Holy Hullabaloos

Prayer in schools? Animal sacrifices in public? Ten Commandments on the courthouse lawn? Jay Wexler has seen it all . . .What happens when a professor of church/state law decides to get out of his stuffy office and hit the road in search of the places and people responsible for some of the country's most controversial Supreme Court cases about this hot-button issue?In Holy Hullabaloos, Jay Wexler visits Amish farmers in Wisconsin who were fined for keeping their kids out of school; drinks at a bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose liquor license was challenged by a nearby Armenian church; and attends a public high school football game in east Texas where students once prayed before kickoff. He stops by Hialeah, Florida, where laws were passed to keep a Santeria church from performing animal sacrifices; visits a publicly funded Muslim school in downtown Cleveland; and checks out the site of a six-foot granite monument of the Ten Commandments erected on the Austin Capitol grounds near the Supreme Court. With a mix of awe and skepticism as well as large doses of humor, Jay Wexler searches for what really happened in some of our gnarliest disputes about just how high to build the wall between Church and government.