
Religious Freedom, Millennium Photograph, Civil War
Top of Mind with Julie Rose - Season 1, Episode 37
- Apr 6, 2015 6:00 am
- 102:09
Religious Freedom Acts (1:11) Guest: Elizabeth Clark, associate director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at BYU Lawmakers in Indiana and Arkansas have come under scrutiny and political pressure in the last few weeks for passing a law commonly referred to as a "RFRA," which stands for Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Critics say the laws empower businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians in the name of religion. Late last week, Indiana's governor signed an amended version of the state's law clarifying that it cannot be used as a defense for discrimination. Arkansas' governor only signed his state's version after a similar provision was added. But Indiana and Arkansas are hardly the first to enact "Religious Freedom Restoration Acts." Nearly half of states have them and the federal government passed one in 1993 - and in the past, these laws had bi-partisan support and were largely noncontroversial. What's changed? Millennium-Long Photograph (25:33) Guest: Jonathan Keats, distinguished experimental philosopher, artist, writer, and a renowned contributor of Forbes magazine You have seen time lapse photos, right? Where a camera captures a single image over a period of minutes or hours to show how the environment changes over time? Well, suppose you could set a camera to capture the passage of years - even centuries? Civil War Photographs (38:09) Guest: Bob Zeller, president of the Center for Civil War Photography We recently learned about a trove of remarkable photos documenting life before and during the Civil War that has arrived at the Library of Congress and is being digitized for people to view online. The pictures themselves are remarkable, but so, too, is the story of how they came to be in a single collection. The photos offer a glimpse at daily life of southern slaves before the war and extend all the way to a shot of Abraham Lincoln's Illinois home draped in a black-and-white mourning cloth after his assassination. The Library of Congress announced last week it h