 I came to Emory Law School as a stowaway in Harold Berman's briefcase. I had been his student at Harvard Law School in the 1980s. He out of the blue took an early retirement from Harvard Law School and came to Emory as the new Woodruff professor. And one of the privileges I had was to come as his research fellow. And two years after arrival, Dr. Laney appointed me as director of the law and religion programs. It was called then. President Laney said that we have a wonderful opportunity at Emory University to make religion a legitimate part of serious discourse in any profession and discipline and department on the campus. I would like you to help lead the serious discussion of religion in the law school. We have Pathbreakers already in place. Frank Alexander has created the program. Hal Berman is there to work with you. I would like you to take what work they have done and to build it up in concert with them. I had eight years of wonderful study under a great mentor in Hal Berman and then with a great colleague like Frank Alexander and others who were working here at the time. I had immersed myself for the ensuing seven years and had an opportunity to write a few things partly on my own, partly with Hal Berman. And I just recognized that there was so much more to learn. I recognized my inadequacies and I recognized the need to respect the extraordinary work that other people had done in the law and religion field and in many other fields of interdisciplinary discourse at the law school already. I think Emory at the time was preaching a wonderful interdisciplinary gospel and was manifesting that very concretely in works through the Carter Center and the wonderful programs that they had put in place through the work of the School of Public Health in collaboration with the CDC with a number of other interdisciplinary initiatives on the campus already. This was a school that was moving from rhetoric to reality in interdisciplinary scholarship and they saw religion as a really critical part of any serious research universities endeavor. That excited me and by reason of that I found the law and religion program opportunity a really unique one and a really attractive one in the 1980s. I got to know Hal Berman first as the great scholar whose work I was reading when I was a college student in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And out of the blue in 1982 I wrote to him asking whether I should go to Harvard Law School to study with him or to the four-lettered rival institution in the neighboring state. And happily Hal Berman wrote me a wonderful letter back and invited me to come study with him. And I have a letter actually that he wrote to me and that letter I would like to read a bit if I may. Here was this young punk 21-year-old from Calvin College. Berman had never heard of me. I was studying legal history and legal philosophy at the time. I wrote to Berman a long, long letter explaining my interests and aspirations and within three days that I wrote him this letter. He wrote this long handwritten letter back to me and it concluded with this wonderful admonition. I wish you every success in your spiritual and intellectual pilgrimage into the world of law, says Berman. I'm glad that you have been studying the formation and transformation of the Western legal tradition and the historical interaction of law and religion. These historical studies even more than the philosophical studies you are contemplating will protect you against the skeptical, even nihilistic assaults upon the law to which you will be exposed, either at Yale or at Harvard. But most of all, my young friend, keep your faith and find a place for it in your legal learning. For only then will you find rest for your reason and for your conscience. That was my start in this field and that in many ways is emblematic of the kind of leadership that Hal Berman has had in this field over all these years. Hal Berman was the intellectual anchor of the law and religion program from the very start. Jim Laney had the idea of creating such a program at Emory University that was burgeoning with new interdisciplinary study. Frank Alexander, a student both of Hal Berman and of Jim Laney at Harvard Divinity School, had the courage and the wisdom to put this program together. But Hal Berman was brought here three years after the program was started and he provided instant credibility both nationally and internationally. There's a burden of proof against any new area of interdisciplinary discourse, especially in a law school. The reason to have interdisciplinary legal study is to enhance the study of law to open up new dimensions of our understanding of how law works. While the burden of proof was on us working in law and religion to show that that was in fact what we were trying to do. We were not here to proselytize our faith. We are not here to introduce a soft subject to distract from the core mission of a law school. We are not here trying to create room for given fundamentalist agendas. We are here genuinely with an interest in trying to sponsor a deeper and richer understanding of law by use of religion and use of theology and the work of theology in the evolution of law in the West and beyond. We spent time working on fundamental issues of faith, freedom and family, the centerpieces of our lives, the three things that people will die for. People saw that we were doing legitimate and important things as professionals working on the law and theology side of discourses. But world events have also made it very clear that law and religion are universal solvents of human living, that they are a volatile compound and that sometimes when they come together in explosive ways the world is imperiled. And one of the things that we had been doing in the law and religion field is trying to find resources to think of healthier ways by which these two universal solvents can come together. Think of healthier ways by which we can understand each other in our own core theological and legal identities. Trying to liven the discourse within religious communities about fundamental questions of law, politics and society. Trying to provide resources for religious communities to be able to engage the hard questions of our day. When I came as director of the law and religion program in 1987 I had a primitive understanding of what I wanted to do in the field of law and religion. And in the course of the last 20 years I've had an opportunity to pursue those interests of my own scholarship on the western legal tradition, especially on issues of marriage and family and human rights and religious freedom, in conversation with the 1,500 people around the world that have worked with our projects. I think I've learned to become much more tolerant and to appreciate much better than I had the wisdom of other traditions, the fervency of other people's faith commitments. I've learned to understand what goes into a person that's striving for women's rights or striving for same sex marriage or striving for the rights of the child. I came out of a very conservative Protestant tradition where all of these things were viewed as taboo, where human rights was viewed with suspicion, where same sex marriage was simply abomination, where the notion of women's rights was viewed to be a modern accretion of the Enlightenment, and to have the privilege of sitting with scholars from around the world and activists around the world and to learn the depth of their commitment to these discourses and the importance of these causes for them and to be able to rethink my own tradition in light of that advocacy has been probably the greatest change that this directorship has occasioned for me as a scholar. It's a wonderful challenge to try to harness all these wonderful individuals who are doing great individual work and to put them and all their talents together into a coherent project. And what I have found by trial and error over the years is trying to create a galvanizing vision for a project that attracts each of these persons, that makes them see that there's something in the project that will give them a set of conversation partners, a set of new kinds of supports that they wouldn't get in their own work and they can come around a common table with their colleagues and they can learn from their colleagues in the same way that they learn from going to all these academic conferences. That has been in many ways the biggest burden of creating a new project. A compelling vision to keep people here, to keep people focused and to get them to involve themselves in earnest conversation with peers in different schools, different disciplines, with different ideologies. The major ones have been the major research projects and they're culminating conferences. We had a major conference on Christianity and Democracy in global context in 1991 that brought President Carter and Archbishop Tutu as our opening and closing keynotes, 50 major speakers from around the world, more than a thousand registrants who participated with us in an extraordinary moment of interdisciplinary and interreligious synergy. A major conference followed in 1994 on religious human rights and global perspective and other 700 or 800 people, 75 speakers from around the world and a major culminating moment in the emerging field of religion and human rights. A series of 12 conferences on proselytism in the New World Order and different parts of the world were wonderful moments for our center, more diffuse but nonetheless exceedingly galvanizing. And I should think the major conference that we had in 2003 on sex, marriage and family and the religions of the book as a culmination of a major project that we had undertaken in our new chapter of work as a center for the interdisciplinary study of religion at two was a galvanizing moment for our work in law and religion. I think what the Christianity and Democracy in global context conference did was to demonstrate to skeptics and demonstrate especially to our benefactors that there was a thirst in the populace and a thirst among professionals especially in the universities to deal with these hard questions, to think about what contributions religious communities, Christianity in that case could make to the new democratic revolution that was breaking out around the world and the possibilities in other areas of politics and of law clearly manifested themselves in that conference. I think the Law and Religion Center has been a unique steeple of excellence for Emory. Here is a place where you look at Emory on the horizon and you can see one small spike in the air which is the work in law and religion which is known as an area of interdisciplinary excellence. I think that has been important for Emory University in terms of its public national and international profile. I think it's also been a wonderful laboratory for the university to try out in a new way its interdisciplinary vision to try to sponsor work that is viewed as controversial, cutting edge and dangerous at the same time and to see that it can work and I think that's helped the university and emboldened the university to think about other dangerous controversial areas and to move into sponsorship of that work. It's harder to trace our law and religion work in direct public policy payoffs in part because of a deliberate decision that I and the other leaders of the center made in the late 80s and that was to stay one step away from the courtroom, one step away from the committee hall and congress, one step away from cutting edge frontline advocacy litigation lobbying on a law and religion theme. We have emboldened and enriched others I hope to take up causes in individual cases to help sponsor new legislation domestically and internationally. One is the development of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 an act of congress that in many ways is the culmination of ten years of work that we had been doing in a pioneering way in religion and human rights. Our work in law and religion especially religious liberty questions in Russia has provided a treasure trove of material that litigants in the Russian courts and before the Russian Duma and the Russian Supreme Court have been using. Our work has helped enliven the discourse about covenant marriage about thinking hard about legislative alternatives to the divorce revolution and the like. Individual colleagues, Frank Alexander working on issues of homelessness and housing rights for communities around the country, Abdullahi An-Naim working on fundamental issues of Muslims and their identity both nationally and internationally. Michael Brod working on the place of the Jewish community and Jewish law within the discourse of state domestic relations law. The next 25 years are in part going to be a repetition of the last 25 years of law and religion. The fundamental questions of faith, of freedom of family, the fundamental hard questions of human rights of religious liberty are going to continue to be perennial contests in the culture wars domestically and in international discourse. I think there are going to be two or three areas that are going to open up and areas that we may want to try to get into as a law and religion center. One are the questions of law, religion and science. Just think of this extraordinary revolution that's now afoot both at the micro level and the macro level. At the micro level, literally at the micro level, the whole human genome project and the whole scary world of nanotechnology and what it might mean for us from designer babies to thinking hard about regenerative tissue to working with stem cell remedies to a number of very important diseases. That is a world that ultimately is going to be deeply contested. The contest between religion and science is ultimately going to come to law for its resolution and to provide resources for mediating that dispute and trying to move it to a more healthy dialectic. And at the micro level, this whole issue of environmentalism and the world worried about a biological holocaust, those are not just the fanciful things of movies anymore. That is a real issue. And again, law and religion are going to have to weigh in deeply into that contest. But in this rapidly globalizing understanding of religion, of law, of commerce, of society altogether, it is irresponsible to continue to operate a law and religion center without taking into account the great richness of the religions of the East. And law and religion and Asian religions is going to have to be something that we consider seriously as a law and religion center going forward. The current new appetite for spiritualism instead of religion is simply a repetition of an old long-standing pattern in the Western tradition, and I dare say in other traditions as well. People get tired of current institutional forms of religion. And one of the reactions to that is to become spiritual, to become mystical, to emphasize the kabbalah, to emphasize those things that are not captured in given normative structures that are maintained by an organized priesthood and perpetuated in an ongoing canon. But ultimately spiritualism cannot survive without religion. And one of the goals of our law and religion center is to try to show that religion needs law, that religious communities ultimately need order, organization, Orthodox canons in order to be perpetuated in order to survive long-term. And in many ways, it's trying to find a way by which these religious institutions and practices can be transformed to make them better engaged with current spiritual patterns. One of the wonderful, rewarding moments for me was at the conclusion of our big project on the child and law, religion, and society. When we sat around the room with the 22 senior fellows who had been with us for the semester, we had an intense faculty seminar. And it was co-directed by the great Martin Marty, the master of religious discourse, the greatest scholar in religion in the 20th century, who sat at that table and at the end said quite plaintively, this is the most edifying and exciting seminar I've ever been a part of. In his own quiet way, blessing us and saying that we had done was worthwhile.