The primary sources we will discuss informed some chapters of Faking Liberties and are central to my new project on religion and education in Japan and the United States. The new book is tentatively titled Difficult Subjects: Debating Religion and Public Education in Japan and the United States. The new book covers the period from 1945 to the present, which I am deliberately not describing as “postwar,” since the period is punctuated and characterized by its many wars (Korean, Cold, Vietnam, on Drugs, on Terror, etc.)

Difficult Subjects is very much a companion volume to Faking Liberties. Whereas in Faking Liberties I focused on religious freedom as a site for contestations over how stakeholders define religion, in Difficult Subjects I am focusing on public schools as sites for disputes over how interest groups define “religion-adjacent” terms such as morality, patriotism, and security. The attached documents have been central to both projects.