Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Mattone Center Reading Group Discusses Natural Law in C.S. Lewis

Last night, the Mattone Center Reading Group met to discuss natural law in C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity.” Great turnout for an important topic. Thanks to all the St. John’s Law students who participated!

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Around the Web

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

  • Texas House Bill 7 allows private citizens to sue anyone involved in the manufacture, distribution, or mailing of abortion pills into or out of the state, with a minimum of $100,000 in damages per violation. The law is intended to enforce the state’s abortion restrictions.
  • Mid Vermont Christian School successfully challenged the state’s exclusion of the school from state sports and tuition programs. The school argued that the state had targeted the school because of its religious beliefs about gender identity.
  • A pastor and deacon are suing a Tennessee sheriff and deputies for attempting to force their removal during a church service, claiming the actions violated the church’s autonomy.
  • A federal court dismissed a lawsuit against the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board, reaffirming that courts cannot intervene in internal church governance matters. The case involved disputes over missionary selection, funding, and associational decisions protected by the First Amendment.
  • The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission has left the Evangelical Immigration Table to pursue an independent approach to immigration-related work, while the coalition continues its advocacy.
  • Easton, Pennsylvania, and Rock Church reached a settlement in an eminent domain dispute, with the city paying $350,000 to acquire and restore the historic Hooper House.
  • Christians in Gaza are refusing to evacuate their churches despite Israeli orders and growing fears of further attacks.

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Around the Web

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

Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

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

  • A proposed bill would safeguard the citizenship of any American pope and exempt him from taxes while serving. 
  • A federal judge allowed a psychedelic mushroom-using religious group’s lawsuit against Provo City and Utah County to proceed and paused the criminal case against its founder. 
  • A federal district judge blocked an Arkansas law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms. 
  • In Jumilla, Spain, a new law bans the use of city sports facilities for cultural, social, or religious activities not organized by the City Council. 
  • The Trump administration has released new guidelines reminding federal agencies that religious expression in the workplace is protected.  
  • The Chinese Communist Party announced new restrictions on religious practice by foreigners in mainland China. 
  • President Trump issued an executive order requiring banks to prevent and address politicized or unlawful debanking based on customers’ political or religious beliefs or lawful business activities. 

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Manent on Pascal

This is a bit outside my wheelhouse, but I did want to note that next month Notre Dame Press will release an English translation of French scholar Pierre Manent’s recent book, Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition. Many observers have noted an uptick in Christianity in France (and the US), especially among young men. How much of this is a genuine spiritual movement and how much a cultural “Team Christianity” isn’t yet clear, and of course some would deny there is a difference between the two, anyway. Whatever explains the uptick, it’s hard to imagine a French Christianity without Pascal–which makes the Manent book important reading for this moment. The publisher’s description follows:

Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference is the first English translation of Pierre Manent’s penetrating engagement with the seventeenth century polymath and apologist for the Christian faith, Blaise Pascal.

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was the first Christian apologist to address modern human beings on their own terms and present a defense of the Christian religion that still resonates today. A major publishing and intellectual event in France when it first appeared in 2022, Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference is Pierre Manent’s investigation of Pascal’s exploration of Christianity in the wake of a sharp atheistic turn at the dawn of the modern state and modern science. Comprehensive in scope and profound in treatment, this engagement with all of Pascal’s writings, including his famous Pensées, appeals to the reader’s head and heart. Manent emphasizes the joy that comes from engaging the truth of faith, and he argues that we are diminished by forgetting the unique and distinctive contributions of Christianity.

More than brilliant exegesis, Manent enlists Pascal in a much greater endeavor: to make what he calls “the Christian proposition” concerning God and man intelligible to Europeans who have made it their business to ignore the religion that founded Europe and the larger Western world.

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Around the Web

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

  • In United States v. Safehouse, the Third Circuit heard arguments on whether a nonprofit aiming to open a safe injection site can invoke religious protections under the Free Exercise Clause or RFRA, after a lower court ruled that the founders’ religious motivations alone do not shield the group from federal drug laws.
  • In Mennonite Church USA v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a D.C. federal court declined to issue a preliminary injunction to reinstate DHS’s “sensitive locations” policy, holding that the plaintiff religious organizations lacked standing to challenge its rescission based on speculative risks of enforcement at places of worship, decreased attendance, restricted services, and added security costs.
  • In Catholic Benefits Association v. Lucas, a North Dakota federal court issued a permanent injunction shielding a Catholic diocese and employers’ group from EEOC enforcement of federal anti-discrimination rules in ways that would compel them to support or accommodate abortion, fertility treatments, or gender transitions contrary to their religious beliefs.
  • In Kynwulf v. Corcoran, an Ohio federal court dismissed a Free Exercise claim challenging Medicaid’s estate recovery rules, holding that the plaintiff was not coerced into participation and could not demand that the state tailor its program to his religious beliefs.
  • In People of the State of California v. Calvary Chapel San Jose, a California appellate court upheld over $1.2 million in fines against the church for violating Covid-era health orders, rejecting its Free Exercise and due process claims by finding the mandates neutral and generally applicable.
  • West Virginia signed a new law, the Parents’ Bill of Rights, granting parents wide-ranging authority over their children’s education, healthcare, and moral upbringing, with state interference allowed only under a compelling interest and narrowly tailored means. 
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Around the Web

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

  • Yeshiva University recently settled a protracted lawsuit with a student-led LGBT group by granting it formal recognition as a student organization, allowing it access to campus facilities and university funding. The lawsuit arose from the school’s refusal to recognize the group on religious grounds, whereas the group claimed such a refusal violated New York antidiscrimination statutes.
  • The state legislature of Kentucky recently passed a joint resolution directing the return of a monument displaying the Ten Commandments to the state’s Capitol Grounds. Temporarily removed during the 1980s due to construction, its return was enjoined by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, citing the now-defunct Lemon test as rendering the monument violative of the Establishment Clause. In light of recent Supreme Court jurisprudence declaring the Lemon test overruled, the state legislature voted to reinstate the monument.
  • A Catholic diocese and a Christian pregnancy center filed suit against the State of Illinois, challenging recent amendments to the Illinois Human Rights Act that prevents discrimination against employees based on their reproductive health choices. The plaintiffs allege that the amendments burden their Free Exercise rights by preventing them from making faith-based employment decisions, and coercing them to associate with individuals whose actions undermine their staunchly pro-life mission.
  • The Kansas state House of Representatives issued a condemnation against a “Black Mass” to take place on the state capitol grounds, citing its clear anti-Catholic animus and blatant disrespect to Christianity. The procession involves the use of a consecrated Catholic host, viewed as a clear mockery and distortion of the Catholic Eucharist, and an alleged affront against the religious sensibilities of “all people of good will.”
  • A New York federal district court ruled that a gender support plan that involved hiding a students social gender transition from her parents did not violate the Free Exercise or Due Process rights of her parents. The Court held that the plaintiff was free to exercise her religious and parental rights over her daughter in the household, and that a school policy that existed for the voluntary benefit of students does not endorse a religious message.
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Around the Web

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

  • In Royce v. Pan, a California federal court upheld the state’s repeal of the “personal belief” exemption from school vaccination requirements, rejecting claims that the law was hostile to religion. The court found that the law was neutral and generally applicable, and that the removal of the exemption did not unfairly target religious practices.
  • In Shash v. City of Pueblo, a Colorado district court rejected a Native American plaintiff’s RLUIPA and free-exercise claims after he was arrested for DUI, as he objected to a blood alcohol test on religious grounds. The court found that RLUIPA did not apply because the plaintiff was not confined to a qualifying institution, and dismissed the First Amendment claim on qualified immunity grounds, noting there was no evidence that the officers were aware of his religious beliefs or intentionally burdened his exercise of religion.
  • In Atlantic Korean American Presbytery v. Shalom Presbyterian Church of Washington, Inc., a Virginia appellate court dismissed a church property dispute, invoking the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine, which bars civil courts from intervening in religious matters. The court ruled that Shalom Presbyterian Church’s decision to seek civil court relief after previously submitting to the Presbyterian Church Synod’s authority amounted to a collateral attack on the Synod’s decision, violating constitutional principles of religious freedom.
  • Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon recently signed HB 0207, establishing the Wyoming Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which mandates strict scrutiny of state actions that significantly burden a person’s religious exercise. Wyoming becomes the 29th state to adopt such a law.
  • Georgetown University argues that the government cannot control its DEI curriculum, citing the First Amendment and its Jesuit mission. This raises the question of whether religious freedom could protect religiously affiliated institutions from attacks on DEI practices, as faith-based colleges often defend their right to make decisions based on their religious tenets.
  • The U.S. Acting Solicitor General filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn an Oklahoma ruling that a Catholic-sponsored charter school violated the state constitution and the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The brief argues that the Free Exercise Clause prohibits excluding the religious school, noting that charter schools do not perform functions exclusively reserved to the state, and thus are not subject to the same constitutional constraints as government-run institutions.
    • Stay tuned for our Symposium on this case!
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Marginalized Religions in the Roman Empire

Most are familiar with the Roman Empire’s treatment of Christianity–which, the conventional account goes, was uniquely bad. But, argues classicist K.P.S. Janssen in a book out this month from Oxford University Press, Marginalized Religion and the Law in the Roman Empire, Rome marginalized other religions as well, and treated them quite similarly in legal terms. Readers can evaluate the argument for themselves. Here’s the description from the Oxford website:

The Roman Empire’s approach to religion has traditionally been described in paradoxical terms. On the one hand, Rome has often been regarded as almost proverbially tolerant, as well as highly flexible in its dealings with the diverse range of religious cults and practices within its territories. On the other hand, the Roman religious landscape was not without its limits, and there were certain groups who found themselves, for one reason or another, on the outside. The legal interactions between these groups and the Roman authorities have largely been studied in isolation. In Marginalized Religion and the Law in the Roman Empire, K. P. S. Janssen instead takes a comparative approach, and investigates how members of various marginalized religious groups were embedded in, and interacted with, the wider Roman legal system. The legal positions of private diviners, Jewish communities and early Christians are compared and contrasted to provide a broader perspective on the legal treatment of marginalized religion in the Roman world. Janssen argues that the known interactions between these respective groups and the Roman authorities are best understood within the wider context of Roman law and administration, and that they furthermore shared a number of important characteristics. While the treatment these groups received was certainly not in all respects identical, the procedural, socio-political, and ideological mechanisms that underpinned the relevant legal measures were nonetheless conspicuously similar.

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Around the Web

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

  •  In People v. Johnson, a California appellate court ruled that prohibiting a criminal defendant, an ordained minister, from wearing a clerical collar and having a Bible during trial was not a reversible error. The court found that this restriction did not affect the trial’s fairness or the verdict. 
  • In Gartenberg v. The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a New York federal court ruled that while Title VI must be applied consistently with the First Amendment, it still requires schools to address harassment that goes beyond protected speech. The court found that Cooper Union’s response to antisemitic intimidation, where protestors banged on a locked library door while Jewish students sheltered inside, was inadequate under Title VI, as the conduct was physically threatening and not shielded by free speech protections.
  • In Civil Rights Department v. Cathy’s Creations, Inc., a California appellate court ruled that a bakery violated state civil rights law by refusing to sell a predesigned white cake for a same-sex wedding reception. The court rejected the bakery’s free speech and religious freedom defenses, finding that its policy was facially discriminatory.
  • In Miller v. City of Burien, a Washington federal court upheld the city’s requirement that a Methodist church obtain a permit before hosting a homeless encampment on its property. The court ruled that the permit process did not substantially burden the church’s religious exercise, as the city’s request was a minor inconvenience aimed at ensuring safety.
  • In Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington v. Doe, the Maryland Supreme Court upheld the retroactive elimination of the limitation period for filing child sexual abuse lawsuits, ruling that the General Assembly had the power to abrogate the statute of limitations.