March 21, 2014 - LAW AND RELIGION FORUM

Posted on March 21, 2014July 27, 2016 by JCPW

Around the Web This Week

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

Crimean Tatars have been asked to vacate part of their land in exchange for new territory elsewhere in the region. The new government in Crimea says it wants to regularize the land unofficially taken over by the Tatars
A Buddhist 6th grader and his family settled a case against a Louisiana school district. Plaintiffs alleged the student was harassed at school and that officials routinely pushed Christian beliefs
The Catholic Church, the Church of England, and al-Azhar, the Cairo-based seat of Sunni Muslim learning, together called for an end to modern slavery within 20 years
President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority met with President Obama in Washington this week and made it clear that he was no closer to recognizing Israel as a Jewish state
In Tennessee, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction against the state’s ban on same-sex marriage as it applies to three same-sex couples who were legally married in other states. Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam will appeal the ruling
The new leader of Germany’s Catholic bishops signaled support for allowing some divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion after a “penitential period”
A British court ruled that the president of the Mormon church doesn’t have to answer fraud allegations. The court said the lawsuit brought by a former Mormon leader attempts to manipulate the court to attack the religious beliefs of others
A Bulgarian man was sentenced to a year in jail for spreading radical Islam, in a case seen as a test for the delicate relations between the country’s minority Muslims and Orthodox Christian majority
A Muslim couple from Long Island is suing the Empire State Building for religious discrimination after they were “assaulted, battered, and forcibly removed” from the building’s observation deck as they peacefully recited evening prayers
On Saturday, hundreds of angry Pakistanis attacked a Hindu temple and set it on fire in southern Pakistan following a rumour that a member of the Hindu community had desecrated the Koran

Posted on March 21, 2014July 27, 2016 by JCPW

McCrea, “Religion and the Public Order of the European Union”

Next month, Oxford University Press will publish Religion and the Public Order of the European Union by Ronan McCrea (University College London). The publisher’s description follows.

Ronan McCrea offers the first comprehensive account of the role of religion within the public order of the European Union. He examines the facilitation and protection of individual and institutional religious freedom in EU law and the means through which the Union facilitates religious input and influence over law. Identifying the limitations on religious influence over law and politics that have been required by the Union, it demonstrates how such limitations have been identified as fundamental elements of the public order and prerequisites EU membership.

The Union seeks to balance its predominantly Christian religious heritage with an equally strong secular and humanist by facilitating religion as a form of cultural identity while simultaneously limiting its political influence. Such balancing takes place in the context of the Union’s limited legitimacy and its commitment to respect for Member State cultural autonomy. Deference towards the cultural role of religion at Member State level enables culturally-entrenched religions to exercise a greater degree of influence within the Union’s public order than “outsider” faiths that lack a comparable cultural role. Placing the Union’s approach to religion in the context of broader historical and sociological trends around religion in Europe and of contemporary debates around secularism, equal treatment, and the role of Islam in Europe, McCrea sheds light on the interaction between religion and EU law in the face of a shifting religious demographic.

Posted on March 21, 2014July 27, 2016 by JCPW

Miller, “The Age of Evangelicalism”

Next month, Oxford University Press will publish The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years by Steven P. Miller (Webster University). The publisher’s description follows.

At the start of the twenty-first century, America was awash in a sea of evangelical talk. The Purpose Driven Life. Joel Osteen. The Left Behind novels. George W. Bush. Evangelicalism had become so powerful and pervasive that political scientist Alan Wolfe wrote of “a sense in which we are all evangelicals now.”

Steven P. Miller offers a dramatically different perspective: the Bush years, he argues, did not mark the pinnacle of evangelical influence, but rather the beginning of its decline. The Age of Evangelicalism chronicles the place and meaning of evangelical Christianity in America since 1970, a period Miller defines as America’s “born-again years.” This was a time of evangelical scares, born-again spectacles, and battles over faith in the public square. From the Jesus chic of the 1970s to the satanism panic of the 1980s, the culture wars of the 1990s, and the faith-based vogue of the early 2000s, evangelicalism expanded beyond churches and entered the mainstream in ways both subtly and obviously influential.

Born-again Christianity permeated nearly every area of American life. It was broad enough to encompass Hal Lindsey’s doomsday prophecies and Marabel Morgan’s sex advice, Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Carter. It made an unlikely convert of Bob Dylan and an unlikely president of a divorced Hollywood actor. As Miller shows, evangelicalism influenced not only its devotees but its many detractors: religious conservatives, secular liberals, and just about everyone in between. The Age of Evangelicalism contained multitudes: it was the age of Christian hippies and the “silent majority,” of Footloose and The Passion of the Christ, of Tammy Faye Bakker the disgraced televangelist and Tammy Faye Messner the gay icon. Barack Obama was as much a part of it as Billy Graham.

The Age of Evangelicalism tells the captivating story of how born-again Christianity shaped the cultural and political climate in which millions of Americans came to terms with their times.