A nation must think before it acts.
The State of International Religious Freedom and Why It Matters
One of America’s – more precisely, one of Philadelphia’s — greatest contributions to the world is freedom of conscience, the idea that people should be free to practice their religion – or not to practice at all. Today, as ISIS gives people the choice to die or convert, while others in various parts of the world flee for their lives because of different varieties of religious intolerance, we have asked one of the leading advocates of international religious freedom to report on the state of religious freedom in the world today.
Professor George holds Princeton’s McCormick Chair in Jurisprudence and is the founding director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. His books include Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality and The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion and Morality in Crisis. His scholarly articles have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, and the American Journal of Jurisprudence. Professor George is a recipient of many honors, including the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Sidney Hook Memorial Award of the National Association of Scholars, and the Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement, A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School, he also received a master’s degree in theology from Harvard and a doctorate in philosophy of law from Oxford.