Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:
- New York City shut down a yeshiva’s preschool program in Brooklyn on Monday for violating a Health Department order requiring vaccination records in light of the measles outbreak.
- After prior orders were struck down, Rockland County, New York health authorities issued two new orders today to combat the measles outbreak, changing their cited legal authority.
- Moroccan King Mohammad VI appointed Rabbi Yoshiahu Pinto as Supreme Chief Rabbinical Court Master, filling the position after a 100-year vacancy.
- The Department of Justice settled RLUIPA zoning claims with the City of Farmersville, Texas on Tuesday, resolving all allegations that the city violated RLUIPA when it denied the Islamic Association of Collin County’s request to construct a cemetery.
- Numerous families filed a lawsuit against a Washington, D.C. synagogue, alleging that one of the synagogue’s teachers sexually abused several preschool children for over a year.
- A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States found that state legalization of same-sex marriage has reduced homophobia across the U.S.
- The Eighth Circuit heard arguments in a Title VII case where the court was asked to find sexual orientation discrimination actionable under the statute.
- Two New Jersey state senators have voiced support for allowing religious exemptions to vaccine requirements.
- The director for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights highlighted his goals to, among other things, investigate states that require insurance to cover abortion and protect individuals who reject vaccines on religious grounds.
- A Christian adoption agency sued Michigan and HHS for religious discrimination based on a settlement that bars Michigan from working with faith-based adoption agencies.
- A “save Chick-fil-A” protest was held at the Texas Capitol after the San Antonio City Council banned the company from a local airport based on its stance on LGBT rights.
- Malaysia’s religious authorities said they were investigating a book about Muslim women who choose not to wear hijab.
- Some sponsors are asking for their money back and a congressman is seeking an investigation after an anti-Semitic song was performed at a “Conflict over Gaza” conference at UNC Chapel Hill.
- The Supreme Court has been asked to permanently block a Louisiana abortion law that requires admitting privileges at a hospital within thirty miles of the facility where the abortion is performed.
- A bill requiring that doctors inform patients that a medically-induced abortion may be reversible has been sent to the Oklahoma governor to sign.
- The Pennsylvania House approved new child sex abuse reporting rules that call for tougher penalties for non-reporting.
- Los Angeles is contemplating a human rights ordinance that would prohibit discrimination and other forms of bigotry resulting from “violent or harassing acts” on a number of protected grounds, including religion.
This book gathers a wide range of theological perspectives from Orthodox European countries, Russia and the United States in order to demonstrate how divergent the positions are within Orthodox Christianity. Orthodoxy is often considered to be out-of-sync with contemporary society, set apart in a world of its own where the church intertwines with the state, in order to claim power over the populace and ignore the individual voices of modern societies.
Peace, and International Political Realism, edited by Keir Lieber (2009). InA Liberalism Safe for Catholicism?, editors Daniel Philpott and Ryan Anderson chronicle the relationship between the Catholic Church and American liberalism as told through twenty-seven essays selected from the history of the Review of Politics, dating back to the journal’s founding in 1939. The primary subject addressed in these essays is the development of a Catholic political liberalism in response to the democratic environment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Works by Jacques Maritain, Heinrich Rommen, and Yves R. Simon forge the case for the compatibility of Catholicism and American liberal institutions, including the civic right of religious freedom. The conversation continues through recent decades, when a number of Catholic philosophers called into question the partnership between Christianity and American liberalism and were debated by others who rejoined with a strenuous defense of the partnership. The book also covers a wide range of other topics, including democracy, free market economics, the common good, human rights, international politics, and the thought of John Henry Newman, John Courtney Murray, and Alasdair MacIntyre, as well as some of the most prominent Catholic thinkers of the last century, among them John Finnis, Michael Novak, and William T. Cavanaugh. This book will be of special interest to students and scholars of political science, journalists and policymakers, church leaders, and everyday Catholics trying to make sense of Christianity in modern society.
Banack challenges this assumption, showing that, in Alberta, religious motivation has played a vital role in shaping its political trajectory.
1540, the Jesuit order has preached the Gospel, managed a vast educational network, and shaped the Catholic Church, society, and politics in all corners of the earth. Rather than offering a a global history of the Jesuits or a linear narrative of globalization, Thomas Banchoff and José Casanova have assembled a multidisciplinary group of leading experts to explore what we can learn from the historical and contemporary experience of the Society of Jesus—what do the Jesuits tell us about globalization and what can globalization tell us about the Jesuits?
in “the entire civilized world” to redeem time from the workplace in order to devote it to education, civic duty, health, family, and leisure.
class history converge. Focusing on Christianity and its unique purchase in America, the contributors use in-depth local histories to illustrate how Americans male and female, rural and urban, and from a range of ethnic backgrounds dwelt in a space between the church and the shop floor. Their vivid essays show Pentecostal miners preaching prosperity while seeking miracles in the depths of the earth, while aboveground black sharecroppers and white Protestants established credit unions to pursue a joint vision of cooperative capitalism.