Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:
- A Native American tribe in New Jersey has accused local authorities of trying to prevent its members from performing traditional rituals on private land it claims belongs to the tribe.
- A therapist who performed marriage counseling is suing her former employer because she says she was terminated after referring a same-sex married couple to a different therapist because counseling them would contradict her religious beliefs.
- After complaints from Quaker parents, a high school in Oregon has removed a Quaker mascot logo from its gymnasium.
- A federal judge in Ohio ruled that a prisoner’s as-applied challenge to the state prison system’s ban on dreadlocks was successful because the prison system does not provide for religious exemptions to the policy.
- Democrats reappointed an expert on Tibetan culture to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, while Republicans appointed the president of the Family Research Council to the same commission.
- Both conservative and progressive groups objected to the Methodist Church’s latest plan to avoid a schism between members of the church who want to recognize same-sex marriages and ordinations and those who do not.
Global Evangelicalism did not begin after the Second World War. The First Great Awakening in colonial America was a transatlantic phenomenon–George Whitefield was English, after all–and people whom we would today call Evangelical missionaries worked diligently in Asia in the 19th century. But it’s fair to say that global Evangelicalism increased in the second half of the 20th century, if only because globalization generally became a more important phenomenon in so many aspects of life. A new book from InterVarsity Press, 
If you want to know about the law of religious freedom in the United States today, you have to know about free-speech doctrine as well: Many religious-freedom cases, including Masterpiece Cakeshop, which is currently before the Court, involve free speech as well as free exercise claims. And, in a development no one predicted a generation ago, free speech has gone from being a concern of the Left to a concern of the Right. Today, on campuses and increasingly in public life more broadly, it’s typically conservatives who insist on the right to speak, as against progressives who see free speech as a vehicle for oppression. These matters are no doubt discussed in a new book by Floyd Abrams, 
For most of our history, America has been a Biblical nation. I don’t mean that statement to be polemical. It’s simply a fact that, for hundreds of years, Americans had a deep familiarity with the Christian Bible and would routinely and unselfconsciously refer to it in their communal life, including their political life. Certainly this was the case at the start of our history. A new, interesting-looking book from Princeton University Press, 
Lately, religious freedom has become a matter of intense debate in the United States. The easy assumption that has existed throughout most of American history, that religion is a good thing that benefits society as a whole, is no longer so widely accepted. And so believers increasingly must justify the protection of religious associations to skeptical fellow citizens.
this fall. I enjoyed reading a draft of this work very much. It focuses in the first half on some of the ways in which Christianity and Imperial Rome beginning in roughly the Antonine dynasty were fundamentally incompatible, leading to the persecution of Christians within the context of an otherwise ostensibly irenic “pax Romana.” But there is a great deal of interest in this book, including provocative and insightful comparisons between the situation of the Roman imperial period to our own contests between law and religion today. Congratulations, Steve!
light on the uses of Magna Carta in the 400 years following its creation: