August 22, 2014 - LAW AND RELIGION FORUM

Posted on August 22, 2014 by

Around the Web this Week

Some interesting law and religion news stories from around the web this week:

Opinion: The president of the World Jewish Congress urges the world to “stand up for Christians” who are suffering what he calls a “campaign of death” which is being largely overlooked by world leaders, the United Nations, and social activists.
The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City filed a law suit on Wednesday against the organizers of a “black mass” scheduled for next month, asserting that the consecrated Host that was to be desecrated is Church property and was obtained fraudulently. Although the organizers claim that the Host was obtained legally, they returned the Host to the Archdiocese on Thursday in exchange for the suit being dropped.
Germany’s development aid minister, Gerd Mueller, accused Qatar of financing the militant group ISIS and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Germany is ready to send weapons to support Iraqi Kurds in their battle against ISIS.
Saudi Arabia’s top cleric said Tuesday that extremism and the ideologies of groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda are Islam’s Number 1 enemy and that Muslims have been their first victims.
Christian farm owners in Upstate New York were fined for refusing to let a lesbian couple hold a wedding ceremony on their property, which they regularly rent out for events. The farm owners agreed to host the reception but claimed that the ceremony violated their religious beliefs.
President Obama commented on the brutal murder of Jim Foley, saying that the terrorist group ISIL ‘speaks for no religion’ as it murders Muslims and targets Christians and other religious minorities. He also opined that the victims of ISIL are “overwhelmingly Muslim” and that “people like [ISIL] ultimately fail.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio met with Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Police Commissioner William Bratton on Wednesday to soothe tensions ahead of Saturday’s march to protest the death of a Staten Island man in police custody.
Pope Francis delivered a mixed verdict on US airstrikes in Iraq, saying that while it is morally legitimate to stop an unjust aggressor, as America says it’s doing with regard to the radical Islamic State in northern Iraq, a single nation shouldn’t decide for itself when the use of force is warranted. For a discussion of the Pope’s response, see here.
- The full transcript of the Pope’s in-flight interview in which he discussed topics including peace efforts between Israel and Palestine, future papal visits, and his personal schedule, can be found here.
A Tennessee high school student was reprimanded and sent to the principal’s office for saying “bless you”–one of the expressions banned in her classroom–to a classmate who had sneezed. The teacher claims that the student was disruptive.
Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, and African Inlander church leaders from South Sudan gathered in London to campaign for peace and reconciliation in the war-torn country, which they fear is being overlooked.
The wedding of a Muslim man to a Jewish woman, who converted to Islam prior to the wedding, drew protesters in Israel who oppose ‘inter-marriage.’ An Israeli court allowed the protesters to picket the wedding, but from no closer than 200m.
Notre Dame law professors’ study finds that when a Catholic school closes its neighborhood suffers.
Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh and Zoroastrian leaders have issued a joint call to David Cameron to use the UK’s seat on the UN Security Council to begin the process of bringing war crimes prosecutions against militants from ISIL.
The acting leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox church under the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Onufry, was formally enthroned as Primate in one of Kiev’s holiest places.
Australian Christian and Jewish leaders launched a campaign to support the Australian Muslim community which they say is being alienated.
A Jewish student at Temple University was assaulted at a student activities fair during an apparent heated exchange with members of a pro-Palestine group.

Posted on August 22, 2014 by

Hart, “Kingdoms of God”

This October, Indiana University Press will release “Kingdoms of God” by Kevin Hart (University of Virginia). The publisher’s description follows:

What did Jesus mean by the expression, the Kingdom of God? As an answer, Kevin Hart sketches a “phenomenology of the Christ” that explores the unique way Jesus performs phenomenology. According to Hart, philosophers and theologians continually reinterpret Jesus’s teaching of the Kingdom so that there are effectively many Kingdoms of God. Working in, while also displacing, a tradition inaugurated by Husserl and continued by philosophers such as Heidegger, Marion, and Lacoste, Hart puts forward a new phenomenology of religion that claims that ethics and religion are not always unified or continuous.

Posted on August 22, 2014 by

Nirenberg, “Neighboring Faiths”

This October, University of Chicago Press will release “Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today” by David Nirenberg (University of Chicago). The publisher’s description follows:

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are usually treated as autonomous religions, but in fact across the long course of their histories the three religions have developed in interaction with one another. In Neighboring Faiths, David Nirenberg examines how Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived with and thought about each other during the Middle Ages and what the medieval past can tell us about how they do so today.

There have been countless scripture-based studies of the three “religions of the book,” but Nirenberg goes beyond those to pay close attention to how the three religious neighbors loved, tolerated, massacred, and expelled each other—all in the name of God—in periods and places both long ago and far away. Nirenberg argues that the three religions need to be studied in terms of how each affected the development of the others over time, their proximity of religious and philosophical thought as well as their overlapping geographies, and how the three “neighbors” define—and continue to define—themselves and their place in terms of one another. From dangerous attractions leading to interfaith marriage; to interreligious conflicts leading to segregation, violence, and sometimes extermination; to strategies for bridging the interfaith gap through language, vocabulary, and poetry, Nirenberg aims to understand the intertwined past of the three faiths as a way for their heirs to produce the future—together.