Lupu, Tuttle, and Singling Out Religion

Ira C. Lupu and Robert W. Tuttle’s new book, Secular Government, Religious People is one of the very best overviews of the American law of religious liberty in print. It is an excellent introduction to the subject, and it makes sense of some tangled areas of doctrine in ways that will enlighten specialists. Their knowledge of the law is encyclopedic, and they deliver it with astonishing compression and grace. The chapter on government funding of religion, which sympathetically reconstructs the rationale of the now abandoned rule against any funding of religion while exposing its limitations, is particularly impressive. 

A keystone of the book’s argument is its response to an increasingly salient question: what makes religion special? That response has important implications for religious accommodation. 

I've just published a brief review of the book, for the Northwestern University Law Review Online, focusing on that issue.  It is available here.