Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:
- The King of Spain joined a march in Barcelona that condemned terrorism; some of the marchers also carried signs with anti-Islamophobic messages.
- A Wisconsin photographer who refuses to provide services at same-sex weddings has won her challenge to the state’s anti-discrimination laws, although the ruling hinges on the fact that she does not operate a storefront.
- A federal judge in Idaho has ruled that the state’s Department of Corrections must offer prisoners kosher meals.
- An ex-employee of the Kansas Secretary of State has lost her lawsuit in which she alleged that she was fired because she did not attend church.
- Four members of a Christian fundamentalist organization were arrested while trying to transport seven children out of the group’s compound. Several members of the group face allegations of child sex abuse.
- Several religious freedom watchdog organizations say that while the Trump Administration is not enforcing certain controversial laws that target political activity by religious groups and that require employers provide health plans that include contraceptives, the Justice Department is continuing to defend the legality of those laws in court.
David Harrington Watt’s Antifundamentalism in Modern America gives us a pathbreaking account of the role that the fear of fundamentalism has played—and continues to play—in American culture. Fundamentalism has never been a neutral category of analysis, and Watt scrutinizes the various political purposes that the concept has been made to serve. In 1920, the conservative Baptist writer Curtis Lee Laws coined the word “fundamentalists.” Watt examines the antifundamentalist polemics of Harry Emerson Fosdick, Talcott Parsons, Stanley Kramer, and Richard Hofstadter, which convinced many Americans that religious fundamentalists were almost by definition backward, intolerant, and anti-intellectual and that fundamentalism was a dangerous form of religion that had no legitimate place in the modern world.
Germany, India and the United States this book traces the rise and turn to moderation of the New Cultural Identitarian Political Movements, often labelled in the West as fundamentalists. Arguing that culturally based ideologies are often the instruments, rather than the motivating force though which segments of a rising middle strata challenge entrenched elites the expert contributors trace the rise of these movements to changes in their respective countries’ political economy and class structures. This approach explains why, as a result of an ongoing contestation and recreation of bourgeois values, the more powerful of these movements then tend towards moderation. As Western countries realise the need to engage with the more moderate wings of fundamentalist political groups their rationale and aims become of increasing importance and so academics, decision-makers and business people interested in South Asia and the Muslim world will find this an invaluable account.
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