Some interesting law and religion news stories from around the web this week:
- BBC: Satellite images confirm that the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq has been destroyed by the jihadist group Islamic State
- Chinese officials have introduced a new law intended to fight religious extremism.
- According to the report of a human rights group, the main violators of religious freedom in Indonesia are local administrators.
- Religion News Service: A California atheist who once argued against the Pledge of Allegiance before the Supreme Court has launched a federal legal challenge to the phrase “In God We Trust” on American currency.
- The Israeli Knesset is considering a new plan to invest in Israeli Arab towns and villages, with the condition that Israeli Arabs fulfill certain conditions “for the good of the State of Israel.”
- BBC: A £20m fund to teach Muslim women in the UK to speak English will tackle segregation and help them resist the lure of [religious] extremism, David Cameron says.
- Newsweek: The Justice Department has accused two largely polygamous towns along the Arizona-Utah border of discriminating against nonbelievers to pressure them to leave.
- Religion News Service: A federal lawsuit has been filed against American Airlines and two affiliated regional carriers by 3 Muslims and a Sikh who were ejected from a Toronto to New York flight last December because they made the stewardesses and the captain uneasy.
- The Tennessee state legislature is considering a bill proposed by a state representative that would ban the teaching of religion in public schools up to the 10th grade.
- Forbes: A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) states that lax IRS controls of audit criteria mean the agency is still able to target based on religious and political views.
- New York Times: The Arkansas-Louisiana Conference of Seventh-day Adventists and two church members filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against an Arkansas city that says the group must obtain a permit to go door-to-door evangelizing and seeking donations.
idea that marriage was one of the seven sacraments, which defined the role of married folk in the church. Although it had ancient roots, this new way of regarding marriage raised many problems, to which scholastic theologians applied all their ingenuity. By the late Middle Ages, the doctrine was fully established in Christian thought and practice but not yet as dogma. In the sixteenth century, with the entire Catholic teaching on marriage and celibacy and its associated law and jurisdiction under attack by the Protestant reformers, the Council of Trent defined the doctrine as a dogma of faith for the first time but made major changes to it. Rather than focusing on a particular aspect of intellectual and institutional developments, this book examines them in depth and in detail from their ancient precedents to the Council of Trent
Turkey, yet the debate largely unfolds within the contours of the discussions over modernization, Westernization, and the Islamic / secular divide. Rarely is there a discussion about how the connotations of the headscarf shift across cleavages of class and status among women wearing it. Instead, the headscarf is typically portrayed as a symbol of Islamic identity, a ‘cover’ that brackets social inequalities other than those based on a supposed ‘clash of identities.’ This study looks beyond these contours by contextualizing the headscarf discussion in an insecure and low-status private sector labor market – namely, retail sales. Based on in-depth interviews, focus groups with lower-middle-class saleswomen with headscarves, and ethnographic study in five cities of Turkey, this book argues that the meanings of the headscarf are continuously negotiated within the quest for social and economic security.