Recently, I served as a panelist at a symposium hosted by the Religious Freedom Education Project at the Newseum called “Defining religious freedom: Current challenges, future directions.” The day-long event included two well-moderated panels and considerable audience participation, focusing on fundamental questions about religious liberty. With court challenges involving contraception and same-sex marriage as the backdrop, the symposium provided a rare and welcome opportunity for a broad, civil discussion about current and future religious liberty challenges in a changing landscape.

The conversation also reflected a need for more in-depth consideration of the free exercise of religion as we approach the 20th anniversary of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

Click here to read the rest of the column.

Our good friends, Buddy and Kay Shurden, invited me to come to Macon to have lunch with them in the fall of 2004. They said they had something they wanted to talk over with me. You cannot possibly imagine how hard my jaw hit the floor when, after a very nice lunch, they handed me a check for $100,000 to endow a lectureship on religious liberty and the separation of church and state. This was an astonishingly generous gift from two teachers on the cusp of retirement after rearing and educating three children and performing many acts of generosity toward their church and other charitable causes.

Click here to read the rest of the column.