Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:
- The Supreme Court denied a request for an emergency injunction to permit Catholic Social Services to continue placing children in foster homes while litigation over the religious agency’s refusal to certify same-sex couples as prospective foster parents continues in lower courts.
- The Texas Supreme Court declined to review a lower court’s ruling that permitted cheerleaders to display Bible verses on run-through banners at high school football games.
- A federal judge ruled that the Pennsylvania House of Representatives’ guest chaplain policy violated the Establishment Clause because it prohibited people who do not believe in God from delivering opening invocations.
- The Eighth Circuit dismissed a claim brought by the Satanic Temple regarding Missouri’s abortion laws for lack of standing.
- Catholic bishops in Pennsylvania voice their support for a victims’ compensation fund as an alternative to permitting victims of sexual abuse whose claims are time-barred to sue in court.
- Catholic bishops in Australia object to recommendations for compulsory reporting laws aimed at priests who learn of abuse in private confessionals.
- South Africa’s high court orders the government to enact legislation recognizing Muslim marriages to provide women with greater protection in case of divorce.
- Indonesian President Joko Widodo revives the country’s founding secular ideology, “Pancasila,” in an effort to counter the growth of radical Islamist ideology.
- A federal judge in Boston denied a civic group’s request for an injunction to compel the city to fly a Christian flag from a municipal flagpole in connection with the group’s upcoming Constitution Day event.
- Geert Wilders, an anti-Islam Dutch lawmaker, cancelled a scheduled Prophet Mohammad cartoon drawing contest amid safety and security concerns.
- The DOJ has begun investigating whether the City of Farmersville, Texas, violated RLUIPA by disapproving the Islamic Association of Collin County’s proposed cemetery.
- Americans United for Separation of Church and State demanded President Trump discontinue meetings with his Evangelical Advisory Board, alleging violations of the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
In 1571, at the Battle of Lepanto, a collection of European powers led by Venice (at least that’s how I learned it, notwithstanding Chesterton’s great poem), defeated the Ottoman navy and ensured that Christian Europe, not Muslim Turkey, would control the Mediterranean Sea. A new history from Harvard University Press, 
This book analyses contemporary Christian-Muslim relations in the traditional lands of Orthodoxy and Islam. In particular, it examines the development of Eastern Orthodox ecclesiological thinking on Muslim-Christian relations and religious minorities in the context of modern Greece and Turkey. Greece, where the prevailing religion is Eastern Orthodoxy, accommodates an official recognised Muslim minority based in Western Thrace as well as other Muslim populations located at major Greek urban centres and the islands of the Aegean Sea. On the other hand, Turkey, where the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople is based, is a Muslim country which accommodates within its borders an official recognised Greek Orthodox Minority. The book then suggests ways in which to overcome the difficulties that Muslim and Christian communities are still facing with the Turkish and Greek States. Finally, it proposes that the positive aspects of the coexistence between Muslims and Christians in Western Thrace and Istanbul might constitute an original model that should be adopted in other EU and Middle East countries, where challenges and obstacles between Muslim and Christian communities still persist.
extremism and securitisation. The chapters address a wide range of topics, including neoliberal education policy and globalization; faith-based communities and Islamophobia; social mobility and inequality; securitisation and counter terrorism; and shifting youth representations. Educational sectors from a wide range of national settings are discussed, including the US, China, Turkey, Canada, Germany and the UK; this international focus enables comparative insights into emerging identities and subjectivities among young Muslim men and women across different educational institutions, and introduces the reader to the global diversity of a new generation of Muslim students who are creatively engaging with a rapidly changing twenty-first century education system. The book will appeal to those with an interest in race/ethnicity, Islamophobia, faith and multiculturalism, identity, and broader questions of education and social and global change.
This beautifully illustrated volume looks at the spaces created by and for Jews in areas under the political or religious control of Muslims. Covering regions as diverse as Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, it asks how the architecture of synagogues responded to contextual issues and traditions, and how these contexts influenced the design and evolution of synagogues. As well as revealing how synagogues reflect the culture of the Jewish minority at macro and micro scales, from the city to the interior, the book also considers patterns of the development of synagogues in urban contexts and in connection with urban elements and monuments.
the nation, or Umma in Arabic. The term Umma may be traced back to the Qur’ān and signifies, then and now, both the Islamic religious community as a whole and the various ethnic nations of which that community is composed, such as the Turks, Persians, and Arabs. Examining Alfarabi’s political writings as well as parts of his logical commentaries, his book on music, and other treatises, Alexander Orwin contends that the connections and tensions between ethnic and religious Ummas explored by Alfarabi in his time persist today in the ongoing political and cultural disputes among the various nationalities within Islam.
This book offers a novel interpretation of Russian contemporary discourse on Islam and its influence on Russian state policies. It shifts the analytical perspective from the discussion about Russia’s Islam as a potential security threat to a more comprehensive view of the relationships of Muslims with Russia as a state and a civilization. The work demonstrates how many Muslims increasingly express a sense of belonging to Russia and are increasingly willing to contribute to state building processes.
Why did the Christian Church, in the twentieth century, engage in dialogue with Islam? What has been the ecumenical experience? What is happening now? Such questions underlie Douglas Pratt’s Christian Engagement with Islam: Ecumenical Journeys since 1910. Pratt charts recent Christian (WCC and Vatican) engagement with Islam up to the early 21st century and examines the ecumenical initiatives of Africa’s PROCMURA, ‘Building Bridges’, and the German ‘Christian-Muslim Theological Forum’, together with responses to the 2007 ‘Common Word’ letter.
recognition adopted by Muslims and second through the performance of Islam as a faith.