Divine Comedy
Amy Rowe Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Jay Wexler, Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009). 272pp.
I first met Jay Wexler in 2006 at an international conference on Law and Religion in Transitional Societies held in Oslo, Norway. Though I recognize the value of such conferences in creating a forum for discussion of a sensitive topic, I also must admit that I find them invariably dull. When Wexler took the podium, his tweed suit, bow tie, and tortoise shell glasses were the very image of the stodgy academic. His message, however, was surprisingly accessible. He described two statutes protecting religious freedom in the U.S. and concluded with a simple lesson for other countries in drafting their own religious freedom laws: do like statute A, not like statute B. (I later enjoyed a bus ride with Wexler in which we discussed everything from Dungeons and Dragons to the now-defunct Spy magazine, for which he once wrote an article that included the nutritional importance of riboflavin.)
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