The Death & New Life of Law and Religion
Episode # 192 — Marc O. DeGirolami
“Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I’ll tell
you who time ambles withal, who time trots withal,
who time gallops withal, and who he stands still
withal.”
(William Shakespeare, AS YOU LIKE IT)
This week, we have a special episode. One near and dear to my heart and my own intellectual history. It is a conversation with professor Marc O. DeGirolami on his piece published in the Oxford Journal of Law & Religion covering the life and death of law and religion. Read it here.
In it, he takes us into the first wave of this movement and its advent forces with those like Harold Berman and John Witte, Jr., who took on the critical mantle of reacting to “the deconstruction of the American Christian legal heritage proceeding apace in the courts and the academy.” DeGirolami discusses the priorities that animated the early scholars of this movement and its eventual decline due not only to various forms of categorical capitulations and concept desuetude, but also the ravages of retirements and the changing landscape of legal discourse. As he writes, the “nature of religion, the plausibility of state neutrality, and the sustainability of religious exemption no longer merit the intellectual attention that they once did,” thus offering us a new vision for what this discipline might look like in the years to come (i.e., the “second wave”). We talk about all this and more!
Marc is the inaugural St. John Henry Newman Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Law and the Human Person. Before joining the Columbus School of Law in 2024, he was the Cary Fields Professor of Law and the Co-Director of the Mattone Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s Law School. He has also been a Visiting Professor and Visiting Fellow at Princeton University's Department of Politics, as well as a Visiting Professor at Notre Dame Law School and Catholic University, Columbus School of Law. His professional experience includes service as an Assistant District Attorney in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Full bio.
Enjoy!