Here is a look at some law and religion news stories from around the web this week:
- In Texas, a bill was passed allowing county clerks the right to delegate to a deputy the task of giving out gay marriage licenses if it would violate their moral convictions.
- CNN: Religious experts from five different religions weigh in on whether President Trump’s missile strike in response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons was morally justified.
- The Nueces County Court is considering the hiring of a religious freedom legal defense firm to protect against challenges to the Ten Commandments monument outside of the courthouse.
- The Nation’s leading secular organization has sent a letter to the University of Mississippi asking that the university prohibit its head football coach and his staff from using their official twitter pages to promote religion.
- A New Hampshire bill would allow parents to use state funds for private or home schooling.
- The Catholic Church has arisen as one of the most powerful forces opposing crackdowns on illegal immigration.
- A study by the Pew Research Center has found that global restrictions of religion have modestly risen in 2015, the last year for which data was available.
- As Easter nears, terrorist attacks against Coptic Christians are on the rise.
- A school board in Ontario is under fire for allowing Muslim students to hold voluntary prayer sessions on school grounds.
The book explores the history of Justiniana Prima, a city built by Emperor Justinian I (527-565) in his birthplace near Niš in present-day Serbia. Previous studies focused on determining the city’s location, underestimating the significance of analyzing written sources for the reconstruction of this city’s genesis and importance. Using information from Emperor Justinian’s Novels XI and CXXXI, as well as Book IV of Procopius of Caesarea’s De aedificiis, Stanislaw Turlej endeavors to show that Justiniana Prima’s historic significance resulted from granting its Church the status of an archbishopric with its own province in 535, which was independent of Rome. Justinian wanted to introduce profound changes to the ecclesiastical organization based on state law.
This volume examines the prevalence, function, and socio-political effects of slavery discourse in the major theological formulations of the late third to early fifth centuries AD, arguably the most formative period of early Christian doctrine. The question the book poses is this: in what way did the Christian theologians of the third, fourth, and early fifth centuries appropriate the discourse of slavery in their theological formulations, and what could the effect of this appropriation have been for actual physical slaves? This fascinating study is crucial reading for anyone with an interest in early Christianity or Late Antiquity, and slavery more generally.