Some interesting law and religion news stories from around the web this week:
- ADF International: This week, the European Court of Human Rights decided Travaš v. Croatia, holding that churches have the freedom to select, appoint, and replace their personnel in accordance with Church teaching and without undue state interference.
- The American Humanist Association has filed a lawsuit against a town in New Jersey demanding the removal of a statue with a Christian cross outside the public library.
- A charter school in Mesa, Arizona has been accused of using controversial textbooks that mix religion with history lessons.
- Last month, a city in Italy passed a new set of regulations that restrict the freedom to construct religious buildings in its territory – the regulations are believed to target Muslims in the area.
- A major Bulgarian political party has proposed new statutes restricting the practice of Islam in the country – women are already banned from wearing veils that cover their faces.
- Dozens are dead after anti-government protesters were confronted with teargas and warning shots by police at a religious festival in Ethiopia last weekend.
- A New Jersey state appellate court ruled this week that favoring religious objections over non-religious objections to vaccinations is not religious discrimination.
- Religion Clause: A lawsuit was filed last week in a California federal district court by an animal rights group challenging the legality under California law of the pre-Yom Kippur ritual of kaporos.
- Six Jehovah’s Witness objectors to mandatory military service in Turkmenistan have been imprisoned this year.
- In Myanmar, a Dutch tourist has received a prison sentence of 3 months for unplugging an amplifier that broadcast Buddhist chants.
- The government of Jakarta, Indonesia, is urging citizens to vote for candidates based solely on their competence and not on their race or religion.
Committee (SNCC), the Student Interracial Ministry (SIM) was a national organization devoted to dismantling Jim Crow while simultaneously advancing American Protestant mainline churches’ approach to race. In this book, David P. Cline details how, between the founding of SIM in 1960 and its dissolution at the end of the decade, the seminary students who created and ran the organization influenced hundreds of thousands of community members through its various racial reconciliation and economic justice projects. From inner-city ministry in Oakland to voter registration drives in southwestern Georgia, participants modeled peaceful interracialism nationwide. By telling the history of SIM–its theology, influences, and failures–Cline situates SIM within two larger frameworks: the long civil rights movement and the even longer tradition of liberal Christianity’s activism for social reform.
court, against a fellow Jew, to benefit a gentile – for breach of a duty of loyalty to a fellow Jew. Through close textual analysis, Saul Berman explores how Jewish jurists responded when this virtue of loyalty conflicted with values such as Justice, avoidance of desecration of God’s Name, deterrence of crime, defence of self, protection of Jewish community, and the duty to adhere to Law of the Land. Essential for scholars and graduate students in Talmud, Jewish law and comparative law, this key volume details the nature of these loyalties as values within the Jewish legal system, and how the resolution of these conflicts was handled. Berman additionally explores why this issue has intensified in contemporary times and how the related area of ‘Mesirah’ has wrongfully come to be prominently associated with this law regulating testimony.