What Goes Around Goes Around Again?(Book Review‪)‬

[Review Essay: Michael J. Perry, Under God? Religious Faith and Liberal Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), xv + 200 pp.] Michael Perry has spent most of his career as a law professor writing about the relationship of religion and polities, especially the appropriate boundaries of religiously grounded belief on political decision-making. This most recent book argues in favor of allowing more space for religiously grounded political decisions in public life. In this review, I'll present the core of Perry's arguments, and discuss why I strongly disagree with his thesis. As a disclaimer, I confess to having been a Perry "watcher" since being assigned an article he wrote when I'd just been appointed as an Articles editor for the Law Review at New York University School of Law many years ago. A number of years later, I read almost all of his published works in connection with my Ph.D. thesis and subsequent book. (1) Having already written three books exploring these issues, (2) as well as a number of law review articles, this most recent book had a sense of the familiar, perhaps more than would be desirable for a new publication, as it appears to have been hastily written and incompletely thought out, and with no apparent urgency for doing so.