Here are some interesting stories involving law and religion from this past week:
- On Thursday, Russia’s Supreme Court approved a ban of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and their classification as an extremist group.
- Foreign Policy: A Chinese regulation would prohibit online insults based on religion. Some decry it as antithetical to Communist values.
- After a community center was forced to close due to a series of anti-Semitic incidents, Jewish groups have called on the Swedish government to take more steps to prevent anti-Semitism.
- UK Prime Minister Theresa May, and a number of church leaders, have publicly denounced the National Trust’s decision to rename its “Easter Egg Hunt” the “Great British Egg Hunt” this year.
- Financial advisers are increasingly structuring their portfolios in accordance with the values and laws of their clients’ religions.
- German Chancellor Angela Merkel has dismissed Christian Democrats’ proposal to introduce legislation regulating Germany’s Muslim population and creating a mosque registry.
- World Religion News: Utah Senator Orrin Hatch has introduced a bill that will enable Mormon missionaries to get visas with more ease.
- A pastor in Texas is facing backlash from the community around the church after proposing to build a four-story apartment building on the church’s grounds.
extremism and securitisation. The chapters address a wide range of topics, including neoliberal education policy and globalization; faith-based communities and Islamophobia; social mobility and inequality; securitisation and counter terrorism; and shifting youth representations. Educational sectors from a wide range of national settings are discussed, including the US, China, Turkey, Canada, Germany and the UK; this international focus enables comparative insights into emerging identities and subjectivities among young Muslim men and women across different educational institutions, and introduces the reader to the global diversity of a new generation of Muslim students who are creatively engaging with a rapidly changing twenty-first century education system. The book will appeal to those with an interest in race/ethnicity, Islamophobia, faith and multiculturalism, identity, and broader questions of education and social and global change.
studies on India and South Asia have proliferated but their analyses often fail to identify why violence flourishes. Unwilling to simply accept patriarchy as the answer, Tamsin Bradley presents new research examining how different groups in India conceptualise violence against women, revealing beliefs around religion, caste and gender that render aggression socially acceptable. She also analyses the role that neoliberalism, and its corollary consumerism, play in reducing women to commodity objects for barter or exchange. Unpacking varied conservative, liberal and neoliberal ideologies active in India today, Bradley argues that they can converge unexpectedly to normalise violence against women. Due to these complex and overlapping factors, rates of violence against women in India have actually increased despite decades of feminist campaigning.