Digital Commons Network^™

Religious Liberty For Religious Child-Welfare Organizations: Promises And Perils, Asma T. Uddin

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

In the 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court held that states cannot deny same-sex couples access to marriage and its accompanying benefits. Some religious communities with traditional beliefs about marriage and sexuality responded to the ruling with strong concerns about its potential impact on their religious exercise.

One area of concern involved religious child-welfare organizations that work with the state to provide these services. In all states, there are two options for prospective parents seeking to adopt children. In the private system, birth parents voluntarily place their child up for adoption through a private organization. In …

Assisted Suicide, Forced Cooperation, And Coercion: Reflections On A Brewing Storm, Lucia A. Silecchia

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

Because government funds to institutions and individuals finance a significant amount of medical care in the United States, the prospect of conditions or “strings” attached to that funding is an ever-present specter. Furthermore, the fact that institutions and individuals require licenses to provide medical care also raises these possibilities as the brave new world of medicine poses far more moral dilemmas than anticipated even a brief time ago.

This has led many institutions and individuals to refrain from various activities, believing that to do so would constitute direct or material cooperation in an evil activity. Their ability to avoid participation …

Mysterizing Religion, Marc O. Degirolami

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

A mystery of faith is a truth of religion that escapes human understanding. The mysteries of religion are not truths that human beings happen not to know, or truths that they could know with sufficient study and application, but instead truths that they cannot know in the nature of things. In the Letter to the Colossians, St. Paul writes that as a Christian apostle, his holy office is to “bring to completion for you the word of God, the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past.” Note that Paul does not say that his task is to make everybody …