On October 16, the Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights will host a lecture with Professor Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, entitled “Antinomian Dreams: A Legal Phenomenology of Disestablishment.”
Professor Sullivan will argue that the distinctive nature of religion in the United States is shaped by its understanding of law using examples from various times and places in US history.
The lecture will be followed by a Q&A.
Professor Sullivan is interested in religion as a broad and complex social and cultural phenomenon, one that is deeply entangled with law. Her particular research focus is in understanding the phenomenology of religion under the modern rule of law. She has training in law and in religious studies and has taught both in law school and in religious studies departments.
She is the author of four books analyzing legal discourses about religion in the context of actions brought to enforce the religion clauses of the First Amendment and related legislation: Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States (Harvard 1994), The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton 2005), Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton 2009), and Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in US Law (Chicago 2020).
- The Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, University of Chicago Divinity School