In one of the more recent, and perhaps the most personally revelatory, of his long list of books published over the past forty-some years, John Witte, Jr. recalls that as a child and adolescent growing up in Canada, he played a lot of soccer.1 Or, at least, he played enough to be sufficiently skillful as a center halfback to be in the thick of things much of the time. Playing offense as well as defense, he had opportunities to score but also to steal the ball from opponents. What gave him as much pleasure as anything, he remembers, was the joy of passing the ball at just the right moment to enable a teammate to score. This assist counted almost as much as if John had scored the goal himself. Toting up stats at the end of the season, he took great pride in the number of his assists.
Comparing this sporting activity to his professional life, John reflected in this recent essay that he still finds satisfaction as a kind of intellectual center halfback. In his work as a teacher, scholar, and director of an influential academic center, joy often comes in passing the ball—in this case, suggesting a dissertation topic for a student, inviting a colleague for a visiting lectureship, or collaborating on a book. All of these initiatives involve fellow scholars—teammates—in probing the relationship of law and religion.
This game has been going on much longer than regulation—some forty years—and by now the score has been run-up to ridiculous numbers. And along the way, John Witte has made more assists than statisticians can adequately tabulate.
The playing field for much of this fun has been Emory University, where John served from 1987 to 2022 as director of what is now called the Center for the Study of Law and Religion (CSLR). In 2022, he stepped away from day-to-day administration of the center and appointed a new executive director while
The center was the brainchild of James T. Laney, who served as president of Emory from 1977 to 1993. Trained as an ethicist and committed to the highest standards of academic excellence, he aimed to make Emory a beacon of higher purpose in academia. In his view, the university should instill in students “the kind of moral vision that transcends parochial interests and nurtures the sympathy and understanding necessary for moral judgment.” Universities, in his thinking, should educate the heart as well as the mind—deepening students’ humanity as well as expanding their intellectual horizons. Graduates should leave the university to build and serve a saner, more resilient, more firmly founded civil society. Laney’s firm conviction, he said, was that “the university should be a scene of fertile intellectual conversation, where different disciplines fructify each other. The university also has a moral calling to work toward the larger common good.”
Impelled by that exalted image of the university, Laney encouraged interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship. Building bridges between the schools and departments across the campus, he thought, would foster collaboration, deepen understanding, and unveil new insights. Most important, cross-fertilization would nurture commitments to the common weal beyond the campus. The Law and Religion Program, as it was then called, was founded in 1982 as one of the first Emory initiatives in response to this vision. Witte became its director in 1987 and would later acquire distinguished titles as Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law and McDonald Distinguished Professor of Religion.
The CSLR website declares the center’s intention to probe the religious dimensions of law, the legal dimensions of religion, and the interaction of legal and religious ideas and institutions. Now offering six advanced-degree programs, numerous cross-listed courses, and dozens of student and postdoc fellowships, the center over the years has brought together scores of Emory faculty, hundreds of students and fellows, and thousands of conference participants from around the world. Luminaries such as President Jimmy Carter (the University Distinguished Professor at Emory since 1982), Archbishop Desmond Tutu (a Robert W. Woodruff Visiting Professor at Emory in the 1990s), and the Dalai Lama (the Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory) have graced the center’s lecterns. Dozens of research projects have made CSLR the hub of a global network of some sixteen hundred scholars. It is truly a steeple of excellence on the Emory campus.
The vision for such fruitful interdisciplinary study actually inspired Emory leaders as far back as 1952, when the University recruited Ernest Cadman Colwell to establish the Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts (ILA). Colwell knew what he was doing. An Emory alumnus twice over (college and theology), he had been president of the University of Chicago, whose prestigious Committee on Social Thought offered a model for the ILA. Wags joked that the acronym ILA stood for “I’ll learn anything.” But the faculty of the ILA worked with absolute seriousness of purpose. The programs of the institute relied on the collegiality of faculty members in quite different departments. Religion consorted with literature. Women’s studies brought together departments of English, sociology, anthropology, and history. African American studies spanned the humanities and social sciences. Some of these programs, such as African American studies and women’s studies, in time became freestanding departments offering their own PhD degrees.
Laney intended ambitiously to expand this interdisciplinary work beyond the liberal arts into the professional schools. If scholars in religion and literature could collaborate, why couldn’t faculty members in the schools of law and theology, or business and medicine, or theology and nursing. Academic deans, recruited to fulfill this ambition, soon structured their budgets and degree programs to chart the path forward. (Even before the Laney administration, the law school had experimented in this vein by appointing Jonas Robitscher in 1971 as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Law and the Behavioral Sciences; he served on the faculty of both the law school and the medical school until his death in 1981. Witte was appointed in 1993 as the first Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law, a title he held until his appointment as Robert Woodruff Professor of Law in 2014.)
The program in law and religion became the pioneer in this endeavor. By good fortune, a young attorney named Frank Alexander, sporting JD and MTS degrees from Harvard, had returned to his native South to practice law. For him the law was a form of ministry, a means to serve as well as to understand concepts common to both law and religion—concepts like fault, justice, freedom, and responsibility. Laney had met Alexander years before, when Alexander was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and in the spring of 1981, Alexander accepted an invitation to teach at Emory Law School. The next year, with Laney’s encouragement, he established a joint- degree program with courses cross-listed in the schools of law and theology.
Nearing mandatory retirement from Harvard in the mid-1980s, Berman welcomed Laney’s offer to extend his career at Emory as the first Woodruff Professor of Law and as a fellow in the Law and Religion Program. There he continued his teaching and scholarship for twenty-two more years, until his death in 2007. He also served as a fellow at the Carter Center, which had been established in affiliation with Emory by former President Carter.
Berman brought to Emory another Harvard Law School protégé, John Witte, Jr., who arrived in 1985 as “a stowaway in Hal Berman’s briefcase,” as Witte once put it. In time, Witte would succeed Berman as Woodruff Professor of Law and as a leader in the field of law and religion. Beginning life at Emory as a research fellow for Berman, Canada-born Witte stepped out of academia briefly to practice law before receiving his own invitation from President Laney in 1987 to join the Emory Law School faculty and direct the center. Thus began John’s long game of making shots on goal and, to Emory’s great benefit, passing the ball to colleagues for innumerable assists.
Under his direction, the center grew from a small joint-degree curriculum with a few courses into a full-fledged academic powerhouse sponsoring groundbreaking research, teaching hundreds of students each year, hosting international conferences, and issuing an ever-flowing stream of publications. He has hosted dozens of roundtable conferences around the world and delivered hundreds of public lectures on six continents, including the 2022 Gifford Lectures.
2 Overcoming the Skeptics
If the result of all this labor has been to enliven and extend the field of law and religion to other campuses around the world, the effect on the home campus
In law schools especially, skeptics thought of examining modern law through a religious lens as an antiquated and misguided enterprise, something that had been undertaken in medieval universities but was made obsolete by modern positivism. Worse, perhaps, in this view, the enterprise distracted professors and students from the real aim of professional education, which is to prepare good lawyers for the nuts-and-bolts activities of keeping a rule-of-law society operating with airtight contracts, smooth-running judicial processes, and clear and comprehensive legislation. The connection of religion to the law was only of historical interest.
Of course, at the very moment when the Law and Religion Program was being established at Emory, religion come to the fore on the world stage. American politicians on the conservative end of the political spectrum in the late 1970s and 1980s began calling America to claim and return to what they perceived as the nation’s Christian foundation. In some ways this was not much different than Martin Luther King Jr. quoting Amos and President Carter quoting Micah while exhorting Americans to righteousness and justice. Religion had played a role in American public life forever.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, religious leaders like Archbishop Desmond Tutu were denouncing the oppressive apartheid regime in South Africa, while Pope John Paul II was giving hope to reforming believers and nonbelievers alike that the Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe would crack and collapse. Astonishingly, 1991 recorded not only the repeal of South African apartheid laws but also the lowering of the Soviet flag over Moscow, thanks in no small part to the influence of religion on people’s understanding of what makes for a just society.
3 Law and Religion Take Center Stage at Emory
That landmark year also provided the occasion for Emory’s Law and Religion Program to prove its mettle at home. Witte, Alexander, and colleagues
The conference proceedings, edited by Witte and published as Christianity and Democracy in Global Context (Westview, 1993), precipitated a flood of publications in the years to come. In a telling ratification of the interdisciplinary vision for Emory, five of the eighteen chapters in the book were written by Emory faculty members not in the law school, while University Professor Carter wrote the foreword and Visiting Professor Tutu the postscript. That amounts to seven “assists” from Witte to his Emory teammates and a dozen more to players around the world.
A second major project launched by Witte brought to Emory several other leading human-rights scholars. Building on the conference on Christianity and democracy, the center broadened its focus to include Jewish and Muslim contributions to cultivating and protecting religious freedom and human rights in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Another international conference brought Tutu back to campus, where he was joined by Martin E. Marty, the eminent University of Chicago church historian, and John T. Noonan Jr., judge of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and prolific author on legal and religious matters. Fifty other speakers and eight hundred conference attendees filled out the conversations. A variety of publications resulted, most notably a two-volume, fifteen-hundred-page anthology on Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective (Martinus Nijhoff, 1996).
This project also introduced the Emory community to an international faculty star, who for the next three decades would add his own luster to the center and the Emory law firmament. Johan D. Van der Vyver had burnished his reputation on human rights as a professor in South Africa, first at Potchefstroom University and later at the University of Witwatersrand, where he was an outspoken opponent of apartheid. Coming to Emory in 1990–91 as a visiting distinguished professor, he was appointed to the I. T. Cohen Professorship of International Law and Human Rights in 1995. That same year, President Carter appointed him as a fellow in the Human Rights Program of the Carter Center.
4 Expanding beyond the Christian Paradigm
As the 1990s deepened, Witte and the Law and Religion Program began to find at Emory a congenial culture for what they were trying to do. A survey of faculty members throughout the university in the early 1990s found that, contrary to what had been happening among U.S. academics in the 1970s, more than half of Emory faculty members considered religion to be an important aspect of their research or scholarship. This was true whether they were humanists, social scientists, or natural scientists, and whether they were in the school of business, law, medicine, nursing, public health, or theology. Clearly there were opportunities for the Law and Religion Program to build collaborative relationships and draw on intellectual and financial resources throughout the university for future programming.
One of the earliest collaborative partners and advocates was in the Emory College Department of Religion. David Blumenthal, now retired as the Jay and Leslie Cohen Professor of Judaic Studies, remarks that “law as a religious category” is crucial in Judaism; that is, law and religion are two sides of the same coin of daily life. So it was natural for him to say yes when invited to join the Emory conversations on law and religion in the 1980s. Having joined the Emory faculty in 1976, Blumenthal was an early advocate of cross-disciplinary scholarship and a stalwart participant in the program on law and religion.
He also was instrumental in bringing to Emory two prolific contributors to the center’s efforts. The first of those was Michael J. Broyde, who was both a rabbi with degrees from Yeshiva University and a lawyer educated at the New York University School of Law. Recruited to Emory College in 1991, Broyde also taught as an adjunct in the law school, where he moved three years later. Witte laid out a welcome mat at the door of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, where Broyde established the Law and Judaism Program in 1996.
About the same time, Blumenthal was introducing Witte to Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, an outspoken and intellectually powerful Muslim human-rights advocate from Sudan. An exile from his homeland, where he had become involved in the push for freedom, equality, and human rights against
An-Naim’s book Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights and International Law (Syracuse, 1990), set the course of his work for the next three decades. His method was to go back to the sources of his faith, stripped of centuries of legal and cultural accretion, and to suggest ways to live by those simple teachings. His central claim was that the Qur’an and Hadith of the Prophets were better than humanly created sharia as a guide to faithful living. Now the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Emory Law School, An-Naim has directed three major explorations of various dimensions of human rights in Islamic context, among other projects.
5 Keeping the Team Together and the Game Alive
John Witte’s ability as an academic leader may derive in part from that youthful joy that he found playing center halfback decades ago. Gathering a constellation of productive and pathbreaking academics in law and religion has required him to have not only the kind of intellect that is the coin of the realm in academia but also personal qualities that instill friendship and loyalty. In a recent collection of his essays titled Faith, Freedom, and Family (Mohr-Siebeck, 2021), he expatiates on “the three things people will die for”—the three f-words in the title. To these three I would add “friendship,” which is a layer of the bedrock of his way of being in the world. He cultivates friendship the way a rose gardener tends to bushes and blooms. That has been true as well of his nurturing of relationships within the Center for the Study of Law and Religion and across the university. With possible rare exceptions (and I know of none), the colleagues whom he has recruited as academic collaborators he counts also as friends—a sentiment no doubt reciprocated.
During the first two decades of leading the center, John and others laid the groundwork for the long-term fulfillment of President Laney’s vision of a more structured program in law and religion. What began as a two-person administrative operation—Witte and a part-time assistant—in a faculty office on the fifth floor of the law school building grew into a major academic enterprise. An entire suite on the third floor of the Emory Law School now houses six full-time staff, seven faculty members, and the Harold J. Berman Library as well as space for student interns. Any given year also brings a flock of postdocs who receive financial support and teaching opportunities as they leaven the intellectual community.
The Pew grant came in part as recognition of how deeply and widely religion as a subject suffused the work of scholars throughout Emory University, not only in the humanities and professions but also in the social sciences and natural sciences. Indeed, a university strategic plan five years later, in 2005, made “religions and the human spirit” a key theme for development over the next ten years.
More funding would follow over the next two decades—some twenty-five million dollars, including generative grants from the Lilly Endowment, the Ford Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Consciousness Development Foundation, the Judy and Michael Steinhardt Foundation, the Fieldstead Institute, the FUNVICA Foundation, and the Social Science Research Network, among others.
Individual benefactors have proved munificent as well. One of the most consistent and personally engaged was Alonzo L. McDonald, a 1948 Emory College alumnus and later member of the Emory Board of Trustees. This former McKinsey CEO had also served as an ambassador and White House chief of staff under President Carter. A devout Christian who converted to Roman Catholicism late in life, McDonald had long been interested in scholarship that promised to deepen Christian faith. Through his McDonald Agape Foundation, he underwrote programs and scholars not only at Emory but also at Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg, Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Georgetown, Duke, and Hong Kong. His sole criteria seemed to be scholarly excellence and productivity. One of his favorite lines was “Perfection is tolerated.” Impact was critical.
Again—tote up the number of assists here, and the stat board begins to light up.
6 Engaging New People at Emory
After stepping down as director of the center in 1987, Frank Alexander remained active as a faculty member teaching law and religion but also worked closely with Witte in various ways. They ran two or three roundtable conferences each year and published volumes together: Modern Christian Teachings on Law, Politics, and Human Nature (3 vols., Columbia, 2006); Christianity and Law: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2008); and Christianity and Human Rights (Cambridge, 2010). But as Alexander began shifting his work to issues of housing and community development, Witte had the good fortune of finding a new collaborator in a brilliant and creative Spanish legal scholar, Rafael Domingo, who joined the center in 2012.
Witte recounts that he received a call out of the blue from Joseph Weiler, director of the Strauss Institute at New York University School of Law. Weiler said that Domingo had just finished a fellowship there and was interested in continuing his scholarly focus on law and Christianity at Emory. Was there room? Witte said there was, and thus did Domingo come to Atlanta, to the delight of his center colleagues.
Tenured as a young man at the University of Navarra, in Spain, where he served as dean of the law school for a time, Domingo has attacked the keyboard with a vengeance, authoring three books and editing five others in his first six years at Emory. Now the Spruill Family Professor of Law and Religion, he adds special expertise in Roman law and European legal history, along with a relentless work ethic. He is also charting new territory by examining the emerging “global law” and, most creatively, exploring the role of God and religion in modern legal systems, the connections between spirituality and the professions, and the spirit of the law beyond its letter.
Other alumni of the center continue to play a part in its ongoing scholarship and teaching. Justin Latterell arrived at Emory to pursue a PhD in religion and wrote his dissertation under the direction of Witte and CSLR Senior Fellow Steven M. Tipton, of the theology school, with a focus on secularization and the intersection of religion, ethics, and law. After completing his degree, Latterell stayed on as a McDonald Fellow and, eventually, director of academic programs at the center and book-review editor for the Journal of Law and Religion.
Terri Montague earned her JD and MTS degrees from Emory in 2014 after serving for three years as the first president and CEO of Atlanta’s BeltLine, a three-billion-dollar community development project. After a term as adviser to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Montague returned to CSLR in 2021 as a McDonald Senior Fellow and senior lecturer in law.
Farther from Emory but still closely associated with the work of the center, Witte has coauthored with Joel A. Nichols and Richard Garnett the preeminent monograph on U.S. constitutional law on religion, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, now in its fifth edition from Oxford University Press. Nichols earned JD and MDiv degrees from Emory in 2000, eventually joining the faculty at Pepperdine Law School. He is now dean and the Mengler Chair in Law at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Other alumni/ae whose careers Witte has helped lay the foundation for include:
- –Bernice King, who earned her MDiv and JD degrees in 1990; she is the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and CEO of the King Center in Atlanta, which carries on King’s work to create “the Beloved Community.”
- –Sara Toering, who earned MDiv and JD degrees from Emory in 2006; she was the first person to be awarded the prestigious Robert W. Woodruff
Fellowship in both the theology school and the law school and currently serves as general counsel for the Center for Community Progress, in Atlanta. - –Matthew J. Tuininga, who earned his PhD in religion at Emory in 2014 working with CSLR faculty, and taught at Emory, Oglethorpe University, and the University of the South (Sewanee) before joining the faculty of Calvin Theological Seminary in 2016.
- –Audra Savage, JD (Columbia), who completed her LLM (2014) and SJD (2018) degrees at Emory and held a CSLR postdoctoral fellowship in religion and human rights before her appointment in 2021 as assistant professor of law at Wake Forest Law School.
- –Major Coleman, PhD (Chicago), set to complete his SJD in 2023, recently appointed as assistant professor of law at North Carolina Central Law School.
- –M. Christian (Christy) Green, JD/MDiv (1995), who went on to earn a PhD from the University of Chicago. As an independent scholar, she publishes widely on religion and human rights, religion and the environment, religious developments in Africa, and religion and the family. She is special content editor of the Journal of Law and Religion and is a member of the journal’s international editorial board.
- –Eric Wang, a Robert W. Woodruff Fellow in Emory Law School, is already a rising star in law and religion. A summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University, he studies theology, labor, and industrialization through the writings of leading progressive theorists, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, Abraham Kuyper, and Lyman Abbott.
7 New Projects
With fresh investments and infusions of strong scholars, CSLR in the 2000s and 2010s embarked on a series of projects focused on faith perspectives of the family. Most notable for involving distinguished faculty members from around Emory was the five-year project on “Sex, Marriage, and Family and the Religions of the Book” (2001–06). This comprehensive study delved into how Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have shaped laws governing sex, marriage, and family life. The bitter culture wars over gender and sexuality, gay marriage, and abortion provided the context for charting the complexities of faith in relation to family law. Codirected by Witte and Don S. Browning, a visiting Woodruff Professor from the University of Chicago and renowned scholar of
As this project moved toward publication, CSLR embarked on another one under the rubric “The Child in Law, Religion, and Society” (2005–10). This interdisciplinary exploration brought into sharp relief issues of childrearing, children’s rights, education, child abuse, poverty, homelessness, juvenile delinquency, violence, and public policy responses. Directed by Witte and Martin Marty, this project also drew on a range of Emory scholars, including Martha Fineman, Woodruff Professor of Law; Brooks Holifield, Candler Professor of American Church History; and Robyn Fivush, Candler Professor of Psychology. Similarly productive, the project yielded thirteen public forums and twenty-four volumes.
The third major project in this series was on “Faith-Based Family Laws in Pluralistic and Democratic States” (2008–13), led by An-Naim, Broyde, and Christy Green. Funded by the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Network, this project offered a rich comparative study of religious family laws in various parts of Africa and the West. A comprehensive website, a score of public forums in African lands, and a journal symposium resulted.
While guiding these projects and directing the center, Witte continued his own prodigious pace of publication, with forty-five books, three hundred articles, and eighteen journal symposia to his name, on topics ranging from human rights to marriage, from family law to constitutional law, and from the Protestant Reformation to the transmission of values in late modern pluralistic societies.
By the time CSLR was ready to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, in 2007, the global landscape had changed so much that new questions loomed. The modern welfare state, which had grown up under the influence of religion, was eroding: how should a more secular, pluralist society address needs of the underprivileged? The shock of 9/11 generated anti-sharia and anti-Muslim movements: how should religious leaders and lawmakers respond? The Catholic Church was rocked by revelations of clerical sexual abuse: what would result from this crisis? New biotechnologies were blurring the lines between humans and machines: what did religious ethics have to say about this? As CSLR scanned the horizon for challenges that would occupy future generations of people of faith under the law, what should the center tackle next?
In typical fashion, the center used its silver anniversary, in 2007, to organize another international conference, this time on the future of law and religion. A veritable who’s who in the field of law and religion—Robert Bellah, the great sociologist of religion at UC Berkeley; Kent Greenawalt, the Christian legal theorist at Columbia; Jean Bethke Elshtain, the eminent feminist political theorist at Chicago; Douglas Laycock, the nation’s leading scholar and advocate of religious liberty; and David Novak, a renowned Jewish philosopher from Toronto—joined other luminaries and Emory scholars to celebrate what the achievements of CSLR and to illuminate a path forward. Part of their collective recommendation was for the center to stay the course while planting new fields. The study of faith, freedom, and family in the Abrahamic traditions should remain perennial staples: “rather like portraits, landscapes, and triptychs,” as Martin Marty put it; “your ‘studio’ of law and religion has to have these.” At the same time, he suggested, it might be time to “turn another leaf in your center’s work.”
9 The Pursuit of Happiness—and Marriage
One new “turning of the leaf” was to begin exploring the relationship of law to non-monotheistic religions, such as Buddhism. Beginning in 1996, Emory had developed a special relationship with Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. That relationship had led to unique collaborations between Emory and Tibetan institutions, including a study-abroad program for Emory undergraduates in Dharamsala, India, and interdisciplinary research and teaching among various college departments and professional schools at Emory. Capitalizing on these relationships, and anticipating a visit of His Holiness to the campus as
Launched in 2007 with support from the John Templeton Foundation, and directed by Philip L. Reynolds, the “happiness project” produced many weekends of conferences, many days’ worth of lectures, the usual shelf of books, and a raft of new interdisciplinary courses on the Emory campus. The climax was an international conference with the Dalai Lama as the keynote speaker. The conference also brought him into conversation with leaders from other faith traditions: Lord Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom; Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church; and Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr of George Washington University, a renowned scholar of Islam. Other interlocutors included internationally prominent Buddhist teachers, psychologists, sociologists, historians, and legal scholars. Several of the conference presentations were turned into essays and published in the Journal of Law and Religion, which is housed at Emory.2
Reynolds not only guided this project but also exemplifies the kind of generative collaboration that might be deemed one of Witte’s “assists.” Arriving at the Candler School of Theology in 1992, Reynolds retired thirty years later. In addition to collaborating on the happiness project, he edited a volume in the Cambridge University Press series on great Christian jurists and became a senior fellow at CSLR. He once remarked that he considered these CSLR projects “the ‘most university-like’ activities of my time at Emory. The opportunity to learn from professors in other fields, and to acquire skills in critical conversation with experts in just about any field of academe, was hugely valuable. Above all, though, this experience was sheer intellectual and collegial pleasure. Sometimes I’d withdraw for a few moments from the conversation and reflect that to be here, engaged in this, was a rare privilege and an unanticipated blessing.”3
One of the results of Reynolds’s CSLR engagement is a volume he edited with Witte titled To Have and to Hold: Marrying and Its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400–1600 (Cambridge, 2007). Spanning more than a millennium
With Witte’s encouragement, Reynolds picked up another project on marriage that had long occupied his scholarly labors. Reynolds had begun this work in 1989 as a study of marriage in scholastic theology. Over the succeeding decades, the focus expanded and led to his first book, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage During the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods. After arriving at Emory, he expanded the focus yet again, delving into the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, including the detailed record of the proceedings of the Council of Trent. With a mammoth accumulation of materials to work with, Reynolds imagined having to publish his study in two volumes; Witte urged one. Organizing his massive study with exquisite refinement, Reynolds published How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theology of Marriage from its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent (Cambridge Studies in Law and Christianity, 2016). At more than a thousand pages in length, this book is his magnum opus and won him the Haskins Medal from the Medieval Academy of America. In a review of the book, Professor Wolfgang P. Müller, of Fordham University, neatly and correctly infers the “close professional ties” between Reynolds and Witte that helped to shape and sustain the production of this massive and comprehensive work. Reynolds later said, “That the monograph was not only completed but also published owes a great deal to my esteemed colleague, John Witte. John insisted that I ought to complete the work as a single book. And once that job was done, he was my persistent advocate in getting the oversized book published.”4
10 And Then the Children
Like Philip Reynolds, Timothy P. Jackson is now retired from the theology school at Emory, where he was the Bishop Mack B. and Ruth Stokes Professor of Theological Ethics. He connected easily with CSLR. In 2003–04 the center hosted a series of forums under the rubric of “The Child in Law, Religion, and Society,” bringing together, again, Jimmy Carter and Martin Marty along with former CDC director and smallpox eradicator William Foege and Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller as well as Emory law professor Martha Fineman. Jackson, as a senior fellow in the center, found ample material
Jackson recalls that in conversation, John Witte has often commented on “the luxury of discipline”—the marvelous freedom scholars have to shape their academic endeavors according to their best energies and most compelling interests. “The phrase has inspired my own efforts,” says Jackson, “especially my Mordecai Would Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism, the unfolding themes of which I discussed with John at length.” Remarking on Witte’s own superb discipline as a scholar, and playing on the sobriquet of singer James Brown as “the hardest-working man in show business,” Jackson calls Witte “the hardest working man in the nomos business,” leading by example. Picking up John’s own recollection of his days playing soccer, Jackson calls him “the Lionel Messi of the Law and Religion pitch: capable of moving deftly and tirelessly amid extremely complex lines and of both scoring points and creatively feeding others’ goal production.”
11 New Frontiers, New Forums, New Leaders
As the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century loomed, Witte and others in CSLR began to think about planning more deliberately for the next phase of work. Particularly urgent was the question about how to sustain the kinds of intra-university connections that had been forged over the previous decades. New leaders of the law school had less interest in the center and more in emerging fields, such as environmental law and health care law. Changing leadership of the university likewise meant changing priorities. External funding was harder to reel in. More seriously, early advocates of interdisciplinary scholarship and stalwart partners of the center were retiring from Emory. On the other hand, a promising younger generation was maturing and looking for opportunities. It was time to rethink the organization and directions of the center.
One new direction was digital publishing. The rising cost of print publication and the limited reach of print materials made digital publication logical. The center’s website was loaded with information, videos, and downloadable lectures. But new platforms were needed to reach nonacademic audiences with thoughtful pieces that were more than an op-ed but less than a heavily
The first, launched in October 2019, was Canopy Forum, which announced “a new direction in law and religion.” This online journal aims to enhance public discourse about the critical issues dividing contemporary societies, from war to poverty, climate change, migration, sectarian tension, and resource scarcity. One example of its wading into controversies of the moment was the extended series of essays by Emory scholars of various stripes regarding the intersection of religion, law, and public health during the Covid-19 pandemic. In some ways, the creation of Canopy Forum a few months before the beginning of the pandemic prepared the center for adapting to what was to come—a much greater dependence on digital tools, remote learning, and virtual forums. Here the presence of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship offered both resources and examples of how to proceed. This marked a turn to new ways of expanding the audience for the work of the center—without the cost, logistical complexity, and long preparation for traditional conferences and symposia.
Organizationally, too, the center was transitioning. Having moved to more online programming and publications, the center was no longer hosting the kind of large public events that had filled the calendar earlier. Turning to new and younger scholars on campus and new residential fellows to teach and offer online programming, the center sought to continue building a stronger virtual community around the world. Witte himself, who had carried the administrative ball so ably for thirty-five years, wanted to devote more time to scholarship and teaching. He thus stepped away from administration to become faculty director of the center’s advisory board, leaving daily operations and supervisory work to a new executive director.
The center found that new executive director after a nationwide search in 2022. Whittney Barth, a graduate of Miami University, Harvard Divinity School, and the University of Chicago Law School with experience in higher education as well as litigation, arrived in August 2022. Announcing the choice of Barth by the search committee, Witte said, “Whittney brings to the job a brilliant mind, rich academic experience, a learned pen, a generous heart, superb organizational strengths, and the refined legal skills needed to navigate bureaucratic complexities.”
It’s hard to say whether this hand-off of responsibilities is an assist from Witte to Barth or from Barth to Witte. In some sense it allows John to take on still more ambitious production of the scholarship that has marked his career for four decades. In any case, more goals surely are in sight.
To begin, the area of law, religion, and jurisprudence would lift up the interest of scholars like Rafael Domingo, who was exploring the interconnections between law and spirituality, and a project led by Michael Welker, a theologian at Heidelberg and a CSLR senior fellow, who with Witte would study the roles of institutions in late modern pluralistic societies in shaping morality, character, and virtue. A second new research area—social justice—would address the role of law and religion in perpetuating or redressing social inequities, inequalities, and injustices, particularly for migrants, refugees, the poor, unemployed, disabled, and incarcerated. The third new area—law, religion, and health—called for focusing on issues of health care and public health: bioethics and the regulation of healthcare; religious opposition to health care interventions; conscience exemptions for healthcare providers; and religious law and doctrine pertaining to healthcare decision-making.
Significant, too, were two programs that returned the center to putting scholarship into action. The early days of the center had offered students practicums in law clinics and other settings throughout Atlanta, as well as workshops for lawyers and religious leaders. In 2015 CSLR launched a four-year Restoring Religious Freedom Project under the direction of Mark Goldfeder, the Spruill Family Senior Fellow in Law and Religion. This project offered hands-on experience to students wanting to explore the prominent area of religious-freedom law. And in 2021, a grant from the Lilly Endowment allowed the center to begin an intensive project on law and ministry, directed by Shlomo Pill, Justin Latterell, and John Bernau. Recognizing that few religious leaders receive training to handle the many legal issues that affect their work, the project aimed to develop resources to help leaders of every kind of religious organization deepen their understanding of the law.
In all of these new directions and appointments, Witte not only has provided a bright and guiding light but also has sought to ensure that the original vision for the center—as a place of interdisciplinary, international, and interfaith scholarship and conversation—not only would be maintained but also would advance. The questions that will engage the center’s faculty and fellows in the coming years are laid out, and the foundation appears firm. Preparing for its fifth decade, the Center for the Study of Law and Religion appears
John Witte, Jr., “Assists and the Legal Profession,” in id., Table Talk: Short Talks on the Weightier Matters of Law and Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2023).
Volume 29, number 1, February 2014.
“A Conversation with Philip Reynolds,” Sep. 7, 2021, https://cslr.law.emory.edu/news/releases/2021/09/philip-reynolds-feature.html#.Y_UJ1hPMKDw.
Philip L. Reynolds, personal communication to the author, April 8, 2023.