On Twitter this morning, the Huff Post seeks your Ash Wednesday Selfies:
HuffPost Religion @HuffPostRelig Will you be observing Ash Wednesday? Tweet your selfies to @HuffPostRelig with the hashtag #MyAshes or #Ashtag and we may share!
Good grief.
Mangion, “Contested Identities”
Next month, Manchester University Press will publish Contested Identities by Carmen Mangion (Birkbeck College, University of London). The publisher’s description follows.
English Roman Catholic women’s congregations are an enigma of nineteenth-century social history. Over ten thousand nuns and sisters, establishing and managing significant Catholic educational, health care and social welfare institutions in England and Wales, have virtually disappeared from history. Despite their exclusion from historical texts, these women featured prominently in the public and private sphere. Intertwining the complexities of class with the notion of ethnicity, Contested identities examines the relationship between English and Irish-born sisters. This study is relevant not only to understanding women religious and Catholicism in nineteenth-century England and Wales, but also to our understanding of the role of women in the public and private sphere, dealing with issues still resonant today. Contributing to the larger story of the agency of nineteenth-century women and the broader transformation of English society, this book will appeal to scholars and students of social, cultural, gender and religious history.
Cox, “American Christianity”
Next month, the University of Texas Press will publish American Christianity by Stephen Cox (University of California, San Diego). The publisher’s description follows. 
Christianity takes an astonishing variety of forms in America, from churches that cherish traditional modes of worship to evangelical churches and fellowships, Pentecostal churches, social-action churches, megachurches, and apocalyptic churches—congregations ministering to believers of diverse ethnicities, social classes, and sexual orientations. Nor is this diversity a recent phenomenon, despite many Americans’ nostalgia for an undeviating “faith of our fathers” in the days of yore. Rather, as Stephen Cox argues in this thought-provoking book, American Christianity is a revolution that is always happening, and always needs to happen. The old-time religion always has to be made new, and that is what Americans have been doing throughout their history.
American Christianity is an engaging book, wide ranging and well informed, in touch with the living reality of America’s diverse traditions and with the surprising ways in which they have developed. Radical and unpredictable change, Cox argues, is one of the few dependable features of Christianity in America. He explores how both the Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant churches have evolved in ways that would make them seem alien to their adherents in past centuries. He traces the rise of uniquely American movements, from the Mormons to the Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and brings to life the vivid personalities—Aimee Semple McPherson, Billy Sunday, and many others—who have taken the gospel to the masses. He sheds new light on such issues as American Christians’ intense but constantly changing political involvements, their controversial revisions in the style and substance of worship, and their chronic expectation that God is about to intervene conclusively in human life. Asserting that “a church that doesn’t promise new beginnings can never prosper in America,” Cox demonstrates that American Christianity must be seen not as a sociological phenomenon but as the ever-changing story of individual people seeking their own connections with God, constantly reinventing their religion, making it more volatile, more colorful, and more fascinating.
Religious Indifferents
The most important recent development in American religion is the rise of the “Nones,” the increasing number of Americans–it may now be 20% of all adults and 30% of young people–who tell pollsters that they have no religious affiliation. Perhaps surprisingly, most Nones are believers. They reject organized religion, not faith. In fact, the Nones overlap greatly with another much-discussed category of Americans, the “Spiritual But Not Religious,” or SBNRs.
Even the SBNR label doesn’t completely capture things. It’s necessary to dig a little deeper. At the Oxford University Press blog, theologian Linda Mercadante, author of the recently released Belief Without Borders, has a helpful guide to the various kinds of SBNRs in America today. Mercadante has interviewed hundreds of SBNRs over a five-year period, she reports, and a very large number are best described as “casual” SBNRs. For them,
religious and spiritual practices are generally approached on an “as-needed” basis and discarded or changed when no longer necessary. Spirituality is not felt to be the organizing center of their lives. Many of the “casuals”—especially younger ones—had little or no religious exposure either as children or adults.
In other words, it would be wrong to understand SBNRs or Nones principally as “seekers.” Nor are they hostile to religion. They just don’t care much about it. Better, perhaps, to call these people something else–something more descriptive. “Religious Indifferents” is a phrase that comes to mind.
If we really are looking at a significant and growing percentage of Religious Indifferents in America, the implications for religious liberty could be profound. Consider the politics of religious accommodations. A minority religion that seeks an accommodation in the legislative process needs allies, people who understand why it is important to honor the minority’s religious convictions. Sometimes, the best friends a minority can have are adherents of other religions, who see it in their interest to lobby on behalf of the minority. By banding together, religions can achieve results they might not be able to achieve on their own. This dynamic, as well as the traditional American commitment to religious liberty as a fundamental right, explains how the Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed in 1993.
Large numbers of Religious Indifferents would change this dynamic. First, Indifferents are unlikely to seek accommodations for themselves. If you don’t care very much about religion, you’re not likely to oppose state action for religious reasons. Second, and more important, Indifferents will not likely feel much affinity for believers who do have religious objections to government policy. If you don’t take religion seriously, yourself, you’re not likely to understand why others do. What’s the big deal, anyway?
Some observers, like Rodney Stark at Baylor, think the numbers of Nones/SBNRs are exaggerated. And many younger Americans who are Indifferents now will no doubt join religions as they get older. If Mercadante is correct, though, the politics of religion in America could be in for a significant change.
Clarke, “The Justification of Religious Violence”
Next month, Wiley-Blackwell will publish The Justification of Religious Violence by Steve Clarke (Charles Sturt University & University of Oxford). The publisher’s description follows.
How are justifications for religious violence developed and do they differ from secular justifications for violence? Can liberal societies tolerate potentially violent religious groups? Can those who accept religious justifications for violence be dissuaded from acting violently? Including six in-depth contemporary case studies, The Justification of Religious Violence is the first book to examine the logical structure of justifications of religious violence.
- The first book specifically devoted to examining the logical structure of justifications of religious violence
- Seeks to understand how justifications for religious violence are developed and how or if they differ from ordinary secular justifications of violence
- Examines 3 widely employed premises used in religious justifications of violence – ‘cosmic war’, the importance of the afterlife, and ‘sacred values’
- Considers to what extent liberal democratic societies should tolerate who hold that their religion justifies violent acts
- Reflects on the possibility of effective policy measures to persuade those who believe that violent action is justified by religion, to refrain from acting violently
- Informed by recent work in psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience and evolutionary biology
- Part of the Blackwell Public Philosophy Series
Jenkins, “The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade”
Next month, HarperOne will publish The Great and Holy War: 
How World War I Became a Religious Crusade by Philip Jenkins (Baylor University). The publisher’s description follows.
The Great and Holy War offers the first look at how religion created and prolonged the First World War. At the one-hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, historian Philip Jenkins reveals the powerful religious dimensions of this modern-day crusade, a period that marked a traumatic crisis for Western civilization, with effects that echoed throughout the rest of the twentieth century.
The war was fought by the world’s leading Christian nations, who presented the conflict as a holy war. Thanks to the emergence of modern media, a steady stream of patriotic and militaristic rhetoric was given to an unprecedented audience, using language that spoke of holy war and crusade, of apocalypse and Armageddon. But this rhetoric was not mere state propaganda. Jenkins reveals how the widespread belief in angels and apparitions, visions and the supernatural was a driving force throughout the war and shaped all three of the major religions—Christianity, Judaism and Islam—paving the way for modern views of religion and violence. The disappointed hopes and moral compromises that followed the war also shaped the political climate of the rest of the century, giving rise to such phenomena as Nazism, totalitarianism, and communism.
Connecting numerous remarkable incidents and characters—from Karl Barth to Carl Jung, the Christmas Truce to the Armenian Genocide—Jenkins creates a powerful and persuasive narrative that brings together global politics, history, and spiritual crisis as never before and shows how religion informed and motivated circumstances on all sides of the war.
Hair and Prison in Nineteenth Century Law
Professor Chris Green points me toward a fascinating case decided by Justice Stephen Field in 1879 when he rode circuit in the District of California–Ho Ah Kow v. Nunan–also involving hair and prison. The case concerns a Chinese man who was imprisoned after he failed to pay a fine for violating a law limiting the number of people who could sleep in spaces of certain designated dimensions. While in prison, the man’s queue (a long braid worn on the back of the head) was cut off by the sheriff of the prison. The plaintiff claimed that the cutting off of his queue was a disgrace, a violation of his religious rights, and “is attended…with misfortune and suffering after death.” The sheriff defended on the ground that a San Francisco city ordinance required that every male prisoner’s hair must be “cut or clipped to an uniform length of one inch from the scalp thereof.” The plaintiff argued that the City lacked the authority to enact the ordinance and that the ordinance imposed “a degrading and cruel punishment upon a class of persons who are entitled, alike with all other persons within the jurisdiction of the United States, to the equal protection of the laws.”
The court agreed with the plaintiff. This particular so-called “queue ordinance” was specifically targeted against Chinese people (the opinion comments on the hostility of Californians toward the Chinese at the time) and enforced exclusively against them, notwithstanding the ordinance’s neutral and generally applicable language. The court also noted the importance of the burdensome effects of an ostensibly neutral and generally applicable law: “Many illustrations might be given where ordinances, general in their terms, would operate only upon a special class, or upon a class, with exceptional severity, and thus incur the odium and be subject to the legal objection of intended hostile legislation against them.” The ordinance was struck down on this ground alone.
But the court’s remarks about the relationship between hair-length regulations and various types of interests that the prison might advance are also worth thinking about:
The cutting off the hair of every male person within an inch of his scalp, on his arrival at the jail, was not intended and cannot be maintained as a measure of discipline or as a sanitary regulation. The act by itself has no tendency to promote discipline, and can only be a measure of health in exceptional cases. Had the ordinance contemplated a mere sanitary regulation it would have been limited to such cases and made applicable to females as well as to males, and to persons awaiting trial as well as to persons under conviction. The close cutting of the hair which is practiced upon inmates of the state penitentiary, like dressing them in striped clothing, is partly to distinguish them from others, and thus prevent their escape and facilitate their recapture. They are measures of precaution, as well as parts of a general system of treatment prescribed by the directors of the penitentiary under the authority of the state, for parties convicted of and imprisoned for felonies. Nothing of the kind is prescribed or would be tolerated with respect to persons confined in a county jail for simple misdemeanors, most of which are not of a very grave character. For the discipline or detention of the plaintiff in this case, who had the option of paying a fine of ten dollars, or of being imprisoned for five days, no such clipping of the hair was required. It was done to add to the severity of his punishment….
The claim, however, put forth that the measure was prescribed as one of health is notoriously a mere pretense. A treatment to which disgrace is attached, and which is not adopted as a means of security against the escape of the prisoner, but merely to aggravate the severity of his confinement, can only be regarded as a punishment additional to that fixed by the sentence. If adopted in consequence of the sentence it is punishment in addition to that imposed by the court; if adopted without regard to the sentence it is wanton cruelty.
The Weekly Five
This week’s collection focuses on religious law and critiques. Steve Smith argues that Ronald Dworkin misunderstands theistic versions of morality; Oren Gross contrasts Jewish and secular ideas about amending the law; Martin Gardner addresses what Mormon Church doctrine has to say about retributive punishment; and Gustavo Kaufman takes on the UK Supreme Court’s decision in the Jews Free School Case. We also include Ian Bartrum’s assessment of the US Supreme Court’s grant of cert in Town of Greece, the legislative prayer case.
1. Steven Douglas Smith (San Diego), Is God Irrelevant? Smith reviews Ronald Dworkin’s posthumous work, Religion without God. Smith maintains that Dworkin misunderstands the disagreement between theists and non-theists. The divide is not between people with different views of morality, he says, but “between those who think that the universe, including the world of humanity, is the product of a loving and intelligent author or designer who created it according to a plan and for a good purpose, on the one hand, and on the other those who reject the belief in any guiding intelligence and any encompassing and mindful plan. That is a difference with profound implications for most of the great issues of life (including, almost certainly, issues implicating law and politics).”
2. Ian C. Bartrum (University of Nevada-Las Vegas), The Curious Case of Legislative Prayer: Town of Greece v. Galloway. Ian Bartrum considers why the Supreme Court granted cert in this case, currently under review, and why the Solicitor General has sided with the town. He infers that some of the Justices may hope to use the case to abandon the endorsement test, and that the Administration has intervened to limit the potential damage.
3. Oren Gross (University of Minnesota), Venerate, Amend … and Violate. This paper compares secular law, which people may amend to meet new circumstances, with divine law, which, in theory, people may not amend. Using Jewish law as an example, Professor Gross examines the way in which rabbis have justified deviating from the text of religious law in extraordinary situations.
4. Gustavo Ariel Kaufman (Independent), Racial Discrimination vs. Religious Freedom in the JFS Decision. Kaufman reviews the UK Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in the “Jews Free School case” from 2009, which held that a Jewish school’s decision to exclude a child based on parentage violated racial anti-discrimination laws. Kaufman argues that the court’s decision disparages religious freedom and contradicts European law.
5. Martin R. Gardner (University of Nebraska), Viewing the Criminal Sanction through Latter-Day Saint Thought. This paper addresses criminal law from the perspective of the doctrines of the Mormon Church. Specifically, the author argues that the church’s doctrines of agency and pre-mortal existence support some aspects of retributive theory.
Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Muslim Prisoner Beard Case
The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear Holt v. Hobbs, the case of a Muslim prisoner in Arkansas who claims that prison officials violated his religious freedom under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act when they enforced their grooming policy against him. The policy forbids the growing of a beard. Here’s the opinion of the 8th Circuit.
The case is important because it zeroes in on the government’s burden under RLUIPA, and whether it needs to consider alternatives to its policy as well as policies that other prison systems have tried in order to satisfy the least restrictive means leg of RLUIPA. In 2005, the Supreme Court held unanimously in Cutter v. Wilkinson that RLUIPA does not violate the Establishment Clause.
Guiora, “Tolerating Intolerance”
This January, Oxford University Press published Tolerating Intolerance: The Price of Protecting Extremism by Amos N. Guiora (S.J. Quinney College of Law, 
The University of Utah). The publisher’s description follows.
Over the years, numerous tragic events serve as a reminder of the extraordinary power of extremism, both on a religious and secular level. As extremism confronts society on a daily basis, it is essential to analyze, comprehend, and define it. It is also essential to define extremism narrowly in order to avoid the danger of recklessly castigating for mere thoughts alone.
Tolerating Intolerance provides readers with a focused definition of extremism, and articulates the tensions faced in casting an arbitrary, capricious net in an effort to protect society, while offering mechanisms to resolve its seemingly intractable conundrum. Professor Guiora examines extremism in six different countries: Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States through interviews with a wide range of individuals including academics, policy makers, faith leaders, public commentators, national security and law enforcement officials. This enables both an in-depth discussion of extremism in each country, and facilitates a comparative analysis regarding both religious and secular extremism.