Navigating law and religion: familiar waterways, rivers less travelled and uncharted seas

Abstract

This chapter begins with comments upon the mainstream contemporary issues within the sub-discipline of Law and Religion and includes a WatchMojo–like top 10 of legal scholars in the field. The less travelled areas identified are indigenous religion (highlighted by the recent Canadian case, Ktunaxa Nation), unusual or exotic religious practices (such as exorcism), the rise of neo-Paganism and the broader philosophical interface of the disciplines of religion and law. Finally, the chapter engages in some futurological conjectures on what Law and Religion may address in the remainder of the twenty-first century. The relentless advance of artificial intelligence, robotics and cyber bio-engineering may give rise to religions such as ‘Dataism’, according to the prognostications of Yuval Noah Harari’s bestseller Homo Deus. Notwithstanding such innovations, entirely orthodox questions of the scope of religious liberty and the relationship between organized religious communities and the state will likely persist.