altMuslimah goes back online today, and what’s returning is neither a reboot nor a comeback. Both words assume you’re returning to something that stayed the same while you were gone, or that you’ve stayed the same enough to slide back into it. Neither is true here.

I started altMuslimah as a book club in my mother-in-law’s basement, in my twenties, before I had a legal career or three kids pulling at my time. It became a place where Muslim women could ask questions that didn’t fit neatly into a mosque sermon or a cable news segment, and it grew faster than I expected. When I envisioned it in 2009, I imagined a room, however virtual, where people slowed down enough to think out loud together.

My own life eventually filled up with work and motherhood. The internet changed, too. Rumination gave way to rage, community to clickbait. Long, uncertain thinking gave way to hot takes built for a scroll, not a sit. The kind of conversation altMuslimah existed to have became harder to sustain, and in 2021, it went quiet.

Something in me quieted when altMuslimah did. My life itself was hardly quiet; work and children made sure of that. I stopped writing and thinking in a certain way, following a question without knowing where it would lead. Somewhere along the way, I began to think of that voice as belonging to an earlier version of myself, before everything that came after.

Writers across Substack’s community of midlife women, including those Midstack curates each week, often describe the strange experience of coming across an old photograph of yourself and feeling recognition rather than nostalgia. One of those writers, Cool Best Friend, put it exactly right: looking at old pictures felt like running into someone you used to be. There she is, unbothered by the years, startlingly familiar.

The best word I’ve seen for this is “former-ative,” both former and still forming. A former self keeps working on you long after you file the chapter as closed, shaping which instincts you trust and which ones you talk yourself out of. When you encounter her again, in an old photograph or in the pull toward a project you set down years ago, you begin to see that she was never as far away as you thought.

We tend to describe the midlife version of this as a return to some younger, more authentic self. I’m not sure I buy that construction. It feels more like a conversation between who you were and who you’re becoming. Midlife may simply be when the earlier voice becomes audible again.

This past summer, I went to see Sarah McLachlan at Wolf Trap. A couple of hours before the show, my daughter and I had argued, the kind of fight that isn’t really about the thing it appears to be about. I drove out there with the argument still sitting just beneath the surface.

By the time I found my seat, the sky had gone that particular bruised green it turns before a summer storm. Within the hour, the storm broke, rain coming down in sheets past the edge of the roof while the people on the uncovered lawn stayed anyway, blankets soaked and umbrellas up, swaying as though the weather belonged to the show. Cicadas kept going underneath the music between songs.

Then McLachlan started talking about her eldest daughter. The year her daughter turned nineteen, everything between them had gone sideways in a way she couldn’t fix by trying harder. Her new record, her first in nearly a decade, had grown out of that year.

My own daughter is nineteen.

I sat there under that roof, rain coming off it in a curtain, the fight I’d just left still warm somewhere behind me. I hadn’t expected to cry, and then I was. McLachlan was describing something I was only beginning to understand: how the child you have spent years raising can suddenly stand before you as someone increasingly separate from you, and how much love can hurt at the moment it has to make room for that separation.

And somewhere inside that recognition was another nineteen-year-old: me.

For a moment, the distance between those years collapsed. I could remember being the daughter who believed adulthood meant moving farther into a life of my own, and I could feel what it was to be the mother watching that movement from the other side. The nineteen-year-old I had been hadn’t vanished when I became the mother of one. She was still there, somewhere inside the way I loved my daughter and the difficulty of letting her become herself.

McLachlan was returning, too. Nearly a decade had passed since her last record, and the years between had become the material for the new one. Sitting there, I thought about altMuslimah’s own years of quiet. I had treated those years as an absence, but maybe they were part of the formation.

The conviction behind altMuslimah is still the one I had in my twenties: faith is the frame everything else sits inside. But I understand that frame differently now, and the intervening years have changed what I bring to the questions I was asking then. Motherhood alone has taken ideas I once understood abstractly and made me live inside them.

I believed then that there was value in making a room for questions without immediate answers, for the kind of thinking that needs time before it knows what it thinks. I believed faith belonged in that room, too, reaching into the parts of our lives that resist easy categories. I recognize that conviction now because I’ve spent twenty years discovering what it asks of me.

altMuslimah comes back today carrying those intervening years with it. The instinct began with a twenty-something woman in a basement. Two decades later, at a concert in the rain and then at a keyboard, I recognize her again.

Subscribe now

Gym class in middle school required shorts. I wore pants instead because my faith requires modesty. A twelve-year-old in navy sweatpants stands out fast against fifteen pairs of bare knees.

Nobody said anything cruel. A girl named Jenny, pulling her ponytail tight before a lap around the track, asked once why I dressed “like that.” I gave her some short, half-true answer.

She shrugged and went back to stretching against the fence. The exchange was enough for me to spend the rest of the period doing the math: how many more times today will something make me explain myself.

Explaining myself as a child

My name did it, too. Substitute teachers turned it into three different words before they gave up and just pointed at me. I learned to raise my hand at all three.

And then there was the pre-Christmas buzz, with a tree in the classroom corner and carols in music class. It was December 21st, the last day before break, when one of my 7th grade teachers pulled her chair into a circle with ours and asked what everyone was doing for Christmas.

I waited with dreaded anticipation. “Grandma’s house…new bike…Midnight Mass with the cousins.” The circle reached me, and I said, “we don’t really do Christmas.”

The room went quiet, and nobody looked at me. Then somebody’s hand shot up to talk about their tree and the room moved on without me. I don’t recall the moment as unkind. The classroom was simply a space intended for one kind of December, and I was there, holding a different one.

Ten Commandments in the classroom

That circle comes to mind now as the fight over the Ten Commandments moves through federal courts in Texas and Louisiana. Both states passed laws requiring Ten Commandments displays in public school classrooms across the state. This spring, a deeply divided federal appeals court upheld the Texas law by a single vote. The Louisiana case has so far turned on procedural questions rather than the constitutionality of the law itself.

I am not against religion in public life. I want a country where people can talk about God without embarrassment, where a menorah glows in one window, a nativity scene stands down the block, and a crescent moon hangs somewhere between them.

Pray in the town square. Live your faith out loud. But for me, a classroom wall is a different question. While children can study and debate the Ten Commandments in a history class, Texas and Louisiana did something very different. The two states chose a sacred text and required it to hang, without context or explanation, on classroom walls across their states.

A child doesn’t choose that classroom. She sits under the display for hours, year after year. The Ten Commandments are there, proclaiming a truth, whether she agrees or not.

The Supreme Court drew the line once already, in 1980, when it struck down an almost identical Kentucky law. That ruling, Stone v. Graham, has never been overturned, but the way the Court thinks about religion and government has changed since then. Courts no longer ask whether a law’s main effect is to promote religion. Now they ask whether the practice fits within history and tradition. Texas and Louisiana are both betting their laws will survive that test.

Competing arguments, different history angles

But “history and tradition” sounds narrower and more modest than it turns out to be, because instead of handing judges a single, clear answer, history and tradition hand them a series of arguments.

One argument, the one the Texas court accepted, goes like this: the Ten Commandments have appeared in public buildings and schools across American history, and the Commandments helped shape American law and culture. A poster on a wall fits within that tradition. What’s more, no student is forced to recite the Commandments or believe them, so there is no imposition.

The other argument digs deeper. It asks: what were the Establishment Clause’s authors afraid of? They worried about the government using its authority to foster religious conformity among people who have no way of opting out. Public schools as we know them came much later than the founding era, but they give the state precisely that kind of authority over children.

Bolted on the wall

School is compulsory, and teachers decide who speaks, who passes. A child in that room is still learning which parts of herself can pass without comment and which ones she’ll need to explain. Nobody has to make her recite the words on the wall for her to do that math.

A law putting a state-chosen sacred text on every classroom wall is not the quiet nod to tradition its defenders describe. I believe it comes much closer to the government-directed religious conformity the Establishment Clause was meant to guard against.

I don’t carry the gym pants around with me anymore, or even most of December 21st. The moments themselves have receded. The question of belonging has not. Kids absorb that weather and keep walking, mostly. What worries me about the Ten Commandments law is that it takes cultural weather children already learn to navigate on their own and makes it permanent, government-issued, bolted next to the chalkboard.

In that vision, the room isn’t just designed for one community’s normal. It tells everyone else what belongs there—and what doesn’t. The room says so. In writing. Every day.

This piece was previously published in Deseret News.

Subscribe now

My daughter entered our family the week my father died.

I suspected I was pregnant before then, though I never bought a test. The nausea started subtly, easy to blame on everything else that year. My father was diagnosed with terminal cancer only a few months before my wedding. “I’d give him four months, at most,” the doctor told us. What followed became competing to-do lists: the daily work of his decline, my move to Philadelphia, two bar exams in two different states, and flights home to Miami squeezed between exam prep and hospital visits. Oh, and the nausea.

Through it all, everything and everyone was bending toward the same impossible question: How much time remained?

He died. A week later, I confirmed I was pregnant.

At the funeral, my aunts kept saying I looked pale, and I let them believe it was grief. My daughter was already there, though none of us knew to look for her yet.

For years, those two facts lived in separate parts of my memory, two rooms in a house I never walked between. While we were preparing for one life to end, another had already begun, no larger than a seed. Only later did I understand they had always belonged to the same story.

My mother’s house gradually filled with a hoard of small things: a blanket folded over the arm of the couch, a pair of socks so small she couldn’t stop turning them over in her hands, laughing. She held up the light pink cardigan she’d once sewn for my own Cabbage Patch doll and wondered how it would fit her new grandchild.

None of us had met her. Still, she had a place among us.

An ultrasound photograph was passed around the dinner table like a family portrait. Someone started saving children’s books, wondering whether the baby would like the beach, or the mango trees that dropped fruit onto the grass every summer of my childhood. A cousin mailed a onesie two sizes too big, betting on a growth spurt that hadn’t happened yet.

As the pregnancy progressed, my husband and I kept trekking from Philly to Florida every chance we had. A couple of months before my due date, on one of those trips, we decided to spend a day at Disney World out near Orlando. We left in the early evening, a few hours into the drive my sister took over at the wheel, and not long after, one of the tires burst, even though my brother had them all checked the day before. The air was still warm, and my feet were swollen inside sandals that no longer fit right.

The car lurched sideways. I remember my sister fighting the wheel, the strange sensation of spinning across four lanes of traffic, empty in that moment as if they had already been cleared for us, without ever feeling the impact you know is coming. Then, somehow, we were still. The concrete barrier sat only a few feet from my window.

The highway patrol officer walked slowly around the car before looking back at us. “I usually see crashes like this from the other side,” he said. “The knock on the door, not the walk-away.” He shook his head. “You all are very lucky.” By the time the tow truck arrived, it was well after dark. The four of us squeezed into the tow truck’s front seat, knees knocking, as the car was hauled away, a dispatch radio crackling somewhere on the dash. Nobody spoke.

My mother has never called it luck. She believes in angels appointed over every person, guarding them by God’s command. Muslim scholars imagined four angels accompanying every human life: two recorded, two guarded. They stood between us and dangers we never knew existed, a reckless driver, or, one commentary says, an insect headed toward the ear. The angels step aside only when a person’s appointed hour has come.

Decades before the diagnosis, my father survived a crash of his own. His car flipped on one of those looping highway exit ramps and rolled into the grass median, and he walked out of it without a scratch, the car totaled beyond recognition. He rarely told the story himself. When it came up, it was almost in passing, the way someone mentions a flat tire.

How many dangers never become stories? A child pauses at the curb, and nothing happens. A flight lands safely and is forgotten within the hour. My husband was diagnosed with leukemia last year; by spring he was back on a ladder, changing the filters in our house, and no one thought to remark on it.

We live as though the absence of disaster does not require our attention. A story needs a wound, and danger that leaves no mark leaves no memory. The two angels who stand guard over each of us do their best work invisibly.

My father’s hour had come. Mine had not, and neither had my daughter’s.

Today, my daughter is grown. She has no memory of the grandfather who would have spoiled her, nothing of the highway where her own story might have ended before it had properly begun. She knows him only through the stories we’ve told her.

To her, belonging has always been a given. By the time she was born, it already was.

Last summer, my flight to Nantucket was diverted to Boston, fog thick enough to ground half the runway. An older man and I shared an Uber to Hyannis, only to discover we’d both missed the last ferry. We found separate hotels. The next morning we bumped into each other again at the dock. By breakfast, with coffee cooling between us and the harbor slowly coming awake, we’d stopped talking like strangers.

When boarding began, I stepped out of line for a moment. By the time I got back, he’d disappeared into the crowd. I looked for him once we were on the ferry but never found him again.

Some people lose each other in airports.

I lost mine on a ferry.

My friend Dilshad Ali lost hers somewhere over Ohio. She spent an hour talking with the man beside her on a flight. They wandered into autism and what it means to raise a child the world doesn’t quite know how to accommodate. Then his wife handed him a book to pass the time.

Dilshad picked up her own book: When Islam Is Not a Religion.

He looked at the cover, said nothing, and somewhere between one page and the next, the conversation quietly came to an end.

If you’ve traveled enough, you’ve probably had a conversation like that. You leave knowing less about what someone does than what keeps them awake at night. Then the cabin doors open, the spell breaks, and everyone drifts toward a different gate.

Recently, Vivek Murthy suggested that airplanes and other liminal spaces should become places of deliberate solitude or connection again. Put away the laptop, read a book, let your mind wander. Or notice the stranger beside you. Sometimes the best use of an empty hour is another human being.

There is a category in Islamic law for someone like this. Ibn al-sabil, the son of the road. For this stretch of the journey, the wayfarer has been separated from the ordinary web of people and places that would otherwise sustain him. Because of that separation, he acquires a claim on the care of others—enough to see him safely home. Once he arrives, the claim disappears. The need belonged to the road.

The Prophetic teachings say something similar about guests. A host owes hospitality for three days. After that, what remains is generosity freely given rather than expected. The teaching never assumes the guest will stay. It simply recognizes that two lives have overlapped for a little while, and that this, by itself, is enough to ask something of us.

When I wrote recently that we should talk to our seatmates, the responses surprised me. People told stories about conversations that only made sense years later. The stranger who became a colleague. The woman who unexpectedly turned out to know your cousin. The chance encounter that returned years later in another city. Looking back, they realized an ordinary flight hadn’t been ordinary after all.

Those stories pointed, almost by contrast, to all the others. For every encounter that circles back years later, there must be dozens that simply disappear into memory. We step off the plane convinced nothing came of the encounter, never knowing what, if anything, it quietly left behind.

Psychologists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder have found that people consistently expect they’d rather be left alone on trains and buses. Afterwards, they report being happier when they talked to the stranger beside them instead.

One reader pushed back when I encouraged people to talk to their seatmates. Strangers don’t choose where they sit on an airplane, he reminded me, and they can’t easily leave if a conversation becomes unwelcome. I think that’s a fair caution. I’ve spent a flight nodding politely while the man beside me recounted his life after becoming a born-again Christian, pausing every few minutes to ask whether I’d ever considered following the same path. By the time he was lamenting how all the wrong people were taking over the country, I found myself watching the little airplane creep across the seatback map, willing it to move faster.

The problem wasn’t that we disagreed. The problem was that I had nowhere to take the conversation except where he wanted it to go. No one is entitled to another person’s attention. A conversation should always remain an invitation.

Even so, I suspect some of our hesitation comes from somewhere else. We want certainty before we say hello. We’d like to know, before we open ourselves to another person, that the hour won’t be wasted.

Life rarely offers that kind of certainty.

The traveler doesn’t arrive with a promise that he’ll become part of your life. The guest doesn’t come with any assurance of what comes next. All you know is that, for a little while, this person has been placed in your care.

It’s tempting to wonder whether certain people were meant to enter our lives. The older teachings ask a different question: Now that they have, how will you receive them?

I still think about breakfast in Hyannis, the salt air drifting across the dock as strangers became companions for a morning. Sometimes I think about the conversation Dilshad had over Ohio that ended when a man lowered his eyes to the cover of a book and let the moment pass.

Breakfast ended. The ferry docked. The plane landed.

Like the traveler, like the guest, they belonged to us only for the length of the journey.

Subscribe now

I was in Switzerland when the Supreme Court handed down its birthright citizenship decision.

Everywhere we went, South Asian tourists were recreating scenes from the Bollywood classic Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, filmed in the Swiss Alps. They wandered through Alpine meadows and posed beside train stations that, more than thirty years after the film’s release, have become part of a shared cultural memory. None of them had ever lived in Switzerland. They’d made it theirs through story. My father made a place his own a different way.

My parents immigrated to the United States from Pakistan before I was born. My father was a civil engineer who eventually started his own firm in Miami. If you’ve flown through Miami International Airport, you’ve moved through spaces his firm helped design. If you’ve boarded a cruise ship from the Port of Miami, you’ve stood on infrastructure his company built.

Shortly before he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, his firm won the contract to rebuild the streets and sewer system of Liberty City.

He rarely spoke about his work in grand terms. He spoke the way engineers often do, as though every problem had a practical solution waiting to be discovered. Conversations revolved around drainage, traffic flow, pavement, deadlines, and clients.

As a child, I found it all faintly unromantic. It wasn’t until much later that I understood what he had actually devoted his life to.

The best infrastructure disappears into ordinary life. If it’s doing its job well, people don’t stop to admire it. The same was true of the airport and the seaport, people moving through them, assuming the road would hold and the water would flow when they turned on the faucet, never wondering who drew the plans. The work recedes into the background while everyone else gets on with living. That disappearance into the background is the whole measure of success.

But Liberty City felt different. Airports and seaports are places people pass through. Liberty City was a neighborhood. Children would walk those streets to school. Families would grow old in homes connected by systems no one would ever see. His work there did more than move people from one place to another. It made ordinary life possible.

The Fourteenth Amendment is the same kind of invisible infrastructure. That is why I kept thinking about the Supreme Court’s decision on birthright citizenship long after the headlines moved on. President Trump had argued that children born to parents who were here unlawfully or temporarily were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and so were not citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court rejected that argument, reaffirming what American law has long understood: with only narrow historical exceptions, birth on American soil confers citizenship. That conclusion rests on the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, the common law that preceded it, and a century of precedent beginning with United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

The Citizenship Clause was written after Dred Scott, when the country was forced to confront whether citizenship could depend on ancestry, whether the law could permanently place some people outside the political community because of who their parents were. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment answered no, and built that answer with words instead of concrete and pipe, words meant to hold up something larger than a city.

A hundred years before my father drew his first plan for Liberty City, Wong Kim Ark tested whether those words meant what they said. When he returned from a visit to China, immigration officials tried to keep him out, on the theory that he had never really been a citizen to begin with. He wasn’t trying to become a symbol. He was trying to come home. The Court agreed that he already belonged.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s real achievement was the starting point it established. The Constitution begins with the child, whoever the parents are. Birth in the United States, coupled with subjection to its laws, became the constitutional rule. Equality started there.

That has always felt personal to me, though not because my parents were immigrants. My father never spent much time talking about whether he belonged in America. He spent his time helping to build it. The airport, the seaport, the streets of Liberty City were how he answered that question.

I was born in the United States. So were my children. My parents were not. For most of my life, that fact felt almost unremarkable. Its very unremarkableness is one of the quiet successes of the Fourteenth Amendment for someone like me. I never had to wonder whether I belonged to the political community, any more than I wondered whether the runway beneath an airplane would hold.

When I think back to Switzerland, I don’t remember the mountains first. I remember the families laughing as they recreated scenes from a movie that had taught them to love a country none of them were born in.

My father chose a different way of belonging.

He helped build one.

Subscribe now

The first thing my cat did, on the day we moved into a near-stranger’s house, was insult the resident.

Harry came out of his carrier, took one slow look around a living room that plainly belonged to another animal, and stretched out in the best patch of sun as though he had paid the mortgage. From under the couch, two outraged eyes watched him do it.

That was Rico. Rico did not care for other cats. The ones in his neighborhood had chased and swatted him for years, and he had concluded, not unreasonably, that his own kind could not be trusted. He was wary of most people too, and openly grumpy with the rest, a cat who had decided the world was against him and saw no reason to hide it.

“He isn’t really a people person,” said the woman whose house we had just invaded, watching the standoff with the calm of someone who had seen him sulk before. “Or a cat person.” Which is a strange thing to say about a cat, and turned out to be exactly true.

We were in that house because ours was not finished yet. It was being built from the ground up, and the move-in date kept sliding, a week, then another, because it was the middle of the pandemic and the workers kept falling sick.

The woman watching my cat make himself at home was, at that point, someone I had never really met. We knew each other through a phone, a long thread of WhatsApp messages and the small bright squares of social media. I had met her husband once, years earlier, but her I knew the way you know someone who lives entirely on a screen. We had lived ten minutes apart for years and never once stood in the same room.

When our plans for where to wait out the construction fell through, twice, she sent the message I have not stopped turning over since.

Come stay with us. All of you. Bring the cat.

The cats, it turned out, were the smallest thing she had taken on. Not everyone would have opened their home to a whole family, least of all then. Because of Covid, people had pulled their families behind closed doors and learned to flinch at a stranger in a hallway, and into that fear she opened hers to a household she had only ever met through a screen. I have been on the other side of need enough times to know how rare that is.

My last piece was about the way friendship can sour, about people who collect friends the way others collect grievances, always keeping a tally. This is the other half of that story, the one with no tally in it at all. She just opened a door.

One reader of that piece pointed me toward Aristotle, who says you cannot truly know someone until you have eaten a great deal of salt together. Friendship cannot be hurried. The wish for it comes quickly, he wrote. The thing itself comes slowly.

Ours began in reverse. She did not take us in because we were close. We grew close because she took us in. The salt we were meant to eat slowly, over years, we ate all at once, at her table, every night for a month. The welcome came first. The friendship is what it left behind.

There is a teaching that runs in both directions. To give while expecting something back is not really to give, it only turns the gift into a loan. And to rush to repay is its own quiet refusal, a way of clearing the books so you do not have to carry what you were handed. Real generosity keeps no ledger at either end.

The Qur’an puts it in the mouths of the righteous, the ones who feed the hungry and then say, we feed you only for the face of God, wanting no reward from you, and no thanks. No reward, not even thanks.

My tradition has a word for it, karim. We translate it as generous, but it shares a root with karama, dignity, as if to give freely and to be noble were never two things. Al-Karim is a name of God, the One who gives before we ask and keeps no record of what comes back. To be karim is to carry a small flame of that, an open hand with no tally in the other, able to give that way, and to receive that way too, without ever counting what you owe.

Somewhere in the second or third week, I caught myself reaching for the right drawer for a spoon without thinking, the way you only do in a kitchen that is yours. It was not mine, but my hands had stopped believing that. Her spoons had become my spoons, and she had made it look like nothing at all.

I have thought about what we owed her, and the truth is that the debt was never the point. What we wanted was to be the kind of guests who are a gift and not a weight, to fold into her days without bending them out of shape.

Some evenings we arranged dinner for the whole house, not to pay anything down but because feeding people is a happy thing to do. The same meal can be a debt repaid or a gift freely given, and the difference is never in the food. It is in what the heart means by it.

Her husband and my son found their own friendship. Eesa was ten that year, and somewhere in those weeks he stopped behaving like a guest. The surest sign was the drink fridge. He had discovered they kept it stocked with Brisk iced tea, which he loved and we never bought at home, and he began helping himself to cans with the easy confidence of a boy in his own kitchen. Her husband loved the stuff just as much, and he took the raids not as a liberty but as the beginning of something. The two of them would crack open their cans and talk like a couple of old men who went back years.

It has become ordinary to keep our homes shut behind us, and there is real safety in that, never more than in the year I am describing. But there is a loss folded inside it, too. There may be no older way of turning strangers into family than handing them the run of your house, and a door that opens that far has become rare, rare enough that it startled me.

There was nothing performed in what she did. No one watched. There was no post, no audience, not even a photograph of all of us crowded around her table. There was only the table, and the food, and room made for us in a life that was already full.

Rico held out about a week. He hissed, Harry ignored him. He hid, Harry waited outside the hiding place like a fool in love. Then one morning I came down to find the two of them asleep in the same square of sun Harry had claimed on the first day, Rico’s paw thrown over his back as if none of the old grievances had ever happened. My friend stood in the doorway and watched them for a while. “I have never once seen him do that,” she said.

Rico trusted almost no one, cat or human, and he had his reasons. Harry gave him no say in the matter. They were shut under one roof, and the roof did the rest. Rico is gone now, a few years gone, and in his whole wary life Harry was the only cat he ever let close.

It is more or less what happened to the woman whose spoons I borrowed and me. A screen had kept us at arm’s length, two people who lived close enough to meet and somehow never did. Then a door opened, and the shared walls did the rest.

We live in the same neighborhood now. The house all that construction was inching toward turned out to be a few minutes from hers, and the screen we used to live behind is mostly gone. When I want to see her now, I hop over.

I have told her, more than once, that she and her husband will always have a place in our hearts that belongs to no one else. I used to think I was thanking her. I understand now that I was doing something else. You cannot pay a gift like that back without turning it into the loan it never was. You can only carry it.

And we do. The salt we ate in that house turned a voice on a screen into family.

Subscribe now

At a dinner last winter, the person next to me leaned in, warm, almost tender, and said in a voice meant only for me, “Between us, I don’t think she really belongs in this group.” The centerpiece was too tall and we had been tilting around it all night to see each other. I remember that for half a second, before anything else arrived, I felt the little electric lift of being picked, of finding myself suddenly inside the velvet rope. The shame came later, the way it does.

I have thought about that half second more than I would like to admit, because it finally handed me a word for a kind of person I had been watching for years without ever quite naming.

You have probably met one. Not the lonely figure at the edge of the party but the opposite, the one at the center of it, genuinely good with people, whose circle never stops widening. Every season brings new names, folded in, hugged hello, made to feel chosen. From the outside it can look like a kindness to everyone, one person warm enough to gather a whole community into a single room.

But gathering people is not the same as loving them, and beneath all that warmth there is a ledger. The hands that pull you in are the same ones that decide, later, who stays close and who gets eased toward the edge. It happens in small print. A cooler hello. An inside joke you are suddenly not told. A dinner you only hear about afterward, from someone who assumed you had been there.

Collecting and gatekeeping turn out to be one gesture, because the only way to own who is inside is to keep ruling on who is not, and a community that should be a single piece of cloth begins to come apart, thread-by-thread.

A few weeks after that dinner, a friend called me. She was working to sound light about it. She wanted to know whether she had done something wrong, because there had been a gathering she was not asked to, a coolness she could not place, a door that had shut without anyone admitting it was a door. “I’m sure I’m imagining it,” she said, and laughed, and then she was quiet, and we both sat there knowing she was not imagining it. I had nothing useful to say. I still don’t.

My tradition has an old, heavy word for what was moving underneath all of this. Fitna. It does not come over cleanly into English, but it points at something like discord, the deliberate stirring of division between people, and Islam takes it more seriously than a long list of sins we are quicker to name.

There is a teaching I keep returning to, that mending what has broken between two people is worth more than years of prayer and fasting, and that the opposite, letting it fester, turning people against each other, is the thing that shaves away your faith the way a blade takes hair. We are warned, again and again, about the one who carries words from house-to-house, who keeps one face for you and another for the person they are quietly turning you against. The warnings are severe because the damage is so soft-footed. You almost never see it as it happens. You see, much later, that the room has split.

Arthur Brooks has a plainer vocabulary for one corner of this. There are real friends, he says, and there are deal friends.

• Deal friends are the ones the friendship is secretly for something, even when that something is just the pleasant hum of being well-connected.

• Real friends are useless. They do nothing for you but love you.

The person who collects and divides has, in an awful way, mastered the deal friend, turned people into a kind of currency to be gathered and, when it serves, spent.

There is a line in the Qur’an that says on the day that finally matters, friends will become enemies to one another, every last one of them, except those who loved each other for the sake of God. I once read that as being only about the next world. I think now it describes this one just as well. Love someone for what they give you, and the friendship is already half an enemy. It just hasn’t shown it yet.

I could stop here, with one villain and a circle of victims, and it would feel righteous and clean. It would also be false. There is always that half second at the dinner. The pull. Before the shame, there was the flush of being chosen. Part of me wanted in.

Most of us are not the collector. That tireless, dividing hunger is genuinely rare, and we ought to say so plainly rather than pretend everyone is a villain in waiting. But the seed of it is completely ordinary. I have felt it in the small, delicious piece of gossip that buys a little closeness with whoever I pass it to. I have felt it inside my best friendships, on an ordinary afternoon, being faintly transactional, or petty, or glad to have been chosen. We think we are the real ones. Mostly we are. And on the bad days we are keeping the collector’s ledger too, in smaller figures, under a gentler name.

The answer is not to grow suspicious of warm people, or to start auditing our friendships for purity, which is its own kind of cold. It is smaller than that, and harder. You feel the half second when it comes, and you do not move with it. You do not carry the sentence to the next person. You say, at the dinner, lightly, “Actually, I like her,” and you let it cost you a little standing. You try, in a room that has its dividers, to be one of the menders instead.

I never did call that friend back with anything wise. But I did one small thing. I asked her to dinner, no group, no gatekeeper, nobody to be inside or outside of. We talked for three hours. Somewhere in there, she stopped performing being fine, and I stopped performing having answers, and we were just two people who had been bruised by the same thing, telling each other the truth.

That is the thing all the collecting in the world cannot give you. One real table, a seat at it for anybody worn out from being sorted.

Leave a comment

I’ve spent my entire career, first as a religious liberty litigator, then an author and public speaker, and now as a law professor, inside one question: Who counts as an American, and what do we owe each other once we’ve decided?

I didn’t choose the question. It chose me. As a young adult, I saw the question answered in its ugliest form when a mosque in my hometown – designed by my late father – was vandalized. More than 50 bullets in its golden dome, sending the message: You do not belong.

I interpreted the lesson differently: We ALL belong, but our rights won’t protect themselves. As a lawyer, I defended people of every faith, evangelical Christians, Sikhs, Native Americans, Jews, Muslims.

Even in the court room, though, I saw the hypocrisy, the hatred. I watched opposing counsel stand up and argue that my client’s faith wasn’t a religion and should not be protected by the U.S. Constitution. It might have sounded like a legal argument, but in fact, it was an argument about belonging — and exclusion.

That’s true of most of our biggest fights. Religion and speech. Equal protection and bodily autonomy. On the surface, they’re disputes about legal rules. Underneath, they’re disputes about who belongs here and on what terms.

Of course, the rules matter. They’re where the real decisions get made, quietly, in language designed to keep most people out of the conversation. But years of engaging public audiences across the nation have taught me that the human factor underneath these fights is almost always anxiety. People feel their place in this country slipping. Most of us just feel the ground moving and don’t know what to trust.

The public conversation gives us two ways to cope. We can pick a team and treat every Supreme Court term like a sporting event. Or we can tune out because it all feels so … jargony. Picking a team leaves us whipped up but uninformed. Tuning out leaves the most important decisions about our lives to people counting on our inattention.

I think there’s a third way, and it starts by seeing rights the way I do.

Rights are structures, not slogans. They have weight-bearing parts and ornamental ones. Foundations that hold, and joints that give way under pressure. I called this publication The Architecture of Rights because you shouldn’t have to be a lawyer to see how the building stands up, or where the cracks are forming.

Subscribe now

What This Is About

My goal is to give you the structural view, delivered through a deeply personal lens. When a ruling comes down or a controversy erupts, I want you to understand what actually changed and why it matters to you.

You don’t need to follow every Supreme Court case to care about constitutional law. You just need a place that takes the subject seriously enough to explain it clearly and honestly.

What You’ll Find Here

• Essays on the constitutional questions shaping American life: religion, speech, equality, belonging. Plain language, with the nuance the headlines leave out.

• Current events analysis when the Court rules or a controversy breaks, so you understand what actually happened before the takes harden.

• Office Hours, where I walk you through the rules because, again, the rules matter.

No jargon. No ideological cheerleading.

A Different Register

Some of this work doesn’t fit inside a legal argument. The same question, who belongs and what we owe each other, also plays out in a marriage, in raising three kids, in the accidents of hospitality and grief and luck that make up a family and a community. Losing my dad to terminal cancer taught me something about belonging that no court opinion ever has. So did caregiving for my husband through his own battle with cancer.

That’s what you’ll find in The Architecture of Care, a section of this publication where I write about the people and communities that hold us up.

I hope you’ll join me.

With gratitude,

Asma

Years ago in Dubai, my friend Mariam told me her country had just appointed its first Minister of Happiness.

“A Minister of Happiness?” I said, with more incredulity than was strictly kind.

Mariam gave me a look. Ours is a friendship that can hold some weight, so she told me directly not to be obnoxious about it, with a smirk that was half serious and entirely on my side.

My incredulity had a logic, or what passed for one. A cabinet post for a feeling struck me as indulgent, the kind of over-the-top gesture Dubai specializes in, a city that gilds everything it touches. Americans, I assumed, were not that type. We would never treat happiness as a thing to be managed.

The joke was on me. A decade later the United States has no Minister of Happiness, but only because we skipped the ministry and went straight for the management. We built the happiness labs at Yale and Harvard. We made a course on happiness, the most popular course in Yale’s history. We downloaded happiness apps by the millions. Piece-by-piece, we assembled an entire private happiness industry, all of it aimed at engineering a single feeling, even as the research keeps finding that the harder we chase happiness the more it backs away.

So Mariam was right to wave off my smugness. The country I found indulgent was at least honest about the project, naming it out loud and giving it a title. Mine pretended to be above all that while managing happiness harder than anyone, one app and one syllabus at a time.

It’s not only happiness we get wrong. Somewhere in those same years, quietly, we started talking to one another less.

A new study by two psychologists, Valeria Pfeifer and Matthias Mehl, set out to count how many words people speak in a day and found something they were not looking for. Their data came from more than two thousand people, ages ten to ninety-four, most of them American, recorded across twenty-two studies between 2005 and 2019. Each year, those people spoke about 338 fewer words a day than the year before, a steady downward slide across the whole period. The daily average fell from around 16,000 in the mid-2000s to 12,700 by 2019. More than a quarter of our talking, gone, with no announcement when it left.

It is the shape of the loss that gets me. These weren’t only the long talks with the people we love. They were the small ones, too. The question to the cashier. The hello in the elevator. The stranger you used to stop for directions, before the little blue dot on a phone’s map took over the asking.

David Byrne, of all people, called it years ago. In an essay titled “Eliminating the Human,” the Talking Heads frontman argued that one convenience at a time, technology was removing the people from our days. We used to talk to a teller; now we talk to a screen.

It all arrived under the banner of ease. And some of the friction it carried off happened to be the contact.

The friction has a new solvent now. Laurie Santos, the Yale psychologist behind that oversubscribed happiness course, says the quiet part out loud: the chatbots are always there, and they never judge you. Children are having their first romantic relationships with them.

Every frictionless exchange can make the next human one, with its bad timing and its capacity to wound, a little harder to begin. In one experiment, strangers waited in a room, some with phones and some without, and the ones with phones smiled at each other thirty percent less. We have not just stopped talking as much. We have stopped looking up.

We have decided friction is the enemy of a good life, and I suspect we have it backward. A neuroscientist named Jim Coan gave a commencement speech this spring titled “You Are a Pain in the Ass.” Community, he told the graduates, is not the same as harmony. Real connection comes with friction built in, the inconvenience of other people, their needs and interruptions and refusal to be streamlined.

That friction is not the fee you pay for belonging, Coan says. It is the belonging. We become ourselves against the resistance of one another.

Which is what makes those 338 lost words feel less like a statistic than a tally. Sociologists call the people at the edges of our lives, the barista, the neighbor who knows your name, our “weak ties,” a term Mark Granovetter coined in 1973, and one that undersells them to the point of insult.

It might be more accurate to say that these connections confirm, under no obligation, that we exist to a world beyond our own front door. You can be loved at home, surrounded even, and still go unrecognized everywhere else, a stranger in your own neighborhood, unseen in the places where no one is required to notice you.

I write here about the architecture of care, and until now I have mostly meant the people closest in, the family in the next room, the friend who answers at midnight. The weak ties are a reminder that there is a wider architecture, too, and the hello is load-bearing. Pull a few hundred small words out of a day, and a person can fall out of public view, while every close relationship stays perfectly intact.

This summer, home and unhurried for the first time in months, I am choosing the friction on purpose. I talk to the woman at the register instead of tapping my card in silence. I let the line move slowly and leave my phone in my bag, asking the man ahead of me about the sheet cake he is buying rather than auditing the lost minutes. And when a tourist looks lost, I stop and give the directions out loud, the old way, before the blue dot can beat me to it.

I am, I suspect, a mild pain in the ass to people who could have finished in silence. It is among the better things I have to offer, and the thing I most want offered back.

A Minister of Happiness was never the absurd part. The absurd part is the belief we put in her place, that happiness is something you optimize alone, frictionlessly, on a screen, rather than something built through the friction of real life itself.

The cold tea. The conversation that runs long past its natural ending because neither of you wants to be the one to leave. The smirk of a friend who loves you enough to tell you to stop being obnoxious.

I should call Mariam. Not text. Call.

This post was published at Deseret News.

Leave a comment

A friend told me yesterday that he is retardmaxxing.

I have to deal with the word first. It borrows language once used to demean people with intellectual disabilities and repackages it as a philosophy, which is its own small cruelty even when no harm is intended. My friend does not mean it cruelly. He picked it up the way people pick up all kinds of internet debris, because it was funny, because it floated past at the right moment, because it named a feeling. Still, the word is not free. I will use it because he used it, and because what sits underneath it is worth taking seriously.

Here is what he meant by it.

He spent his early years as an academic, the way I am living mine now. He read difficult things, argued about them, and believed, the way you must believe to do that work, that the arguments mattered. Then he left academia almost by accident and entered the corporate world. He found he was very good at it. The money was real. The ladder was real. The rewards arrived in the steady, legible way academic rewards almost never do. He climbed.

Then his father became severely ill, and something in him stopped long enough to look around.

What he saw was a hamster. A very accomplished hamster on a very expensive wheel, running. He had spent years optimizing his pace without ever asking where the wheel was taking him, because a wheel does not take you anywhere. His father’s illness did not expose his life as fraudulent. It simply interrupted the motion long enough for him to feel how dizzy he was, and to realize that the running itself had quietly become the entire content of his days.

So he decided to stop optimizing. Stop tracking. Stop consulting experts about every detail of his existence and waiting for permission before moving. He was going to “whoopsie” his way through life, as the gospel of retardmaxxing puts it, and figure things out as he went. He was choosing, deliberately, to become dumb about his own life, because the smart version had become the only version.

I understood him immediately, because something similar happened to me, and it happened early.

I had just graduated from law school. The future was beginning to harden into something definite, all forward motion and professional momentum. Then my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died four months later.

There was no long season of preparation. Just the diagnosis, then a rapidly narrowing window, then the rest of my life on the other side of it.

I remember the smallness of those four months more than the size of them. A chair pulled close to a bed. The long hours of sleep, the silence, the vigil I kept in his room. Near the end, when he could no longer move anything else in his body, he prayed by blinking his eyes. That was what was left to him, and he used it. A man reduced to almost nothing, still turning what remained toward God.

I still do not have language clean enough to describe what that did to me. It rearranged the hierarchy of things. I had been living sealed, optimizing toward a future no one had promised me, and I had mistaken the trajectory for the life. Meanwhile the actual substance of living, the people, the presence, the irretrievable ordinary days, had been sitting quietly in the background the whole time, waiting to be noticed.

So when my friend described the hamster wheel, I did not hear a stranger naming something new. I heard someone naming a thing I had carried for years.

The family these words come from

The word my friend used has cousins.

There is looksmaxxing, the project of pushing your face and body to their genetic ceiling and beyond: jaw exercises, supplements, surgeries, endless tiny calibrations built on the belief that if you could perfect your appearance, the rest of life would follow.

And there is a gentler, more respectable cousin Frank Bruni wrote about recently in the New York Times. He calls it brainmaxxing: a culture obsessed with cognitive optimization, where Americans spend billions of dollars chasing sharper memory, better focus, protection against decline. Supplements, puzzles, diets, “brain health” regimens. Bruni jokes that his morning Wordle counts as mental calisthenics rather than procrastination.

Then he arrives at the real insight. Cognitive health, he writes, has become the next frontier of self-care. Maybe the brain is the new belly, another part of the self to tone, refine, perfect.

That is the family resemblance. Looksmaxxing perfects the body. Brainmaxxing perfects the mind. Retardmaxxing claims to reject the entire game.

But it does not fully escape it. It preserves the exact structure of the thing it rebels against. It still imagines life as a problem solvable through the correct optimization strategy. Only now the thing being optimized is thoughtlessness itself. The wheel is still a wheel when you decide to run on it backward.

All of them share the same hidden grammar. They treat life as a quantity to maximize. More beauty. More cognition. More detachment. The variable changes. The structure does not.

So the real question was never which thing to max. The real question is whether maxxing is the right shape for a life at all.

Janan got off the train

I keep thinking about my friend Janan Delgado, who had almost the same realization and reached almost the opposite conclusion.

Janan once described herself as the fastest train on the track. As a student in Cairo, she quietly disdained anything slow. Her favorite animal was the bee because bees worked hard and got things done. She would enter the PhD program of her choice, teach somewhere prestigious, publish important books. Keep up or move aside.

The world she entered kept confirming that this was the only train worth riding. When she mentioned that her sister was visiting, an advisor frowned and asked how long, because the last time family visited, she had fallen behind on her writing. When she got engaged and wanted to spend a year in Cairo with her husband, a professor warned her she would fall through the cracks. No congratulations. Just concern about momentum.

Then she had children.

And the self she had built, the sealed self capable of shutting out every competing demand and arriving at work like a single-bodied person, cracked apart. Her dissertation, which should have taken a few years, took ten. She watched colleagues graduate and move on while she felt herself slowing into someone unrecognizable to her former self.

She finished anyway. Her dissertation passed with distinction and later won first place across all of Harvard.

But the lesson she took from that experience was not that she had succeeded despite the slowness. It was that interrupted, encumbered, relational work can still be excellent work.

Her essay ends with a literal train ride. She missed her stop and woke up sixty miles beyond her station. Sitting on a bench in Trenton, crying, she realized something strange: she had been riding the slow regional line. If she had been on the fast express she spent most of her life admiring, the same mistake would have carried her ninety-five miles in the wrong direction. Speed, she writes, is appealing. It is also unforgiving.

Janan did not abolish thinking. She did something harder. She allowed care to reorganize her life around other people and accepted what it cost her in speed.

I got on the train Janan got off

I have to be honest about where I stand in all this, because it would be easy to tell this story as though I am the calm observer watching friends sort themselves out.

I am not. I am doing the thing.

I have spent my life pursuing what people used to call the “life of the mind,” and I recently pivoted into academia, which means I boarded roughly the train Janan stepped off. I give up a great deal for the privilege of reading, teaching, writing, and thinking seriously about questions I believe matter. I love it the way you love something you waited a long time for.

And if I am honest, there is a version of what I do that is simply smartmaxxing in more dignified clothing. Publications. Talks. A number I could spend my entire life pushing upward while calling it a vocation.

The easy answer is that my work is meaningful while my friend’s was empty. But that answer flatters me too much to trust it.

The real difference, I think, is whether the work turns a person outward or seals them inward.

My friend’s climb had become a sealed room. So had Janan’s train for a time. So had my own life before my father’s illness cracked it open.

The danger was never intelligence or effort themselves. The danger is becoming the kind of person who can shut out every demand except his own ambitions, who can move through the world as though he owes nothing and belongs to no one.

What I want, on my better days, is not optimization but orientation. I want a life in which learning opens outward, into students, readers, friends, a husband, children, a God I am trying to serve. A life where thought deepens my obligations to other people rather than insulating me from them.

That, I think, is what my father’s illness taught me, and what my friend’s father taught him without meaning to. Not that thinking is bad. My friend remains one of the smartest people I know and will remain smart no matter how aggressively he tries to “whoopsie” his way through life. What broke was not the mind but the seal around it.

Retardmaxxing is his attempt to break that seal with a sledgehammer. I understand the impulse. Sometimes a seal that tight seems to demand one. But you do not have to become dumb to become present. You only have to let other people rearrange you.

None of these are really ways of maxxing at all. Not beauty. Not intelligence. Not even meaning.

The better question is quieter than that.

Who are you for?

Everything I have come to believe tells me the answer was never a number. It was a direction. Outward, toward each other, which is slower and more porous and less controllable than optimization. It is also, I suspect, the only thing any of this was ever for.

Leave a comment

Yesterday, I was on 1A talking about the country’s 250th birthday and a question the show put plainly. What does America’s relationship with faith look like now? As the conversation went on, I kept noticing how easily certain people get left out of the story we tell about religious freedom. Muslims, progressive believers, anyone whose faith doesn’t match a narrow picture of what religion is supposed to look like. They get treated as if they are not quite part of the American story, and not quite covered by the protections the rest of us take for granted.

I have spent years writing about one version of this. In my work on Islam, I showed how the most effective way to take away a community’s rights is not to attack those rights head on. It is to argue that the thing in question is not really a religion at all. Call Islam a political movement, a foreign legal code, a program of conquest, anything but a faith, and the whole framework of protection quietly disappears. If it is not religion, there is no religious freedom question to answer. The community is left exposed, and the people doing this can say with a straight face that they never touched anyone’s religious liberty.

What surprised me is how many people recognize the move once you name it. After I speak, they come up to tell me they have seen the same thing aimed at their own beliefs.

• A Jewish man tells me he has been informed by non-Jews that his support for Israel is not really part of Judaism, just politics in religious dress.

• A Mormon friend tells me he is used to hearing that his church is not really a religion at all but a cult, or that whatever it is, it does not count as the real thing.

• A woman tells me she has been told that her belief that her faith permits, and sometimes calls for, abortion in certain situations is not religion but ideology she has wrapped in sacred language.

The accusation always has the same shape. Your belief may be sincere, but it is not the kind of thing the law was built to protect.

This same idea showed up, in a more careful form, in the fight over Indiana’s abortion ban. A group of plaintiffs, including a Jewish organization and several women of different faiths, argued that the ban violated their religious freedom under a state law, because their faith directs them to end a pregnancy in circumstances the ban makes a crime. The law professor Josh Blackman, writing with two colleagues, built the case against them. Soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, he suggested in a post he called tentative thoughts that many non-Orthodox Jews could not really claim a religious obligation about abortion, because their branch of Judaism does not treat religious law as binding in the strict sense.

Blackman later said he did not mean that liberal Jews can hold no sincere beliefs, but the core idea survived. People who do not believe a higher power is commanding them, he argued, people for whom faith is more personal, hopeful, cultural, or traditional, do not fit the kind of case the law was meant to protect. That one line does a great deal of work. It splits faith into real religion, which orders you to do things, and a lesser thing that merely inspires or comforts. And it puts a lot of believers on the wrong side of the line.

Here is where it gets revealing, and where the trap snaps shut. The same logic that says Muslims and progressive believers are not doing real religion does not lead its users to leave those communities alone. It leads them to attack from both directions at once. They do not want religious freedom to cover a Muslim’s prayer or a progressive’s conscience. But when a public school teaches a unit about Islam, or runs a program meant to push back against anti-Muslim prejudice, suddenly those same voices discover a deep concern about the separation of church and state, and they sue to shut it down as an unlawful establishment of religion. So Islam is too political to count as a religion when a Muslim wants protection, and too religious to be allowed in a public school when a Muslim might benefit. The category bends whichever way leaves the community with less. That is the tell. This was never an honest question about what religion is. It is a tool, and the tool always cuts the same people.

I want to be fair to Blackman. He is making a real legal argument about a hard question, and lawyers can disagree in good faith about how the law should treat beliefs that recommend something rather than strictly command it. He is not running the crude project of calling a whole faith a fraud. But the logic he sharpens is the same logic I have chased for years in its uglier forms. It lets an outsider decide what counts as real faith, and it treats the ordinary variety inside any religious tradition as proof that the believer is faking. Critics warned early that this reasoning would not stay parked on abortion. The same groups using it for their own members would find it turning back on them.

The Indiana appeals court took a different path, deferring to the women’s own account of what their faith asked of them. I will not pretend this settles everything. If the believer decides what her faith requires, a court still has to ask how it can test that without becoming the very arbiter I have been warning against. Where the line sits, and who can police it, is a real problem, and one I mean to take up later.

But the difficulty of drawing that line is not a reason to hand the pen to whoever happens to distrust a given faith. The lesson I keep coming back to is that religious freedom cannot be sliced up. Once we let someone outside a faith decide whether a believer’s commitment is the real thing, we have given away the principle that protects all of us.

Leave a comment

On Sunday, organizers of “Rededicate 250” will gather on the National Mall for a day of prayer, worship, and what they describe as a “rededication” of the United States as “One Nation under God.” Timed just ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday, the event features Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and other senior officials, along with prominent evangelical leaders, two Catholic bishops, and a leading Orthodox rabbi. It is organized through a public-private partnership with the White House.

The event revives a constitutional question Americans have never fully resolved: When does public religious expression become governmental establishment of religion?

For some, the answer is straightforward. The National Mall is a traditional public forum where private groups regularly hold religious and ideological events. Religious Americans have the same right as anyone else to assemble, pray, and celebrate their vision of the nation’s history.

For others, the event feels different, not because it is religious but because of how it is framed. It is presented as a national act of religious recommitment, organized in partnership with the White House, with high-ranking officials appearing under their official titles. At some point, critics ask, does patriotic religiosity become government endorsement?

What the Constitution Actually Requires

The Constitution offers no simple answer, but it does provide a framework.

The First Amendment contains two religion clauses that exist in tension. The Free Exercise Clause protects Americans’ right to practice religion publicly and robustly. The Establishment Clause forbids the government from establishing religion or coercing religious observance. The challenge has always been defining where private expression ends and unconstitutional governmental action begins.

For much of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court approached this boundary with suspicion. School-sponsored prayer was struck down on the ground that schoolchildren are uniquely vulnerable to official religious pressure. By the 1980s, the Court had developed an “endorsement test,” which asked whether government action conveyed an impermissible endorsement of religion to a reasonable observer.

The Court’s modern jurisprudence has moved in a different direction, away from the endorsement test and toward history, tradition, and the absence of coercion.

The key case for events like Rededicate 250 is Town of Greece v. Galloway. Citizens there challenged a town’s practice of opening meetings with explicitly Christian prayers, many invoking Jesus Christ by name. They argued that the practice excluded non-Christians and effectively aligned the town with one faith.

The Supreme Court disagreed. Writing for the Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy emphasized the nation’s long tradition of legislative prayer dating back to the Founding. So long as the government does not coerce participation, discriminate among faiths, or use prayer as a tool of proselytization, ceremonial religious expression generally falls within the nation’s constitutional traditions.

That approach has strengthened in recent years. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Court rejected the endorsement test and held that a high school football coach’s visible postgame prayers were protected private religious expression. Establishment Clause analysis, the Court said, must be guided by “historical practices and understandings,” not by abstract concerns about perceived endorsement.

Under this framework, Rededicate 250 would likely be upheld. The National Mall is a paradigmatic public forum. Participation is voluntary. No one is compelled to attend, pray, or affirm any creed. The government is not imposing religious observance in the way the Establishment Clause most clearly forbids.

History points in the same direction. As Michael McConnell has shown, the establishments familiar to the Founding generation were defined not by religious rhetoric or public ceremony, but by legal control over religion itself: controlling doctrine and clergy, compelling attendance, providing public financial support, and limiting political participation to members of the established church. Rededicate 250 has none of these features.

What Legal Doctrine Cannot Settle

And yet doctrinal permissibility is not the same as constitutional reassurance.

What makes Rededicate 250 more fraught is the fusion of three elements: explicitly Christian worship, national symbolism, and the participation of high-ranking officials in their official capacities, in an event organized through a partnership with the White House. The event does not merely place religion alongside public life. It intertwines religious commitment with national identity.

That distinction matters, even if it does not map neatly onto modern doctrine. The Establishment Clause was not designed to purge religion from the public square, but to prevent the state from identifying itself too closely with a particular faith. The Framers worried not only about formal establishment, but about what happens when religious and civic identity become tightly linked.

The concern is not coercion in the narrow sense. No one at Rededicate 250 will be punished for refusing to participate, and no legal rights turn on attendance. The question is subtler: When senior officials participate in overtly sectarian national ceremonies, organized through the executive branch, does the government signal that some religious identities are more fully “American” than others?

Reasonable people will answer differently. Some will see these officials as exercising their own religious liberty in public view. Others will see the symbolic prestige of government, and the organizing power of the White House, being lent to a specifically Christian vision of the nation.

The Supreme Court today is likely to side with the former view. But the underlying debate reflects competing visions of American pluralism itself, and doctrine alone cannot resolve it. One vision treats public religious expression as an essential part of national identity. The other worries that when government and religious symbolism merge too closely, citizens outside the dominant faith are pushed to the margins of civic life.

Rededicate 250 places those competing instincts on full display. That is why the event matters, not just as a gathering on the National Mall but as a test of how Americans understand the relationship between faith, citizenship, and political belonging.

To celebrate America’s 250th, I will be speaking at a very different type of event:

Leave a comment

In recent weeks, senior officials have urged Americans to pray for military victory “on bended knee” and to do so “in the name of Jesus Christ,” tying the nation’s wars to a sense of divine purpose.

At the same time, service members have filed 110 complaints about their commanders describing war itself as part of “God’s divine plan” and invoking biblical end-times language as they prepare troops for combat.

Separately, inside the Pentagon, leaders have also organized recurring Christian prayer services, held in government spaces and promoted within federal agencies. A watchdog group has now gone to court to find out how those events were planned, who approved them, and whether taxpayer resources were used to support them.

What exactly is happening here?

Is this simply religion in public life, something the Constitution clearly allows? Or is it something else, something closer to the government itself taking a religious stance?

The Constitution does not push faith out of public life. It protects it. Americans can pray. Leaders can speak about their beliefs. The military even employs chaplains so service members of many faiths can worship.

But there is a line. The government cannot use its authority in ways that effectively favor one faith or pressure people to participate in particular religious practices — especially in settings where hierarchy and context can make participation feel expected rather than freely chosen. General appeals to prayer are one thing; directing or embedding religious activity within official duties is another.

Where that line sits, however, has become harder to locate.

The Supreme Court has spent decades trying to define it, and its answers have shifted. For a long time, courts asked whether a reasonable observer would see a specific government action as an endorsement of religion.

But over the past decade, the Court has moved away from that framework. In Town of Greece v. Galloway (2014), it upheld explicitly Christian legislative prayer based on historical tradition. In American Legion v. American Humanist Association (2019), it criticized the old tests courts had relied on for decades.

Most recently, in 2022, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Court went further. It ruled in favor of a high school football coach who prayed on the field after games, emphasizing his individual right to religious expression and directing courts to look instead to history and tradition.

Together, these decisions make clear that government employees do not lose their right to pray simply because they are acting in a public role — and they narrow the situations in which courts will treat religious expression as unconstitutional, even when it happens in public view.

That matters here. When senior officials call publicly for prayer in explicitly Christian terms, the line between personal expression and official speech becomes contested. Are they speaking as individuals, or as the government itself? After Bremerton, courts are less quick to answer that question in favor of an Establishment Clause violation.

So, what can courts still look at?

They can ask what the government itself is organizing. Making space for religion is allowed. That is why chaplains exist. But organizing recurring Christian prayer services inside federal agencies raises a different question: Is the government making room for religion, or is it building a platform for it?

That is where the lawsuit now pending becomes important. The group behind it is not just objecting in the abstract. It is asking for the details: Who planned these events? How much staff time went into them? Were outside speakers invited to promote a specific message? Were complaints raised by employees who felt uncomfortable or excluded?

Those details matter because an Establishment Clause case today is not simply about whether someone prayed. It is about whether the government itself organized, funded, or directed religious activity in ways that cross from accommodation into promotion.

Even so, one principle has survived all of this. Coercion matters.

In Lee v. Weisman, the Court held that government-sponsored prayer violates the Constitution when the setting makes it difficult to opt out, even when no explicit requirement to participate is issued. That holding has not been overruled.

The coercion reasoning has particular force in the military. In an ordinary workplace, you can skip an event. You can stay silent. You can opt out without much thought.

Can you do that in the military?

When a superior speaks, it carries weight. When a superior frames a mission in religious terms, it can sound like strong guidance. When a superior invites participation in a prayer, even a voluntary one, it can feel like clear expectation.

When service members report being told that a war is part of God’s plan, what does that mean for the soldier who does not share that belief? What does it mean for the one who does, but understands faith differently? What does it mean for the one who simply wants to do the job without taking a religious position at all?

Are they free to stand apart? Or are they being asked, quietly but unmistakably, to fall in line?

For a legal challenge to succeed, those questions would have to be answered with evidence. A court would look for signs that officials were acting in institutional rather than purely personal capacities. It would look for patterns, not isolated moments. It would look for pressure, even if no one ever said the word “mandatory.” And under the current Court’s framework, it would also have to grapple with whether the challenged practice has historical precedent — a question that tends to favor the government.

The law here is genuinely uncertain. Recent decisions have moved the Court away from aggressive Establishment Clause enforcement and toward stronger protection for religious expression by government actors.

Yet that shift does not make the underlying concerns disappear. It makes them harder to litigate.

So, what is taking place, exactly?

Is it faith accompanying power? Or is it power speaking in the language of faith?

And for the soldiers standing in formation, listening to a prayer before a mission briefing, the question is even more immediate: When the voice comes over the loudspeaker, is it a superior speaking as an individual — or the institution speaking through him?

In that moment, do you really have a choice?

This piece was previously published at Deseret News.

Leave a comment

The Supreme Court’s decision this week in Chiles v. Salazar is about far more than conversion therapy. It redraws the line between what the government can regulate and what it must leave alone, and it does so in a way that will reshape how law treats speech in medicine, counseling and other professional settings.

The case also reflects a broader shift in how these disputes reach the court. For years, conflicts involving sexuality and conscience were framed as questions of religious freedom. That is no longer how they arrive. Chiles came as a free speech case.

But even then, the more important development is not simply how the case was argued; it is how the court chose to understand what was being regulated.

Kaley Chiles, a licensed counselor in Colorado, challenged a state law that prohibits therapists from engaging in “conversion therapy” with minors, reflected in professional efforts to change a client’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The law drew a line. It prohibited counseling that seeks to change sexual orientation, while allowing counseling that affirms identity and supports exploration. Colorado defended that line as a matter of public health, pointing to a broad medical consensus that conversion therapy is ineffective and associated with depression, anxiety and increased risk of suicide.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent takes that evidence seriously and treats it as the heart of the case. In her view, Colorado was doing what states have long done. It was regulating a form of treatment that the medical profession has concluded is harmful, just as states regulate drugs, procedures and standards of care more generally. The fact that this particular treatment is delivered through words, she argued, should not change the analysis.

Her core claim is a careful doctrinal one: There is a meaningful difference between a state that targets speech because of the ideas it expresses and a state that restricts speech only incidentally because it is regulating a medical treatment. Prior Supreme Court decisions, she argued, recognized exactly that distinction and called for less demanding constitutional scrutiny when a state is doing the latter — that is, when the speech restriction is a byproduct of regulating care, not an attempt to silence a point of view.

Eight other justices saw the case differently. And that difference determined everything that followed.

The Supreme Court did not deny that Colorado had evidence or that it was acting with protective aims. It said those should not be relevant considerations once the law was understood as regulating speech.

Chiles provides only talk therapy. She does not prescribe medication or perform procedures. She speaks. From that premise, the court drew a categorical conclusion: If what she does is speech, then what the state is effectively regulating is speech, whatever label the state uses.

That move is not just descriptive. It is decisive.

Once the case is placed in the domain of speech, the governing rules change. The court is then able to ask not whether Colorado was regulating a harmful practice but whether it was taking sides in a debate.

And on that question, the answer was straightforward: The law permits a therapist to affirm a minor’s identity, but forbids a therapist from encouraging change. It allows one perspective and prohibits the other. The court treated that as textbook viewpoint discrimination, the most disfavored form of speech regulation under the First Amendment.

At that point, the case was effectively over. Once a law is classified as viewpoint discriminatory, the government’s evidence, however substantial, carries far less weight. The question is no longer whether the state has good reasons; it is whether the state has chosen a side.

Colorado argued that it was regulating professional conduct. The lower courts agreed. The Supreme Court majority rejected that framing outright. From this view, calling something a treatment or a therapeutic method does not change what it is.

The First Amendment, the court said, cannot be avoided by labeling speech as conduct. Nor does the fact that the speaker is a licensed professional diminish constitutional protection. The court reiterated that there is no separate category of “professional speech” that receives lesser protection.

Thus, at the same time litigants have increasingly brought these cases as speech claims rather than religious ones, the court has become more willing to accept that framing and to go further by treating professional interactions themselves as speech. The first shift is strategic. The second is doctrinal. Together, they are reshaping the law.

The immediate case is about conversion therapy. The broader shift is about something larger.

The consequences are significant. A neutral and generally applicable law like Colorado’s would likely survive a religious freedom challenge under existing doctrine. Treated as a speech restriction, the same law triggers the most demanding form of constitutional review. And when that review is driven by a finding of viewpoint discrimination, the outcome is rarely in doubt.

The implications extend well beyond this case. Much of modern health care is delivered through conversation. Addiction counseling, eating disorder treatment, suicide prevention and end-of-life care all depend on words rather than instruments or prescriptions. States have long regulated these practices based on evidence about what helps and what harms.

After Chiles, those regulations rest on less certain ground. Any rule that permits some therapeutic messages while forbidding others risks being characterized as taking sides. And laws that take sides face a constitutional standard that most cannot satisfy.

The majority acknowledges some limits but does not define them. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, points to a possible path forward. A law that restricts clinical speech without favoring one viewpoint over another might survive constitutional challenge. But that distinction is easier to state than to apply. In a therapeutic setting where treatment often consists of conversation directed toward particular ends, separating content from viewpoint is not straightforward.

Jackson warns of the consequences. Rules requiring providers to act in patients’ best interests, to avoid cruel care and to meet basic standards of competence all shape what professionals say, and all could now face challenge. The majority does not provide a clear answer.

The First Amendment now reaches into spaces it has not occupied before.

The immediate case is about conversion therapy. The broader shift is about something larger. The debate is no longer being fought on the terrain of religion or public health. It is being fought on the terrain of speech. And on that terrain, the balance of power shifts.

Chiles follows a line of recent decisions in which the court has used the First Amendment to reach outcomes that might once have required a harder constitutional fight. This includes a 2023 case in which the court resolved a business owner’s religious objection to serving gay customers entirely through speech doctrine rather than religious freedom principles.

What is new in Chiles is that this logic has now moved inside the clinic. It applies not to a business owner speaking to the public but to a licensed professional speaking to a patient in a therapeutic relationship. That extension matters.

States that seek to regulate what licensed professionals say to patients will now have to navigate a constitutional landscape that has shifted beneath them. Laws that favor one therapeutic message over another will face serious obstacles. Kagan’s concurrence suggests a narrower path may exist, but no one yet knows how far it runs or whether legislatures can successfully walk it.

What is clear is that the First Amendment now reaches into spaces it has not occupied before. The cost of that expansion will be measured, case by case, in the states’ diminished capacity to directly regulate the care of their citizens.

This piece was previously published at Deseret News.

Leave a comment

We don’t talk enough about men and work-life balance, not the way women have been talking about it for decades, with the same honesty and the same stakes. We have a whole vocabulary for what overwork costs women, what it costs families, what it costs the woman quietly managing everything at the margins. But the conversation about what total absorption into work costs men is much quieter. The friendships that dissolve, the children who learn not to interrupt, the self whittled down to professional function. That conversation tends to happen in softer rooms, if it happens at all.

A few weeks ago I was at a conference at Duke built around meaning, loneliness, and what it looks like to live well in a time when both feel harder to hold. Arthur Brooks was there and Iain McGilchrist was there, and it was the kind of conversation that follows you home on the plane and sits with you at the kitchen table for days.

Brooks has written about how men in America are unlikely to form new friendships after thirty, how work becomes not just what they do but who they are, the last remaining structure of identity. He has a phrase for the shallow relationships that fill the space, “deal friends,” built on transaction and utility rather than genuine sustenance. His worry is that we have normalized a version of male life in which depth gets steadily traded for productivity, and no one calls it loneliness because it doesn’t look like loneliness from the outside.

McGilchrist arrived somewhere nearby from a different direction. He talks about two kinds of attention, one narrow and grasping, oriented toward getting and using, the other open and patient, oriented toward connection and what actually matters. His worry is that we have built a world rewarding the first almost exclusively while quietly starving the second, and that meaning doesn’t come from optimizing your life but from staying genuinely present to it.

I flew home thinking about Shabbir.

He has returned to work, gradually, the way you ease back into cold water. A meeting here, a conversation there, the slow reopening of a professional self that had been suspended, not erased. Researchers who study cancer survivors say this is one of the most psychologically significant moments in recovery, not the end of treatment but the return to a role that tells you who you are outside of illness. You are more than a patient. Work, at its best, gives that back. And I can see it in him, the way his energy sharpens after a good call, the way a difficult problem seems almost nourishing.

But what the research also shows, and what feels true from lived experience, is that the person who returns to work after something like this is not the same person who left. Illness strips life down to its essentials. It clarifies, sometimes brutally, what was actually central and what only pretended to be. And the question that follows a survivor back into the office, whether they name it or not, is whether they can carry that clarity with them or whether the old grooves will quietly reopen.

For men especially, those grooves run deep. The culture has long treated professional absorption as a kind of nobility. He is focused, driven, carrying a lot. The hours disappear around him and this gets narrated as seriousness rather than partial absence. The home adapts, the children learn the shape of maybe later, and the woman across from him becomes, slowly, more infrastructure than companion. I watched versions of this in other families. I watched it, in different ways, in ours.

What illness did was interrupt that story without asking.

I’ve written about some of what shifted this past year. How I watched Shabbir become present in ways I had wanted for years and given up asking for. The year was enormous. And what gets clarified that way, you can’t unsee.

The question I find myself sitting with now is not whether Shabbir can do it, he can, but whether the reentry becomes a genuine new chapter or just a gradual slide back into old patterns dressed in new gratitude. I watch this with hope and wariness held together, and I think that’s the honest place to be.

Families are porous, and work doesn’t stay in its lane. It shapes the emotional weather of a house. This is why I’ve never been able to take the language of balance lightly, even when it gets used so casually it sounds like lifestyle branding. Balance is not a cute aspiration. It’s an ethical question about what kind of presence we owe each other.

I keep coming back to what McGilchrist was describing at that conference, that we can pay such narrow, consuming attention to one part of our lives that we lose access to the wider world that gives it meaning, that we mistake the getting and the doing for the thing itself. Women know something about the opposite of that, even without the language for it. We know what it is to think in fragments, to carry six lines of attention at once, to long for an hour not already claimed by someone else’s need and to watch a meaningful life quietly reduce itself to maintenance if we’re not careful.

After a year like ours, none of this feels abstract. It feels domestic. Marital. Spiritual, even.

I don’t have neat answers for what comes next. I only know that this season has made me suspicious of any version of success that requires us to become less available to wonder and to each other. Some evenings I watch Shabbir moving between things that once seemed impossible to hold together, work and recovery and fatherhood and the quiet pleasure of an ordinary day, and there is so much gratitude in that image alongside something in me that stays quietly attentive. Not fearfully. Just honestly.

Survivorship, I’ve come to understand, is not about returning to the person you were before. It’s about figuring out who you are now, and choosing carefully what gets to occupy the center.

Subscribe now

In Texas this month, a proposed Muslim housing development near Dallas has been cast as evidence of the “Islamization of Texas,” described not as a real estate project, but as a civilizational threat.

At a Fort Worth church just days after the primaries, panelists debated banning Islam, deporting Muslims, or reclassifying their faith as a political ideology. In Austin, after a deadly downtown shooting, Muslim families quietly increased mosque security and wondered whether their children would be targeted, not because of anything they had done, but because of what they believed.

I have seen this pattern before. In 2019, I wrote “When Islam Is Not a Religion,” warning that the effort to define Islam out of constitutional protection was already underway. What we are witnessing now is not new.

The argument is deceptively simple. Islam, a surprising number of critics say, is not truly a religion. It is a political system, a totalitarian ideology wearing a religious veneer. And if it is merely political, then it does not qualify for protection under the First Amendment.

I documented these kinds of assertions in a 2018 New York Times article. Since then, the argument has not faded; it has grown more explicit and more mainstream. In 2025, Sen. Tommy Tuberville from Alabama wrote in response to a violent incident abroad, “Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult.” That same year, a local Florida official, Robert Langevin, argued on social media that Islam is “as much a political ideology as it is a practice of faith,” and claimed Muslims were advancing that ideology in Western societies.

This language in the U.S. echoes that of Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who for years has described Islam not as a religion but as a totalitarian political ideology comparable to fascism or communism.

The pattern is familiar: redefine a faith as an ideology, recast believers as political actors, and constitutional protections begin to look optional rather than fundamental.

This claim does not live on the fringe. It has appeared in courtrooms, legislative proposals, and official statements by elected leaders. Lawmakers have introduced anti-Sharia bills premised on the idea that Islamic law poses a unique threat to American values, even though existing law already prevents the abuses they claimed to fear.

Lawyers have also argued that mosques were not entitled to the same protections as churches because Islam was inherently political. The debate was never really about foreign law. It was about who counts.

The controversy surrounding the EPIC community near Dallas fits squarely within this framework. A group of Muslim Texans sought to build a residential developmentanchored by a mosque and community amenities.

Critics responded with warnings of demographic takeover and creeping Sharia. Their concern was not traffic patterns or zoning density, but visibility. Muslims choosing to live together in intentional community became, in this telling, proof of an imagined transformation of Texas itself.

As of March 2026, the development’s legal status remains locked in a complex gridlock of local permit delays and state-level litigation. Additionally, in February 2026, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development opened a federal civil rights investigation at the urging of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott who has called residential development “discriminatory” and invoked fears of “Sharia” while insisting that religion was being used as a “form of segregation.”

The phrase “Islamization of Texas” does powerful rhetorical work. It reframes Muslim religious life not as an exercise of faith, but as an ideological campaign. This casts ordinary civic participation as stealth conquest. Once that frame takes hold, extraordinary legal measures begin to sound reasonable.

Consider what follows if it does. Could the state deny mosque construction outright? Could Muslim charities be regulated as political organizations rather than houses of worship? Could Muslim religious arbitration be singled out for restriction while Jewish and Christian arbitration remains respected? Could Muslim inmates be denied religious accommodations because their faith has been labeled an ideology?

These are not abstract possibilities. They could be the practical consequences of redefining religion.

Religious liberty in America rests on a foundational principle: Government does not sit as theologian. It does not decide which doctrines are sufficiently spiritual or sufficiently American. The First Amendment protects religious exercise because we do not have to prove that our beliefs are popular or comfortable in order to deserve constitutional protection.

To declare that Islam is not a religion is to make Muslim rights conditional on political approval.

History should make us wary of this move. Catholics were once portrayed as loyal to Rome rather than the Republic. Jews were depicted as operating hidden networks of influence. Latter-day Saints were treated as an inherently political movement undeserving of constitutional standing.

In each case, the pattern was the same. Redefine the unfamiliar faith as political, then deny it full protection. The faces changed; the logic did not.

Texas prides itself on limited government and robust religious liberty, and many of the same leaders now warning about Islamization champion strong protections for Christian religious exercise. That instinct for protection is sound.

But it cannot be principled if it is selective. Evangelical Christianity shapes views on marriage, abortion, and public policy. Catholic social teaching animates debates about poverty and immigration. Orthodox Judaism structures daily life in ways that touch commerce and community. Nearly every faith tradition carries moral commitments into public life, and none of that strips it of its religious character.

The test of religious freedom is not how we treat the familiar. It is how we treat the faith that unsettles us.

Muslim Texans describe a lived reality in their own families and communities that looks nothing like an ideological campaign. They celebrate Ramadan under American and Texas flags, run businesses, serve in public office, and raise families in the same suburbs now accused of harboring civilizational threats. Their lives resemble ordinary American pluralism. The question is whether American pluralism will extend to them.

When I wrote “When Islam Is Not a Religion,” I argued that the struggle over Muslim religious liberty was a test of the coherence of religious freedom itself. That test is before Texas again. A government that labels a faith political in order to place it outside constitutional protection has already abandoned neutrality. And a religious liberty that applies only to the comfortable is no liberty at all.

This piece was previously published at Deseret News.

Subscribe now

We were halfway through dinner when someone asked me to look back.

It was the day after my birthday, and the table was full of people who have known me across many versions of my life. At some point between the appetizers and dessert, Amina leaned forward and said gently, “How do you even think about this past year?”

I set down my fork. Just days after my birthday last year, my husband was diagnosed with leukemia, and everything since then has felt slightly off-axis, as if life tilted and never quite returned to level ground. There was no neat answer to her question, no summary that could do justice to the fear, the strange stretches of calm, the way time seemed to stretch and then snap back.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard to put into words.”

“What about him?” someone else asked, not unkindly. “How has this changed him? How has it changed your family?”

I found myself talking about things I hadn’t planned to say. Not the big moments, but the quiet revisions to everyday life.

For most of our marriage, we barely marked time. Birthdays passed with a mumbled acknowledgment, maybe a card left on the counter. Anniversaries slipped by unobserved. The children’s birthdays I managed and insisted on. Those we celebrated, because childhood deserves its ceremonies. But for us, days bled into one another, undifferentiated and unremarkable.

A few years ago, I put my foot down. Maybe it was a meltdown. Maybe it was clarity breaking through like light through a crack.

“We have to start commemorating the special moments,” I told him one evening after another forgotten anniversary had come and gone. “Otherwise, what is life about if we let each day dissolve into the next without marking where we’ve been?”

He looked up from his laptop, not quite understanding why it mattered so much to me, why we needed to celebrate at all.

The change came slowly, grudgingly at first, like turning a rusty wheel. Birthdays began to involve cards, small gestures, attention paid. Anniversaries became occasions rather than dates we’d already flipped past. It felt forced for a while, performative in a way that made me wonder if I’d asked for something artificial, something that couldn’t take root in soil that had gone hard from neglect.

But this year, something shifted.

This year, my birthday arrived with flowers he’d chosen himself, a dinner he’d arranged with kanafe and ice cream for dessert, a favorite. He has realized now that even this is a space for creative investment, that the choosing matters as much as the gesture itself. Our daughter Zaynab presented me with a two-tier Jellycat cake she’d made, a little smiling face on top with tiny feet sticking out the bottom, as if the cake were sitting there pleased with itself. Mikael gave me a small standing crocheted ice cream cone that reads, life is better with a sprinkle of you in it. Coming from Mikael, I knew each word was laden with intent and emotion. They sang to me, badly and joyfully, and when I looked at their faces, I saw recognition there. Perhaps even an admission that I had been right all along. That it was worth it. That marking time is not vanity, but survival.

“You see?” I wanted to say, but didn’t need to.

At the dinner table with friends, I tried to explain this.

“Before all of this, there were other patterns that felt just as fixed,” I said, reaching for my water glass. “Eesa would ask his dad to throw a football around or do something physical together. Not a big commitment. Just time.”

“And?” Amina prompted.

“More often than not, the answer was no,” I said. “Too tired. Too much going on. Another task still unfinished in his head.”

I remembered watching Eesa’s face close over when his father said, “Maybe later, buddy,” without looking up from his phone. I remembered how affection, too, had its limits. How my husband would joke that I held his hand too tightly in public, as if handholding felt conspicuous, unnecessary. We loved each other, of course, but love lived efficiently then, tucked between obligations like receipts filed in a drawer. I didn’t expect interruptions. I didn’t expect him to wander into my office and lean down to kiss the top of my head while I was absorbed in my work, because that kind of softness wasn’t part of the rhythm we had established over years of practical coexistence.

This is not a story about what he failed to do. I cannot fully know what he was carrying then. His workload was immense, the stress constant and compounding. When you are under that kind of pressure, the world narrows to a pinpoint of necessity. You move forward with blinders on, focused on holding everything together. Stress doesn’t just exhaust you. It quietly teaches you what to overlook, and sometimes who.

What illness did was interrupt those grooves with the force of a record scratch.

“Now, instead of tossing a football for ten distracted minutes, he goes to the gym with Eesa almost every day,” I said. I see them leave together in the morning, my husband’s hand resting on our son’s shoulder as they head out the door. It’s not performative or forced. It’s become theirs, a space they’ve built together out of repetition and shared effort and presence. They lift weights. They talk, or sometimes they don’t. They just exist side by side in a way that feels deeper than anything I’d seen before, maybe deeper than what was possible before their bond was tested by the possibility of its ending.

And the affection I didn’t expect has arrived anyway, unannounced, naturalizing itself into our days. A hand reaching for mine without calculation. A casual touch as he passes by my desk. Last week, he came into my office while I was on a deadline, said nothing, kissed the top of my head, and left. As if to say that he sees me in this moment too. As if to say that I am not background.

The birthdays now feel natural, woven into the fabric of who we are rather than stitched on awkwardly. The anniversaries land with weight because we understand, finally, that time is not infinite, that we cannot assume there will always be another year to get it right.

Around the table, people nodded. I could see it in their faces, a kind of wonderment mixed with understanding, as if they were witnessing something they recognized but hadn’t quite known how to name.

“There was no grand reckoning,” I continued. “No speech about priorities.” Just a gradual shift in where his attention rests, a slow learning that celebration is not frivolity but witness. A way of saying that this day will not pass unmarked, that this person will not go unseen, that this moment, right here, matters.

What it feels like, from inside the family, is a change in casting. We are no longer background figures orbiting a demanding professional life, no longer the supporting infrastructure that makes everything else possible. We are the main scene, the story he is choosing to live inside.

Someone refilled my water glass. Across the table, candles flickered in their holders, small fires marking this evening as different from all the others that came before.

Caregiving has taught me that this is how lives change. It teaches you that to mark time is to honor it, and to honor time is to say that we were alive here, together, and we saw it. We did not let it slip past unmarked. We did not take it for granted.

At that birthday table, surrounded by friends who have watched this year from a distance, I realized that illness has not only exposed fragility, but clarified center. It has redrawn the floor plan of our life, pulling certain rooms forward and closing off others we once mistook for essential.

Care does that. It rearranges the architecture. It reveals where life is really being lived.

Leave a comment

Imagine a case that reaches the Supreme Court involving a student disciplined by his school. Everyone agrees the student spoke. The disagreement is about something subtler. Was he punished for his words, or for the way he behaved while speaking. That single distinction determines whether free speech protections apply at all.

The justices do not debate the value of free expression in the abstract. They focus on context. Where was the student standing. Who could hear him. What else was happening at the time. The outcome turns on how to describe what occurred.

This hypothetical captures something essential about constitutional law. Rights do not activate on their own. They are triggered by facts. Before the Constitution can protect speech, religion, or protest, someone has to decide what kind of event actually took place.

We often miss this because we talk about rights as if they are automatic. Either you have them or you do not. Either the Constitution applies or it does not. In practice, constitutional protection depends on whether facts are understood in a way that lines up with the boundaries the law has drawn. Facts are the gateway.

Speech is protected only if it is recognized as speech rather than disruption. Religious practice is protected only if it is understood as religious practice rather than ordinary behavior. Protest is protected only if it is distinguished from threat or violence. The Constitution does not answer these questions for us. It waits for them to be answered.

For much of American history, that work happened slowly and deliberately. Courts gathered evidence, listened to competing accounts, and explained why one version of events mattered more than another. The process was imperfect, but it was designed to stabilize facts long enough for law to do its work.

The religion context makes this especially clear. Whether religious freedom applies often turns on how a burden is described. A government rule can be seen as a minor inconvenience or as a serious pressure that forces someone to choose between faith and participation in public life. Exposure to ideas can be framed as harmless or as deeply disruptive to a way of life. The legal standards may remain the same, but constitutional protection rises or falls with how the facts are understood.

The same is true for speech. A demonstration can be described as peaceful expression or as dangerous obstruction. Filming officials can be understood as accountability or as interference. The Constitution draws lines between these categories, but it does not tell us which side of the line a particular event falls on. That judgment comes first.

This is where this piece by my friend John Inazu is especially helpful. He explains that many of our disagreements collapse three different kinds of claims into one. We confuse claims about what happened with claims about what the law says, and we confuse both with claims about what we think is right. When those categories blur, factual disputes turn into moral standoffs, legal questions flatten into slogans, and people stop trusting the processes meant to resolve disagreement.

Inazu’s insight is that these distinctions matter. A factual claim asks what occurred. A legal claim asks how the law classifies that occurrence. A moral claim asks how we should evaluate it. Each plays a different role, and each requires a different kind of reasoning. Treating them as interchangeable makes it almost impossible to reason together.

This essay begins one step earlier.

Before we can separate facts from law, or law from morality, facts themselves must be understood in a way that fits the structure of constitutional law. If the law protects speech but not threats, everything depends on how the event is described. If the law protects religious exercise but not every personal preference, everything depends on how the practice is characterized.

When facts are unstable, constitutional law cannot do its job. Rights do not disappear because the Constitution has changed. They fail to attach because the event never makes it through the gateway.

Outside the courtroom, this problem becomes even more visible. In public life, events are interpreted almost instantly. Short video clips circulate before investigations are complete. Narratives form quickly and confidently. Moral conclusions often arrive before factual ones have settled.

Here too, facts determine whether rights are thought to exist at all. A protest is either dissent or danger. Filming authorities is either accountability or interference. A religious objection is either conscience or discrimination. These judgments come first, and once they harden, it becomes difficult even to ask what the Constitution requires.

The killing of Renée Good revealed this dynamic with painful clarity. From the outset, there was no shared understanding of what had happened. Competing accounts emerged immediately, each carrying not just a description of events but a conclusion about their meaning. Without agreement on the facts, the question of constitutional limits never fully came into view.

Then came the killing of Alex Pretti.

The Pretti shooting feels different not because it is simple, but because the violence resists easy reframing. A man filming federal agents, later pinned to the ground, shot multiple times. Whether filming counts as protected activity or as interference is not a moral question. It is a factual one that determines whether constitutional limits apply at all. When that judgment is made too quickly or too loosely, the space for rights collapses.

In both cases, the Constitution did not vanish. What faltered was the gateway. Before courts could meaningfully weigh in, before doctrine could do its work, the most consequential factual judgments had already been made. Once an encounter is understood as a threat, the law’s protective categories recede. Once it is understood as interference, constitutional safeguards narrow. The boundaries remain, but the event never reaches them in protected form.

This is why the question of whether the Constitution still matters feels so urgent. The text remains. The doctrines remain. But constitutional law can matter only if facts are understood in a way that aligns with the lines the law has drawn.

The Constitution does not enforce itself. It relies on shared habits of care in describing events. It relies on our willingness to pause long enough to ask what happened before deciding what it means or how we feel about it. When that step is skipped, the Constitution does not disappear. It simply never turns on.

Leave a comment

Renee Good did not set out to test the outer limits of free speech. She was a poet, a mother, and a school board member who, on a cold January morning in Minneapolis, encountered something many Americans now recognize immediately: unmarked federal vehicles, neighbors blowing whistles, phones raised to record, and the sudden arrival of ICE in a residential neighborhood.

Minutes later, Good was dead. An ICE agent fired three shots into her car during a confrontation on a public street. Within days, federal officials labeled the incident “domestic terrorism,” defended the shooting, and deployed tear gas and pepper spray against protesters and students who returned to the streets, including near a public high school. Classes were canceled. Prosecutors resigned. And a chilling message settled over communities watching closely: protest near immigration enforcement had become dangerous.

Public discussion since has focused almost entirely on use of force—whether the agent reasonably feared for his life, whether a car can constitute a deadly weapon, whether the shooting was justified under the Fourth Amendment. Those questions matter. But they obscure a deeper and largely unexplored constitutional issue:

What happens to the First Amendment when protest collides with immigration enforcement?

For decades, the Supreme Court has treated verbal opposition to law enforcement as core protected speech. In City of Houston v. Hill, the Court put it plainly:

“The Constitution does not allow such speech to be made a crime. The freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.”

That principle is not rhetorical flourish. It reflects a judgment about democratic identity. Free societies tolerate dissent directed at the state itself, even when that dissent is angry, disruptive, or deeply uncomfortable.

Immigration protests test that commitment because they unfold in volatile settings. They take place on streets and sidewalks during active enforcement, where civilians watch and record as the government exercises one of its most coercive powers. The speech is confrontational by design. The discomfort is the point.

Shouting at agents, criticizing their actions, demanding that they leave a neighborhood—none of this loses constitutional protection simply because officers find it hostile or distracting. Nor does the protection evaporate because the subject is immigration rather than some less politically charged issue.

The Line Between Order and Suppression

The First Amendment does not protect everything that happens at a protest. The law draws a line between speech and conduct, and that line becomes critical when emotions run high. Chanting, filming, and verbal confrontation are protected. Physical obstruction that creates genuine safety risks may be regulated, even in public forums.

The hard question is not whether limits exist. It is how they are enforced.

In the Good incident, her car was positioned in the street, partially obstructing traffic. That fact matters. But regulation is not escalation. The Constitution does not treat every act of civil disobedience as a lethal threat. Video shows other vehicles maneuvering around her car, verbal exchanges that were plainly protected, and an agent approaching while recording on his phone. Seconds later, he fired.

Even if one accepts that obstruction can be regulated, the use of deadly force during expressive activity carries constitutional consequences beyond the immediate encounter. When enforcement escalates in protest settings, the chilling effect extends far beyond the individual involved. It signals to observers that participation itself—watching, filming, speaking—may carry extreme risk.

That chilling effect deepened in the days that followed. Federal agents deployed chemical agents to disperse crowds, treating entire gatherings as threats rather than distinguishing between unlawful conduct and protected dissent. The Supreme Court has repeatedly warned against this kind of collective suppression. Unlawful acts by some do not erase the First Amendment rights of others.

There is also the unresolved problem of retaliation. When protest activity aimed at immigration enforcement draws harsher responses than comparable conduct elsewhere, constitutional suspicion is unavoidable. The First Amendment forbids the state from using its enforcement power to punish disfavored viewpoints. Labeling civilian monitoring and protest as “domestic terrorism” risks collapsing that distinction altogether.

None of this denies the real dangers immigration officers face. Vehicles can be weapons. Officers make split-second decisions under stress. The Constitution does not require agents to absorb genuine threats without response. But it does require restraint, especially when enforcement unfolds amid constitutionally protected dissent. Authority does not include a right to silence critics.

What makes Renee Good’s death so unsettling is not only the loss of life, but the precedent it threatens to set. If protest near immigration enforcement is treated as inherently dangerous, then the First Amendment shrinks at precisely the moment when its protections are most needed.

The Constitution does not guarantee order or efficiency. It guarantees space for speech, for protest, for communities to bear witness when the state exercises its most formidable powers. Immigration enforcement may require authority. It does not require a protest-free zone.

The unresolved question after Minneapolis is not only whether one shooting was justified. It is whether dissent remains a protected constitutional act, or whether it is only tolerated when it is quiet, distant, and safely removed from the officials it challenges.

That question has received far less attention than it deserves. And it may ultimately matter more than any single verdict.

Leave a comment

I keep telling myself to write a new piece. I’ve been telling myself that since August.

The idea sits open on my laptop like an unfinished room, sentences framed but never drywalled, waiting for a quiet that never comes. Each week I promise myself the next flight, the next stolen evening, the next pocket of calm, and each week something more urgent arrives. Care does not knock. It simply walks in and sits down.

I thought I was waiting to write about my life. I didn’t realize the waiting was my life.

This fall, everything turned over at once: a new school, a new state, a new city whose streets I navigate by instinct rather than map. A new classroom of students who read me before I speak, deciding what kind of authority I am, what kind of care I will offer, what kind I will withhold. Teaching constitutional law for the first time meant waking early to revise lectures, doctrine running alongside domestic life, hypotheticals replaying themselves while I brushed my teeth and packed lunches and searched for missing shoes. Even as I moved through ordinary rituals, the law followed me, faint but insistent, asking to be shaped, explained, made legible to others.

I learned the cadence quickly: Sunday afternoon flights, the practiced efficiency of Clear and TSA Pre, the short hop to Lansing that became oddly intimate, the ride share smelling faintly of someone else’s coffee. By Wednesday night I was home again, bags in the mudroom, already scanning for what needed doing first.

“You’re back,” one of the kids would say—confirmation, not greeting.

“Yes,” I’d answer, dropping my purse, shrugging off my coat. “I’m back.”

Being home meant immediate recalibration. Making up for three nights gone, sitting longer at dinner, lingering in doorways, listening for what hadn’t been said in my absence. I’d rinse the mugs accumulated in the sink, start the dishwasher someone had loaded, turn off lights left glowing down the hall. Care is not only presence; it is the deliberate mending of what frays when you leave.

I told myself I would write when things slowed down. When I had perspective, when I could see the shape of what I was living clearly enough to name it. But you cannot witness your own life from inside the current. You can only move through it, mistaking motion for control.

One evening, my youngest said he wanted to ring in the new year early.

“Why?” I asked, half-smiling, bracing for something theatrical.

“Because 2025 was terrible,” he said, plainly. “It was the year Daddy was sick. And you were always traveling. It was just … a lot.”

A beat.

“It was a year of sudden stuff,” he added, reaching for language. “Like everything changed at once.”

I didn’t correct him or soften it. I nodded, because he was right. Children arrive at truth while we’re still managing logistics, still persuading ourselves that we’re fine. He had been taking inventory while I was busy keeping things moving. He saw what I was too close to see: that the year had asked too much, that the pace had cost something, that someone needed to say it out loud.

He became the witness I couldn’t be.

Now it’s the last day of the year. I’m home from our first family vacation in over a year, but I’m feverish, time slipping sideways, my body insisting on rest while my calendar refuses. The vacation already feels like a rumor. I unzip my suitcase on the bed and stop. Fold a shirt. Move it. Fold it again. My phone lights up on the dresser with another alert, another departure with a name attached to it.

I lean my weight against the dresser and say, quietly, “I’m tired.”

In two days, I’ll leave again—this time for Hawaii, with a spiritual development grant meant to restore my soul so that I can continue the work I do on religious pluralism, on listening across difference, on holding space for faith in a fractured public life. Even restoration, I’m learning, has a schedule. Even renewal must be justified.

I open my laptop, then close it. The document waits exactly where I left it, the cursor blinking with the steady patience of something that expects nothing from me.

What I want is a pause. Not escape or retreat, but a moment wide enough to see what I’ve been living inside. To recognize that this delayed piece is not an accident but evidence. That the architecture I’ve been inhabiting is built on vigilance and responsiveness and the quiet assumption that someone else’s needs must always come first.

I had been thinking of writing as something separate from caregiving, a refuge from it, a way to process experience from a distance. But maybe that was wrong. Maybe writing isn’t escape at all. Maybe it’s a kind of witnessing that requires stillness before it offers meaning.

In the morning, I slide a notebook into the side pocket of the suitcase without deciding whether I’ll use it. It’s an old habit, this gesture—packing the possibility of thought alongside the certainty of obligation. The notebook has followed me to dozens of places, its pages mostly blank, a quiet promise I keep making to myself even when I know I won’t have time to keep it.

Care, I’m learning, is not only what we give. It is the structure that determines what we’re allowed to postpone. Writing fell to the bottom not because it mattered least, but because everything else declared itself essential first. The piece I couldn’t write became the piece I was living.

This piece has been waiting because I have been holding everything else up.

And maybe that, too, is what needed to be said. That the cost of care is not only exhaustion, but the loss of the distance required to see yourself clearly. That sometimes your child has to tell you what you’ve been living through because you’ve been too busy living it to notice.

The postponement was never a failure.

It was the evidence.

Subscribe now