The proceedings of the conference “Civil Religion in the United States and Europe: Four Comparative Perspectives” have been published as Volume 41, Number 4 (2010) of The George Washington International Law Review. The conference, organized by Professor Frederick Mark Gedicks, Guy Anderson Chair & Professor of Law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School, with the assistance of W. Cole Durham, Jr. and the International Center for Law and Religion Studies (ICLRS) at Brigham Young University, was held 12-14 March 2009 at the Law School in Provo, Utah.

Civil religion is a topic of increasing significance both in the United States and Europe, and there are important cases currently pending before courts on both continents, including the U.S. Supreme Court, that bear directly upon this issue.

The conference was organized around differences in thinking about civil religion in France, Italy, the United States, and Europe broadly. Contributing major papers were Silvio Ferrari (keynote), Blandine Chelini-Pont, Alessandro Ferrari, Frederick Gedicks, Talip Kucukcan, Michael Perry, and Marco Ventura, with responses by Pasquale Annicchino, David Fontana, Andrew Koppelman, Pierre-Henri Prélot, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, and Emmanuel Tawil. Brett G. Scharffs, Francis R. Kirkham Professor of Law and ICRLS Associate Director at Brigham Young University, contributed an afterword, “Creation and Preservation in the Constitution of Civil Religion.”