Old Members’ Trust Graduate Conference and Academic Travel Fund report – Nathaniel Hodson (2022, DPhil Theology and Religion)

In October 2024, I was able to make the trip to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, USA, in order to present at the International Consortium for Law and Religion Studies 2024 Conference. The conference, hosted by the Law School at Notre Dame and the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at Brigham Young University, is considered the most significant conference on the intersection of law and religion. It occurs once every two years, and lives up to its title as ‘international,’ as there were many scholars and legal professionals from every continent, with particularly strong representation from continental Europe and Latin America.

During the conference, I presented on an interdisciplinary panel entitled ‘Social Actions and Corporate Religious Liberty: Legal, Moral, and Theological Perspectives on a Contested Freedom.’ The panel participants consisted of myself, my colleague from Oxford (recently the McDonald Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Christian Ethics and Public Life at Oxford, now AKC Director and Lecturer in Ethics & Values at King’s College London) Edward David, Maksymilian Hau (PhD Candidate in Law at the University of Warsaw), and chaired by Wojciech Brzozowski (Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and Administration, University of Warsaw). The panel explored the concept of corporate religious liberty: religious liberty for groups, whether they be for-profit corporations, religious universities, or houses of worship. My co-panelists offered more strictly legal presentations, focusing especially on recent US Supreme Court decisions in comparison with related EU case law. My paper offered resources from Christian theology to more subtly evaluate such cases, give all the parties involved their due, and especially to distinguish between the nature of religiously motivated for-profit firms and churches as such. During the Q&A time we received very helpful and searching questions from legal experts from the USA and Europe. This was especially welcome as it will help refine our research into this topic, which will issue in a book project to be published with Routledge in 2025.

Finally, I was able to spend the weekend just after the conference in Chicago. Not only was this necessary for my travels, as Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport is the nearest international airport to the University of Notre Dame, but it was a special delight for me, as I lived in Chicago for four years just before I moved to Oxford to begin the MPhil at Univ in 2022. I enjoyed my time visiting dear friends (including some from Oxford!), eating more Chicago style deep-dish pizza than I’d care to admit, and exploring one of America’s great cities.

I am deeply grateful for the generous support of the Old Members’ Trust Graduate Conference and Academic Travel Fund. The travel grant allowed me to present interdisciplinary work at a conference working on law and religion at the highest level. Meeting with such an international community of distinguished scholars and practitioners was invigorating, and their professional connections and feedback have already begun to positively shape my panel’s research project on law and religion. This, in turn, will sharpen the argument we will make in our ongoing book project. All of this, along with the chance to see old friends in Chicago, was made possible by the generosity of the Old Members’ Trust.

Published: 24 January 2025

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