Here are some news stories involving law and religion from this past week:
- The Netherlands’s lower house of parliament moved to restrict the wearing of full-face veils in public places.
- The chairman of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission warned in a report that overzealous policing of holiday festivities could suppress freedom of religion.
- A religious persecution watchdog group said that Vietnam’s new religious laws do not go far enough to protect freedom of religion.
- More evidence of IS atrocities committed against Yazidis has come to light.
- Christian bakers in Northern Ireland who were successfully sued for refusing to make a cake with a pro-gay message on it may be able to appeal their case to the UK Supreme Court.
- The man who was shot and killed after attacking students at Ohio State University with his car and a knife had apparently complained on social media about the treatment of Muslims
- Several mosques in California and Georgia have received threatening letters from a group identifying itself as “Americans for a Better Way.”
- A Muslim contestant in a Minnesota beauty pageant drew headlines for competing in a hijab and a “burkini.”
- Texas has enacted regulations requiring that health care facilities dispose of fetal remains via burial or cremation.
Chinese people have been instrumental in indigenizing Christianity. Sinicising Christianity examines Christianity’s transplantation to and transformation in China by focusing on three key elements: Chinese agents of introduction; Chinese redefinition of Christianity for the local context; and Chinese institutions and practices that emerged and enabled indigenisation. As a matter of fact, Christianity is not an exception, but just one of many foreign ideas and religions, which China has absorbed since the formation of the Middle Kingdom, Buddhism and Islam are great examples. Few scholars of China have analysed and synthesised the process to determine whether there is a pattern to the ways in which Chinese people have redefined foreign imports for local use and what insight Christianity has to offer.
The Fatimid empire in North Africa, Egypt and Syria was at the centre of the political and religious history of the Islamic world in the Middle Ages, from the breakdown of the ‘Abbasid empire in the tenth century, to the invasions of the Seljuqs in the eleventh and the Crusaders in the twelfth, leading up to its extinction by Saladin. As Imam and Caliph, the Fatimid sovereign claimed to inherit the religious and political authority of the Prophet, a claim which inspired the conquest of North Africa and Egypt and a following of believers as far away as India. The reaction this provoked was crucial to the political and religious evolution of mediaeval Islam. This book combines the separate histories of Isma’ilism, North Africa and Egypt with that of the dynasty into a coherent account. It then relates this account to the wider history of Islam to provide a narrative that establishes the historical significance of the empire.
In Search of the Way is a history of intellectual and religious developments in Japan during the Tokugawa period, covering the years 1582-1860. It begins with an explanation of the fate of Christianity, and proceeds to cover the changing nature of the relationship between Buddhism and secular authority, new developments in Shinto, and the growth of ‘Japanese studies’. The main emphasis, however, is on the process by which Neo-Confucianism captured the imagination of the intellectual class and informed debate throughout the period. This process was expressed in terms of a never-ending search for the Way, a mode and pattern of existence that could provide not only order for society at large, but self-fulfilment for the individual. The narrative traces how ideas and attitudes changed through time, and is based on the premise that the Tokugawa period is important in and of itself, not merely as a backdrop to the Meiji Restoration of 1868.
Roisin Cossar brings a new perspective to the history of the Christian church in fourteenth century Italy by examining how clerics managed efforts to reform their domestic lives in the decades after the arrival of the Black Death.