Here is a look at some law and religion news stories from around the web this week:
- A new study by the Public Religion Research Institute finds that while the number of “Nones” in the United States is at an all-time high, they will have little influence as a group on election day.
- A divided panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Rowan County commissioner’s Christian invocations before meetings did not violate the Constitution.
- Claims by two former magistrates arguing that their rights were violated by state guidance memos, which stated that they could lose their jobs if they refused to perform gay marriages, were dismissed by the North Carolina Court of Appeals.
- Jewish and Muslim volunteers came together to decorate a Detroit elementary school.
- Opinion: Innocent Muslim Americans are bracing for unfair backlash after the bombing in New York City.
- The Anti-Defamation League is calling upon tech companies to help fight anti-Semitic online hate speech.
- In Jordan, a major Islamist party is fielding four Christian candidates among its list of candidates for parliament.
- A number of religious groups in Russia report difficulties under a new Russian law which bans proselytizing.
- The Church of England appointed a national minority ethnic officer to help increase the number of minority candidates for ordination.
Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture is the first collection of its kind on this subject. The volume brings together a range of original essays that address different aspects of the role and presence of Jews and Jewishness in British film and television from the interwar period to the present. It constructs a historical overview of the Jewish contribution to British film and television, which has not always been sufficiently acknowledged. Each chapter presents a case study reflective of the specific Jewish experience as well as its particularly British context, with cultural representations of how Jews responded to events from the 1930s and ’40s, including World War II, the Holocaust, and a legacy of antisemitism, through to the new millennium.
The Buddha Party tells the story of how the People’s Republic of China employs propaganda to define Tibetan Buddhist belief and sway opinion within the country and abroad. The narrative they create is at odds with historical facts and deliberately misleading but, John Powers argues, it is widely believed by Han Chinese. Most of China’s leaders appear to deeply believe the official line regarding Tibet, which resonates with Han notions of themselves as China’s most advanced nationality and as a benevolent race that liberates and culturally uplifts minority peoples. This in turn profoundly affects how the leadership interacts with their counterparts in other countries. Powers’s study focuses in particular on the government’s “patriotic education” campaign-an initiative that forces monks and nuns to participate in propaganda sessions and repeat official dogma. Powers contextualizes this within a larger campaign to transform China’s religions into “patriotic” systems that endorse Communist Party policies. This book offers a powerful, comprehensive examination of this ongoing phenomenon, how it works and how Tibetans resist it.