Author Event at The Book Works

Thursday, May 24 at 7 pm

Peter Irons, author of

GOD ON TRIAL: DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA'S RELIGIOUS BATTLEFIELDS

This event is cosponsored by the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties http://www.aclusandiego.org/ See also

http://www.aclusandiego.org/news_item.php?article_id=000232

Over the past two decades, federal courts have become contentious battlefields in America’s growing religious wars. GOD ON TRIAL: Dispatches from America’s Religious Battlefields by Peter Irons takes an in-depth look at five recent landmark court battles over the separation of church and state. Irons, a noted lawyer, constitutional scholar, and bestselling author, delivers a compelling narrative accompanied by first person accounts from both sides of the conflict.

In 1989, residents of San Diego challenged a forty-three-foot-high cross in the center of a public park at the summit of Mount Soledad; 1995 brought a dispute in a Texas town over the recital of prayers at high school football games in the town of Santa Fe, Texas; in 1999 in Whitley City, Kentucky and on the grounds of the state capitol in Austin, Texas, separate lawsuits were filed against the display of the Ten Commandments; in 2000, a parent with a first grade student in Elk Grove, California, challenged the words “under God” in his daughter’s daily Pledge of Allegiance. And, finally, in 2004, parents in Dover, Pennsylvania, challenged the school board’s requirement that “intelligent design” be taught as an alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Irons’ detailed, in-depth investigation of each of these trials is followed by interviews with the people involved to provide a complete, accessible, and humane chronicle of the ongoing wars for “the soul of America.”

PETER IRONS is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, San Diego where he taught constitutional law and directed the Earl Warren Bill of Rights Project. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a civil liberties lawyer, he is a member of the Supreme Court bar. He is the author of the bestselling book May It Please the Court, as well as six other previous books. Irons was elected to two terms on the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).