Some interesting law and religion news stories from around the web this week:
- The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) is asking the City of Wilmore, Kentucky to remove the cross off of the water tower at Asbury University.
- A Marine base on Oahu is keeping its “God bless the military” sign despite pressure from a religious freedom group.
- Last Friday, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law controversial legislation concerning so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs). Under the new regulations, these religiously rooted counseling and health care clinics for pregnant women will have to disclose when they’re not licensed medical providers.
- Thailand has banned a film because its depictions of Buddhist monks could “destroy the faith.”
- The British owners of a townhouse in Morocco said that Airbnb does not comply with Morocco’s religious laws regarding booking a room for unmarried couples.
- An Ohio judge on Friday formally ended a court effort to force chemotherapy on an Amish girl whose parents had defied a hospital over her treatment for leukemia.
- The State Department released the International Religious Freedom Report on Wednesday, stating that religious freedom is facing increased threats all over the world, but especially in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
- The Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation wants Belen, New Mexico to remove a year-round Nativity scene made of metal from city property, and is threatening legal action if it’s not removed from public land.
- On Tuesday, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department’s surveillance of Muslim groups in New Jersey after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, finding that the Muslim plaintiffs raised sufficient allegations of religious-freedom and equal-protection violations.
- Michigan civil liberties advocates filed a complaint on Wednesday after a Catholic hospital refused the request of a pregnant woman with a brain tumor to get her tubes tied during a cesarean section scheduled for this month.
have been its main groups and how do their leaders compete to attract followers? Which social and religious ideas from abroad are most influential? In this groundbreaking study, Sadek Hamid traces the evolution of Sufi, Salafi and Islamist activist groups in Britain, including The Young Muslims UK, Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Salafi JIMAS organisation and Traditional Islam Network. With reference to second-generation British Muslims especially, he explains how these groups gain and lose support, embrace and reject foreign ideologies, and succeed and fail to provide youth with compelling models of British Muslim identity. Analyzing historical and firsthand community research, Hamid gives a compelling account of the complexity that underlies reductionist media narratives of Islamic activism in Britain.
adoration of the sacrament and canon law from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. The medieval Church believed Christ’s glorified body was present in the Eucharist, the most central of the seven sacraments, and the Real Presence became explained as transubstantiation by university-trained theologians. Expressions of this belief included the drama of the elevated host and chalice, as well as processions with a host in an elaborate monstrance on the Feast of Corpus Christi. These affirmations of doctrine were governed by canon law, promulgated by popes and councils; and liturgical regulations were enforced by popes, bishops, archdeacons and inquisitors. Drawing on canon law collections and commentaries, synodal enactments, legal manuals and books about ecclesiastical offices, Izbicki presents the first systematic analysis of the Church’s teaching about the regulation of the practice of the Eucharist.