Religious Liberty Summit 2024
Notre Dame Religious Liberty Summit | Notre Dame | July 9-11
Depolarizing Religious Liberty
The fourth annual Notre Dame Religious Liberty Summit will bring together the world’s leading defenders of religious liberty for conversation between religious leaders, scholars, and advocates about the future of religious liberty. This year, the Summit’s theme is Depolarizing Religious Liberty.
Featured topics include:
- Muslim and Jewish Voices Finding Common Ground After October 7th;
- Women and Religious Liberty;
- Book Talk, "Learning to Disagree" by John Inazu;
- Book Talk, "Religious Liberty in a Polarized Age" by Thomas Berg;
- Keynote with Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades, the 9th bishop of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend;
- The State of Ukrainian Religious Freedom: Then and Now; and
- Black Church and Religious Freedom.
This year, the Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Initiative will honor Nazila Ghanea, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief and Director of International Human Rights Law Programmes at the University of Oxford, with the 2024 Notre Dame Prize for Religious Liberty.
The prize is given annually to one individual in recognition of their achievement and support in preserving religious liberty.
With decades of experience within the realm of teaching higher education the University of Oxford, University of London, and Keele University, Ghanea continues to support networks that are interested in freedom of religion or belief and its interrelationship with other human rights all across the world.
She continues to support the promotion and application of principled understandings of human rights, including freedom of religion or belief, by publishing her research and getting the word out to others through her lectures, thus inspiring other professional bodies around the world to advocate for human rights and religious freedom.
Ghanea is the fourth recipient of the Notre Dame Prize for Religious Liberty.
Nury Turkel, an Uyghur-American attorney and member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, received the inaugural award in 2021. Mary Ann Glendon, the Learned Hand Professor of Law Emerita at Harvard Law School and former U.S Ambassador to the Holy See, received the award in 2022. And last year in 2023, Lord David Alton, a member of the House of Lords of the United Kingdom, received the award.
Thomas C. Berg, the James L. Oberstar Professor of Law and Public Policy at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, will receive the 2024 Religious Liberty Initiative Scholarship Award.
The award recognizes Berg’s scholarly accomplishments in the field of law and religion, and the many careful contributions made to theoretical thinking about religious liberty.
Berg has written six books, 75 book chapters and journal articles, and dozens of opinion pieces on religious freedom, constitutional law, and the role of religion on law, politics, and society. His most recent book, "Religious Liberty in a Polarized Age," conducts an erudite consideration about why religious liberty should be protected, concurrently speaking to both sides of the political divide.
Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades will serve as this year's keynote speaker at the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Summit. Rhoades is the acting 9th bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend as of January 13, 2010. After growing up in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, he was a member of Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Parish. He continued his theological studies at the North American College and the Pontifical Gregorian University, in Rome from 1979-1983.
Rhoades was ordained a priest of the Harrisburg Diocese on July 9, 1983. His first assignment in the diocese was as parochial vicar in York from 1983-1985 at Saint Patrick Parish. In 1985, he returned to the Gregorian University in Rome where he continued his studies and earned advanced degrees in canon law and dogmatic theology.
He later spent much time with Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary (1995-2004), where he often taught courses in canon law, Hispanic ministry, and systematic theology. In 1997, he was named rector of Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary, and he stayed within this role until October 2004, when he was appointed by Pope John Paul II as Bishop of the Diocese of Harrisburg. He continued to stay in Philadelphia until 2009, where he was appointed the 9th bishop of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend by Pope Benedict XVI.
Currently, Rhoades serves as Chair-Elect of the USCCB Committee on Religious Liberty. He is also a member of the USCCB Committee on Doctrine and the USCCB Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism.
Questions about our Summit? Reach out to our team at religiousliberty@nd.edu.
Connect with the Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Initiative
Submit the form below to receive updates about our filings, events, and other news.