Winnifred Sullivan's "The Impossibility of Religious Freedom"

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Law and Religion Program at the University at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. She is currently the Lilly Endowment Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her book, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book does give one a sense of the U.S. legal issues that are the frame for my book -- the way in which American courts, in enforcing laws protecting religious freedom, paradoxically have a preference for highly structured orthodox religion over the popular religious practices of most Americans. What is not included on that page are the actual voices of the plaintiffs in the case, practitioners of what I call in the book "outlaw religion," (and what the court called "cemetery anarchy"), and of the five academic experts in religion who attempted to explain the nature of religion to the court. The “impossibility” of the title lies in the impossibility of defining religion, legally or academically, in such a way as to capture the religious lives of Americans.

Learn more about The Impossibility of Religious Freedom at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue