Some interesting law & religion stories from around the web this week:
- Religion News Service asks a panel of theologians and policy experts whether the United States should intervene in Syria, considering Just War doctrine and America’s moral responsibility
- Christian communities in the Middle East are reported to be unanimous in opposition to Western military intervention in Syria
- The Egyptian military has enlisted Muslim scholars to persuade soldiers and policemen that they have a religious duty to obey orders and use deadly force against supporters of the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi
- An NPR segment on the plight of the Arab world’s Christians
- Egypt has widened crackdowns on dissenters, as well as the definition of “Islamist”
- California will compensate an atheist parolee after state authorities returned him to jail for refusing to participate in a religiously-oriented rehab program
- The Church of Scientology is building a multi-million dollar chapel and community center in East Harlem, part of a new effort to expand the church’s base from Hollywood to urban areas
- Worried they could be sued by gay couples, some churches are changing their bylaws to reflect their view that the Bible only allows marriage between a man and a woman
- North Carolina has become the seventh state explicitly to prohibit Sharia law interpretation in court
- Iran warns that American intervention in Syria would stoke “the flames of outrage of the region’s revolutionaries”
- Berger on the “excision of the supernatural from the Christian message” in mainline Protestantism (from last week)