When John Witte was chosen in early 2001 to deliver the sixth Distinguished Faculty Lecture at Emory, he could have talked about family law, legal history, or the First Amendment and comparative religious liberty. Then again, as the first professor from the law school to be selected to give the faculty lecture, he could have talked about the Law and Religion Program, which he has directed since 1987.

Instead, as the distinguished lecturer, he talked about a subject that most people know intimately, for better or worse—marriage. His lecture, entitled "An Apt and Cheerful Conversation on Marriage," looked at this most ancient of institutions and concluded that—despite all its problems—the tradition of marriage always has found the resources to heal and reinvent itself.

While close to his heart, the subject of marriage was a starting point for scholarly collaboration under the auspices of Emory's new Center for the Study of Law and Religion (CSLR). Established in 2000 under Witte's direction, and with the help of a $3.2 million grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Center is home to world-class scholars and forums on the religious foundations of law, politics, and society. It currently offers four joint degree programs, 15 cross-listed courses, several annual public forums, a visiting fellows program, and 8 ongoing research projects involving 85 Emory senior fellows and associated faculty from more than 20 fields of study.

In the past decade, the CSLR has received more than $10 million in project funding from the Alonzo L. McDonald Agape Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Ford Foundation, Lilly Endowment, John Templeton Foundation, and Henry Luce Foundation, among others for projects that have yielded more than 250 public forums and 300 published volumes to date.

Recently, the CSLR was awarded $1.25 million in grants from the McDonald Foundation for research on "Christian Jurisprudence." Led by Witte, the project will run through 2010 and generate new lectures and books on church-state relations in the Western tradition, religion and human rights in Christian perspective, and various topics in family law.

Witte is undertaking this project because he is concerned about "the growing inability of the modern churches to engage the hard legal, political, and social issues of today with doctrinal rigor, moral clarity, and biblical authenticity." "I want to do my small part to help the Church reengage responsibly the great legal, social, and political issues of our age, and to help individual Christians participate in the public square in a matter that is neither dogmatically shrill nor naively nostalgic, but fully equipped with the revitalized resources of the Bible and the Christian tradition."

FYI

John Witte is the Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and a specialist in legal history, marriage, and religious liberty. He has published 150 professional articles, 11 journal symposia, and 22 books, including most recently The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (2007) and Christianity and Law: An Introduction (2008) (with CLSR co-director Frank S. Alexander). His writings have appeared in 10 languages.

Witte has lectured and convened major conferences throughout North America, Western Europe, Israel, Japan, and South Africa. He has been selected ten times by the Emory law students as the Most Outstanding Professor and has won dozens other awards and prizes for his teaching and research, including the National Religious Freedom Award in 2008.