June 1, 2015 - LAW AND RELIGION FORUM

Posted on June 1, 2015July 26, 2016 by

Around the Web Last Week

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

Nebraska’s legislature overrode the governor’s veto of a bill repealing the state’s death penalty law, making Nebraska the first conservative state in more than 40 years to abolish the death penalty.
As studies show increasing numbers of atheist and religiously unaffiliated Americans, organizations work towards building a secular voting block for the 2016 election.
A Buddhist monk and the leader of Burma’s 969 movement, a radical nationalist group, was accused of inciting violence against the Rohingya, a Muslim minority.
A French mosque used France’s 1905 law guaranteeing secularism to successfully argue its case against a member of the congregation regarded as disruptive for criticizing the imam, holding parallel prayers, and preaching his ultraconservative Salafist brand of Islam.
In response to litigation, the Department of Homeland Security released a questionnaire used by U.S. border officials that includes questions about travelers’ religious practices and relationship to martyrs.
A Christian advocacy group in Britain warned that measures introduced in the UK to tackle Muslim fundamentalism could be used to “clamp down on legitimate expressions of dissent” and subject comedians, campaign groups, religious groups, secularist groups, and journalists to harsh measures.
A US Marine relied on RFRA in appealing her conviction for violating an order to remove a Bible verse she taped to her computer.
The UN’s rights envoy to Myanmar expressed alarm over the enactment of four race and religion bills considered to be discriminatory against ethnic and religious minorities.

Posted on June 1, 2015July 26, 2016 by

Wills, “The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis”

In March, Penguin Books released “The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis” by Garry Wills. The publisher’s description follows:

Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope and the first from the Americas, offers a challenge to his church. Can he bring about significant change? Should he?

Garry Wills, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, argues provocatively that, in fact, the history of the church throughout is a history of change. In this brilliant and incisive study, Wills describes the deep and serious changes that have taken place in the church or are in the process of occurring. These include the change from Latin, the growth and withering of the ecclesiastical monarchy, the abandonment of biblical literalism, the assertion and nonassertion of infallibility, and the erosion of church patriarchy. In such developments we see the living church adapting itself to the new historical circumstances.

As Wills contends, it is only by examining the history of the church that we can understand Pope Francis’s and the church’s challenges.

Posted on June 1, 2015July 26, 2016 by

McLarney, “Soft Force: Women in Egypt’s Islamic Awakening”

This month, Princeton University Press releases “Soft Force: Women in Egypt’s Islamic Awakening” by Ellen Anne McLarney (Duke University). This publisher’s description follows:

In the decades leading up to the Arab Spring in 2011, when Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarian regime was swept from power in Egypt, Muslim women took a leading role in developing a robust Islamist presence in the country’s public sphere. Soft Force examines the writings and activism of these women—including scholars, preachers, journalists, critics, actors, and public intellectuals—who envisioned an Islamic awakening in which women’s rights and the family, equality, and emancipation were at the center.

Challenging Western conceptions of Muslim women as being oppressed by Islam, Ellen McLarney shows how women used “soft force”—a women’s jihad characterized by nonviolent protest—to oppose secular dictatorship and articulate a public sphere that was both Islamic and democratic. McLarney draws on memoirs, political essays, sermons, newspaper articles, and other writings to explore how these women imagined the home and the family as sites of the free practice of religion in a climate where Islamists were under siege by the secular state. While they seem to reinforce women’s traditional roles in a male-dominated society, these Islamist writers also reoriented Islamist politics in domains coded as feminine, putting women at the very forefront in imagining an Islamic polity.