ALBANY – Since the days when Thomas Jefferson and James Madison robustly argued for the separation of church and state, courts and scholars have perpetually debated just how high the wall between the two rises.
Now, a slew of upstate Establishment Clause cases are raising questions anew, and the attorney challenging the shifting paradigm is a solidly built but soft-spoken former high school football star who started off in physics, gravitated to law and discovered how First Amendment issues so intimately mesh with his own Christian heritage.
