Bypassing the Bible
For years, Diane Moore and her students have debated the implications of landmark Supreme Court decisions in her “Religion, Democracy, and Education” course at Harvard Divinity School (HDS). But they rarely get to dig past the scholarship to the actual names attached to those decisions — people like Ellery Schempp, a freethinking 16-year-old who, more than 50 years ago, decided to protest his suburban Pennsylvania high school’s mandatory daily Bible readings. As it turns out, Schempp, now 72, has been happily residing just a few miles away, in Medford, for the past 20 years. On Wednesday, he made the quick trip to the Center for the Study of World Religions to talk about his experiences as one of the last living symbols of a series of Supreme Court cases that banned state-sponsored displays of faith in public schools. “There are very few people who have won a Supreme Court case about First...