What Religious Studies Means for Religious Freedom

Featuring Benjamin P. Marcus

Thursday, April 23
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm CST
Zoom

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What does religious freedom protect? Religious studies scholars emphasize that religious identity is co-constituted by the beliefs people hold, their behaviors within and beyond ritual settings, and their experiences of belonging to intersecting communities. But should religious freedom protect more than belief? In this webinar, we’ll discuss the limits of religious freedom and the way Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court have tried to balance religious freedom with other rights and responsibilities.

About Benjamin P. Marcus
Benjamin P. Marcus is the religious literacy specialist with the Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Institute, where he examines the intersection of education, religious literacy, and identity formation in the United States.

He has developed religious literacy programs for public schools, universities, businesses, U.S. government organizations, and private foundations, and he has delivered presentations on religion at universities and nonprofits in the U.S. and abroad. He has worked closely with the U.S. State Department, International Baccalaureate, Interfaith Youth Core, the Foundation for Religious Literacy, and the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme in the United Kingdom.

In February 2018, Marcus was accepted as a Fulbright Specialist for a period of three years. As a Specialist, he will share his expertise on religion and education with select host institutions abroad.

Marcus chaired the writing group for the Religious Studies Companion Document to the C3 Framework, a nationally recognized set of guidelines used by state and school district curriculum experts for social studies standards and curriculum development. He is a contributing author in the Oxford Handbook on Religion and American Education, where he writes about the importance of religious literacy education. In 2015 he served as executive editor of the White Paper of the Sub-Working Group on Religion and Conflict Mitigation of the State Department’s Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group.

Marcus earned an MTS with a concentration in Religion, Ethics, and Politics as a Presidential Scholar at Harvard Divinity School. He studied religion at the University of Cambridge and Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude. This fall he will start a JD at Yale Law School.

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