Center for Law, History & Culture Workshop 19th Distinguished Lecture in Law and Humanities—Staying in Place: The Colored Methodist Church, Sacred Space, and Law in the American Civil War Era by Sarah Barringer Gordon (University of Pennsylvania)

March 31, 2022 at 4 pm, the Gould School of Law, Faculty Lounge, Rm. 433. Reception to follow. 

Event Description: CLHC is delighted to announce the 19^th Distinguished Lecture in Law and Humanities: “Staying in Place: The Colored Methodist Church, Sacred Space, and Law in the American Civil War Era,” delivered by Professor Sarah Barringer Gordon, the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Gordon is a renowned historian of American law whose work probes the place of religion in public life and the place of law in American religious life.  She is the author of The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in the Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina, 2002), which was the recipient of best book awards from both the Mormon History Association and the Utah Historical Society, and The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2010), which explores how religious minorities shaped the interpretation of the constitutional principles of disestablishment and religious liberty. Known for her extraordinary mentorship as well as her path breaking explorations of religion and law, Professor Gordon served as President of the American Society for Legal History from 2017 to 2019.  She also serves on the boards of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the McDowell-Hartman Foundation, and the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2015-16 she was a Guggenheim Fellow, in 2017 she held the Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress, and in 2020-21 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where she worked on her forthcoming book about the separation of church and state in the first century of the American republic. Her current work, which forms the subject of her lecture, examines the role of legal disputes over church property in shaping the complex interactions between religion and race.