A CLG CLE Program
Religious Beliefs: Help, Hindrance – or Even Relevant - in the Practice of the Law?
Friday, December 19, 2025
12:00 - 1:00pm CT
Virtual Event via Zoom
Invite link will be sent prior to the event via email.
1 hour of general CLE credit will be awarded for attending.
As we approach Christmas, and we celebrate the beginning of the Christian story, we thought it timely to reflect on the role of religion in the practice of the law. So, we asked Dr. Ron Nahser to follow up on his 2024 CLG talk: Spirituality and Philosophy: Insights and Practices for the Lawyer Today?
To explore what the connection between religion and the law might be, he thinks a good place to start is with the famous statement - familiar to every lawyer – pronounced at the beginning of Yesuha’s (GR. Jesus) public life when he said: “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them. (Matthew 5:17). Was this the start of the great legal debate raging today between the Textualists and the Pragmatists which SCOTUS Justice Stephen Breyer helped frame?
And while Breyer, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, and their fellow pragmatists will again be referenced, St. John Henry Newman, recently named the 38th Doctor of the Church, and other recent theology and moral philosophy luminaries, will be star witnesses.
Finally, we will be asking the fundamental question: what is the law that we, individually and collectively, are attempting to fulfill…and what does religious belief/unbelief – Christian or otherwise - have to do with it?
Speaker:
Ron Nahser, PhD
Director, Urban Sustainable Management Programs - Emeritus
Senior Fellow, Institute for Nature and Culture
Department of Environmental Science and Studies
DePaul University
Ron Nahser, PhD, is Director, Urban Sustainable Management Programs, Senior Wicklander Fellow at the Institute of Business and Professional Ethics, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Nature and Culture at DePaul University. He is the Provost Emeritus of Presidio Graduate School and Professor of Pragmatic Philosophy and Ecological Economics, Center for Confucian Entrepreneurship and East Asia Civilizations, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. He is also Executive Director of Corporantes, Inc., and Strategic Advisor to the UN Principles for responsible Management Education(PRME) Secretariat.
In addition to publishing numerous books and articles, he is the author of Learning to Read the Signs: Reclaiming Pragmatism for the Practice of Sustainable Management and Journeys to Oxford: Nine Pragmatic Inquiries into the Practice of Values in Business and Education.
He lectures and consults with business and academic audiences in the US and internationally on business values, vision, marketing strategy, branding, social responsibility and integrative sustainable management.
Nahser has a BA from University of Notre Dame, an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, an MA degree in Religious Studies from Loyola/Mundelein College and the PhD in American Philosophy from DePaul University.
He has taught at DePaul since 1982.