The Prayer Abides

About this Episode

Shaking off the rust after a two-week break, we’re back to argue about the Supreme Court’s latest entry in the “Let Us Pray” genre. We are joined by law and religion scholar Nathan Chapman and focus on ancient Greece, where by Greece we mean Greece, New York, and by ancient we mean 1999. That’s when the town began to invite local clergy to its monthly Town Board meetings to deliver short prayers. For almost a decade, these prayers were uniformly Christian and almost always explicitly so. Government and prayer: what to do? We disagree.

This show’s links:

• Nathan Chapman’s faculty profile and writing
• Nathan Chapman, Disentangling Conscience and Religion
• This Week in Law, Episode 258, featuring Christina Mulligan and recommending our show
• Oral Argument 18: Oral Argument, with Tom Goldstein
• Town of Greece v. Galloway, Supreme Court, pdf and html
• Town of Greece v. Galloway, Judge Calabresi’s opinion for the Second Circuit
• Allegheny County v. Greater Pittsburgh ACLU, a creche case that uses the “endorsement” test
• Marsh v. Chambers, the principle Supreme Court case on legislative prayer
• Lemon v. Kurtzman, origin of the so-called Lemon test for Establishment Clause challenges
• Lee v. Weisman, prohibiting prayers at public school graduation ceremonies
• McCreary County v. ACLU, finding a predominantly religious purpose in displaying the Ten Commandments in courthouses and holding government must remain neutral between religious and non-religious viewpoints, with O’Connor’s concurrence decisive
• Nelson Tebbe and Micah Schwartzman, The Puzzle of Town of Greece v. Galloway
• Akhil Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction
• Marie Griffith, The Establishment Clause: An Interview with Judge Guido Calabresi
• Guido Calabresi, video of lecture, What about the Establishment Clause? (his remarks begin at 8:50)
• The entry gate to New Haven’s Grove Street Cemetery