (2021), as well as Faith, Freedom, and Family (Mohr Siebeck, 2021), and Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment (Oxford University Press, 2022). In addition to his administrative duties, Professor Witte serves as editor of the Cambridge Law and Christianity Series and Emory Studies in Law and Religion and co-editor of the Journal of Law and Religion, Brill Research Perspectives on Law and Religion, and the Aranzadi Colección Raíces del Derecho series. He holds degrees in law (Harvard University) and theology (Dr. Theol. h.c., University of Heidelberg).