Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Pentecostalism and Education

Private religious education and home schooling are booming, a consequence of recent Supreme Court opinions on state funding, the failure of public schools during the Covid pandemic, the ongoing culture wars, and many other factors. One thinks of private religious education mostly in terms of traditional religious bodies and, within Christianity, in terms of Catholics and Evangelicals. A forthcoming book from Rowman and Littlefield suggests that Pentecostal Christianity, which is growing fast across the globe, will also be important in the private religious schools movement. The book is Pentecostal and Charismatic Education: Renewalist Education Wherever It Is Found, by William K. Kay (King’s College London) and Ewen H. Butler (Regent University). Here’s the publisher’s description:

The enormous Pentecostal and charismatic movement—often called Renewalist—has highlighted the power of the Holy Spirit but has rarely emphasized the movement’s educational range and reach. Formal and informal teaching in many schools, colleges, seminaries, church campuses, homes, and parachurches all contribute to a scattered and varied teaching impetus. Pentecostal and Charismatic Education: Renewalist Education Wherever it is Found looks at education through the eyes of those who see God at work in the world through the church and beyond. The book explores questions like: What should parents look for in a child’s education and what choices do they have? What educational role can churches have? This book offers a worldview invested with traditional Christian theology, but also enlivened by an understanding of the continuing outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Podcast on Karabakh

Thanks to EWTN’s Kresta in the Afternoon for having me on again this week to discuss the situation in Karabakh, where Azerbaijan is starving 120,000 Armenian Christians in an ethnic-cleansing campaign. You can listen to the podcast here: https://player.fm/series/kresta-in-the-afternoon-3266582/military-blockade-leaves-thousands-of-armenian-christians-in-dire-straits-mark-movsesian21-august-2023.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Christianity as Knowledge Creator

Here is what looks like a fascinating new book on how societies come to generate knowledge. The argument appears to be that a Christian theological framework in the late Roman Empire influenced many other domains of knowledge production and acquisition, including literature, law, politics, science, and others. It is a book about the relationship of Christianity and the creation of knowledge and meaning in other areas of human life.

The book is The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations (Cambridge University Press), by Mark Letteney.

The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations traces the beginning of Late Antiquity from a new angle. Shifting the focus away from the Christianization of people or the transformation of institutions, Mark Letteney interrogates the creation of novel and durable structures of knowledge across the Roman scholarly landscape, and the embedding of those changes in manuscript witnesses. Letteney explores scholarly productions ranging from juristic writings and legal compendia to theological tractates, military handbooks, historical accounts, miscellanies, grammatical treatises, and the Palestinian Talmud. He demonstrates how imperial Christianity inflected the production of truth far beyond the domain of theology — and how intellectual tools forged in the fires of doctrinal controversy shed their theological baggage and came to undergird the great intellectual productions of the Theodosian Age, and their material expressions. Letteney’s volume offers new insights and a new approach to answering the perennial question: What does it mean for Rome to become Christian?

Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • In St. Augustine School v. Underly, the 7th Circuit addressed a long-standing dispute over transportation benefits for private religious schools in Wisconsin. While a state statute allows these benefits for only one school from a single organizational entity in each district, the court had previously ruled that the state Superintendent wrongfully denied St. Augustine School these benefits. However, in the latest decision, the 7th Circuit declined to address federal constitutional issues the plaintiffs raised, emphasizing that the court would not provide an advisory opinion on an unnecessary theory, and upheld the district court’s declaratory judgment without an injunction or damages.
  • In Spirit of Aloha Temple v. County of Maui, a Hawaii federal district court ruled in favor of the Spirit of Aloha Temple regarding their special use permit on agriculturally-zoned land for religious purposes. The court decided the state did not meet the strict scrutiny standard, but other issues, including whether the denial imposed a significant religious burden, remained unresolved. The case emphasizes that under RLUIPA, there must be evidence of intent to discriminate when regulations are neutral.
  • The Catholic Archdiocese of Denver and two Catholic schools filed a lawsuit in Colorado federal district court against restrictions in Colorado’s universal preschool funding program. The suit, St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton v. Roy, argues that the program’s conditions infringe on their free exercise and free speech rights by not allowing preference for Catholic families and imposing non-discrimination requirements that conflict with Catholic teachings. The program’s rules also challenge the schools’ stances on matters of marriage, gender, sexuality, and biological sex-based regulations.
  • In Chesley v. City of Mesquite, a Nevada federal district court dismissed former police chief Joseph Chesley’s lawsuit against the city and its former city manager for circulating damaging rumors about him, including to his church members. Chesley claimed that the rumors and the city’s failure to stop them violated his free exercise rights by tarnishing his reputation within his church and hindering his worship experience. The court rejected this claim, noting that the subjective harm to his reputation didn’t amount to a “substantial burden” on his religious rights.
  • In Cristello v. St. Theresa School, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Catholic school that terminated an unmarried art teacher who became pregnant, due to her violation of an employment agreement to abide by the teachings of the Catholic Church, which agreement prohibited premarital sex. The teacher had claimed pregnancy and marital status discrimination under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (LAD). The court determined that the school was protected by the LAD’s exception for religious organizations, asserting that such decisions can be made using neutral principles of law without entangling courts in religious matters.
  • Following accusations of blasphemy against a young Christian man, a mob in Faisalabad, Pakistan, attacked multiple Christian homes and churches, setting them ablaze. The outburst of violence was triggered when torn pages from the Quran with alleged blasphemous content were found near the Christian community, leading local religious leaders to call for protests.
  • The Nicaraguan government has seized the University of Central America, a prominent Jesuit-run institution, alleging it to be a “center of terrorism.” This move is the latest in a series of crackdowns on the Catholic Church, opposition figures, and academic institutions by President Ortega’s regime, with over 26 Nicaraguan universities confiscated since December 2021. The widespread confiscations and expulsions, targeting churches, civic groups, and opposition members, reflect a broader erosion of democratic norms and a suppression of civil society in Nicaragua.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Collection on Islam in Europe

The idea that Europe, at least Western Europe, is “post Christian” is not a new one. The phrase typically means that Christianity no longer is the default option for Western Europeans. In the new Europe, Christianity is just one of many religious and non-religious commitments out there. One such commitment, of course, is Islam, the religion of millions of people who live in Western Europe today. A new collection from Bloomsbury, Islam, Religious Liberty, and Constitutionalism in Europe, explores the challenges that Islam poses to church-state relations in contemporary Europe. The editors are our friend Mark Hill (Cardiff University) and Lina Papadopoulou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki); one of the contributors is our friend and Tradition Project member, Andrea Pin (Padova). Looks very worthwhile. The publisher’s description follows:

For centuries, since the Roman Empire’s adoption of Christianity, the continent of Europe has been perceived as something of a Christian fortress. Today, the increase in the number of Muslims living in Europe and the prominence of Islamic belief pose questions not only for Europe’s religious traditions but also for its constitutional make up. This book examines these challenges within the legal and political framework of Europe. 

The volume’s contributors range from academics at leading universities to former judges and politicians. Its twenty chapters focus on constitutional challenges, human rights with a focus on religious freedom, and securitisation and Islamophobia, while adopting supranational and comparative approaches. 

This book will appeal not merely to law students in the United Kingdom and the European Union, but to anyone involved in diplomacy and international relations, including political scientists, lobbyists, and members of NGOs. It explores these contested relationships to open up new spaces in how we think about religious freedom and co-existence in Europe and the crucial role that Islam has had, and continues to have, in its development.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Gray on Liberalism

John Gray has been an insightful critic of various features of, or tendencies in, political liberalism for decades. Whether it be the problem of evil in the modern world, the extent to which law is merely an artifact of state power rather than “a free-standing institution towering majestically above the chaos of human conflict,” the stubborn hope of a “secular eschatology,” or the by now largely discarded “agonistic liberalism” of Isaiah Berlin, Gray’s arguments have been consistently interesting and provocative (though rather bleak).

Here is a new book out this November by Gray targeting the heart of his work over the years, though one with evident (and, I think, rightful) praise for one of the major figures in liberalism, Thomas Hobbes: The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism (Macmillan). Sure to be greatly engaging and provocative.

Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, his cold political vision continues to see through any number of human political and ethical vanities.

In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans, John Gray allows us to understand the world of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors, and disappointments. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near apoplectic triumphalism in the West: a genuine belief that a rational, liberal, well-managed future now awaited humankind and that tyranny, nationalism, and unreason lay in the past. Since then, so many terrible events have occurred and so many poisonous ideas have flourished, and yet our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations that will somehow dissolve. Hobbes would not be so confident.

Filled with fascinating and challenging observations, The New Leviathans is a powerful meditation on historical and current folly. As a species we always seem to be struggling to face the reality of base and delusive human instincts. Might a more self-aware, realistic, and disabused ethics help us?

Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • In We the Patriots USA, Inc. v. Connecticut Office of Early Childhood Development, the 2d Circuit upheld the constitutionality of Connecticut’s decision to repeal religious exemptions from its mandatory vaccination laws, while still permitting medical exemptions. The court found that the act was neutral under Smith and thus dismissed plaintiffs’ challenges.
  • In Sims v. Secretary, Florida Department of Corrections, the 11th Circuit found that in a suit where a Muslim inmate argued that he was denied an exemption from a Florida prison’s grooming rules requiring beards be no longer than half an inch, the Prison Litigation Reform Act’s requirement that inmates exhaust administrative remedies before filing suit only required him to exhaust the prison system’s grievance process. The Department of Corrections argued that the PLRA required inmates to file a rule change petition before filing suit.
  • In Huntsman v. Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the 9th Circuit reversed dismissal of a suit brought by a former member of the LDS Church who alleged fraud on part of the church after he contributed $2.6 million in tithes to the church. The court rejected the Church’s argument that the suit was precluded by the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine.
  • In Carter v. Transport Workers of America, Local 556, the Northern District of Texas ordered sanctions against Southwest Airlines for failing to comply with a prior order that found Southwest violated Title VII by terminating a flight attendant for posting her religiously-motivated views of abortion on her social media. The court also ordered Southwest’s attorneys to attend at least 8 hours of religious liberty training.
  • In Burke v. Walsh, a Catholic couple filed suit against a foster care agency in the District of Massachusetts. The couple brought free speech and free exercise challenges because the agency denied them a foster care license because they “would not be affirming to a child who identified as LGBTQIA.”
  •  In Doe No. 1 v. Bethel Local School District Board of Education, the Southern District of Ohio dismissed a suit brought by Muslim and Christian plaintiffs alleging free exercise, due process, and equal protection challenges to a school board’s policy allowing students to use the bathroom of their gender identity.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Justice after War

I’m no expert, but it seems to me that most discussion of Just War Theory has to do with the reasons for starting a war and how one should prosecute a war once it has begun. A new book from Catholic University Press focuses on a different problem: how the victor should behave when a war is over. Looks very interesting. The book is Justice after War: Jus Post Bellum in the 21st Century. The author is theologian David Chiwon Kwon (Seattle University). Here’s the publisher’s description:

Justice After War is aimed especially to both undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the general audience who want to understand the significance of a recent development within the just war tradition, namely, the increasing attention given to the category of jus post bellum (postwar justice and peace). While examining the interrelated challenges of moral and social norms in both political and legal domains, as well as church practices, this work proposes an innovative methodology for linking theology, ethics, and social science so that the ideal and the real can inform each other in the ethics of war and peacebuilding. The main task of this project, then, is to identify what the author views as three key themes of jus post bellum, and three practices that are essential to implementing jus post bellum immediately after a war: just policing, just punishment, and just political participation.

David Kwon endeavors to challenge the view of those who suggest that reconciliation, mainly political reconciliation, is the foremost ambition of jus post bellum. Instead, he attempts to justify the proposition that achieving just policing, just punishment, and just political participation are essential to building a just peace, a peace in which the fundamental characteristic must be human security. It thus demonstrates that human security is an oft-neglected theme in the recent discourse of moral theologians and that a more balanced understanding of jus post bellum will direct attention to the elements composing human security in a postwar context.

Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • In The Satanic Temple, Inc. v. City of Boston, a Massachusetts federal district court affirmed Boston City Council’s refusal to invite a representative of The Satanic Temple (“TST”) to deliver an invocation. The court did not find evidence of discrimination against TST based on its religious beliefs, citing evidence that the councilors typically invited community-involved speakers serving their constituents, a qualification TST did not meet. While the court acknowledged the potential for abuse due to lack of formal written policy on selecting invocation speakers, it maintained that “the lack of a formal, written policy does not by itself create a constitutional problem.”
  • In Children of the Kingdom v. Central Appraisal District of Taylor County, a Texas state appellate court affirmed a $32,000 property tax assessment against a religious organization that did not apply for a tax exemption. The court rejected the organization’s claim that the exemption application requirement violated their First Amendment rights, stating it was a neutral and generally applicable requirement designed to maintain equality and uniformity in the property tax system.
  • In Salado v. Roman Catholic Diocese of El Paso, a Texas state appellate court determined that the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine prevented the court from ruling on whether funds raised by parishioners to construct a new church were improperly used by the diocese. The diocese had chosen to merge the parish with another and transfer the $1.4 million in funds to the new joint parish. The court stated: “To resolve the dispute… would require this Court to interpret Canon Law and policies of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the rights and authority of bishops regarding the patrimony of a parish. Churches have a fundamental right “to decide for themselves, free from state interference, matters of church government[.]”
  • A lawsuit was filed in Oklahoma state court challenging the state’s Virtual Charter School Board’s approval of a state-funded, Catholic-sponsored charter school, St. Isidore’s. The plaintiff alleges that St. Isidore’s operation would violate the Oklahoma Constitution, Charter Schools Act, and Board regulations, particularly on grounds of religious discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and non-compliance with nonsectarian requirements.
  • A law mandating the display of the national motto, “In God We Trust“, in all public school classrooms across Louisiana has taken effect with the start of the new school year. Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards signed the House Bill 8 into law, which passed without any opposition in the Republican-led state Senate and House of Representatives. The legislation applies to public post-secondary institutions as well.
  • Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has signed a law to change the date of Christmas celebrations from January 7, followed by the Russian Orthodox Church, to December 25. As stated in an attached explanatory note, this move is part of an effort to “abandon the Russian heritage” and align more with Ukrainian traditions and holidays. The law also adjusts the dates for two other Ukrainian patriotic holidays.
  • Ilya Solkan, a priest in a small village near Kyiv, Ukraine, was expelled by his parishioners for introducing politics into his pastoral care and expressing support for Kremlin’s policies. Solkan belongs to the branch of the Orthodox Church tied to the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, which is seen by many Ukrainians as a symbol of Russian influence. Amid escalating tensions due to war, Ukraine is experiencing a growing rejection of the church’s Moscow-linked arm, and more than 1,500 local churches have switched allegiance to the Ukrainian national church. Solkan, now unemployed and ostracized, continues to hold services at his home and is attempting to regain his position through a lawsuit. Meanwhile, the villagers have welcomed a new priest from Ukraine’s national church.


Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Communalism in the Indian Constitution

Liberalism privileges the individual and teaches that the state is legitimate when it honors individual rights–including the right to religious freedom. A much older understanding conceives the polity in terms of communities, including religious communities, and teaches that the state has a duty to coordinate relations among them justly. An interesting-looking new book from Cambridge, India’s Communal Constitution: Law, Religion, and the Making of a People, argues that both understandings prevail in contemporary India: a formal liberalism and a practical communalism. The author is constitutional scholar Mathew John (Jindal Global Law School, India). Here is the description from Cambridge’s website:

This book speaks to debates on law, constitutionalism, and the contested terrain of political identity in modern India. Set against the overwhelmingly liberal design of the Indian Constitution, the book demonstrates a tendency in the Constitution and its practice to identify the Indian people in parochial and communal terms. This tendency is identified as India’s Communal Constitution and its imprint on contemporary constitutional practice is illustrated by drawing on the constitutional practice as it addresses religious freedom, personal law, minority rights and the identification of caste groups. Thus, casting the Constitution and its practice as a field of contest, the aspiration to define the Indian people as a community of individual citizens is brought face to face with its antagonists. The most significant of these antagonists is the tendency to cast the Indian people as a collection of communities which this book examines and details as India’s Communal Constitution.