Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

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

  • The Supreme Court of the United States denied certiorari in Missouri Department of Corrections v. Finney, a case in which a Missouri state appellate court upheld a trial court’s striking of three potential jurors who were disqualified because of their religious belief that homosexuality is a sin. The underlying suit against the Department of Corrections involved sex discrimination and hostile work environment claims by a lesbian employee.
  •  In United States v. Rourke, the 9th Circuit held that it was “plain error” for a district court to impose a condition to a defendant’s supervised release that the defendant live at and participate in a 12-step rehabilitation program, which asks the participant to call on a spiritual power to overcome addiction problems. The court found that without a non-religious alternative, the supervised release violates the Establishment Clause.
  • In Prodan v. Legacy Health, a federal district court in Oregon found that two former health care workers who challenged their employer’s denial of a request for a religious exemption from a Covid vaccine requirement made out a prima facie case of religious discrimination in the workplace under Title VII.
  • In Annunciation House, Inc. v. Paxton, a Catholic agency serving migrants and refugees in Texas filed suit against the Texas Attorney General, arguing that his demand for certain records violated the agency’s religious freedom. A Texas state court granted a TRO barring the Attorney General from examining the records.
  • In Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee signed a bill which says, in relevant part, “[a] person shall not be required to solemnize a marriage.” The original bill would have allowed refusals by those who objected to the solemnization on religious belief.
  • The Utah legislature passed a bill that prohibits the government from imposing substantial burdens on the free exercise of religion unless it can show that it had a compelling interest to do so, and it used the least restrictive means to further that interest.
Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

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

  • In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the United States Supreme Court held 6-3 that the 1st Amendment’s free speech clause prohibit Colorado from requiring that a website designer create websites for same-sex weddings contrary to her religious beliefs.
  • In Groff v. DeJoy, a religious accommodation case under Title VII, a unanimous Supreme Court clarified that “undue hardship” exists where “‘a burden is substantial in the overall context of an employer’s business.'”
  • In Fox v. Washington, the 6th Circuit held that the Michigan Department of Corrections must recognize “Christian Identity” as a religion for purposes of the Michigan prison system.
  • In Goldstein v. Hochul, a federal court in New York refused to issue a preliminary injunction in a challenge to New York’s 2022 Concealed Carry Improvement Act, which bans carrying firearms in “any place of worship or religious observation.”  The suit was filed by an Orthodox Jewish congregation, its president, and Jewish residents of New York who say that they have carried handguns for self-defense in synagogues.
  • In Doe v. Alpine School District, a federal court in Utah rejected claims by parents of a high school student that the school’s practice of giving students long periods of unsupervised time, during which the student had premarital sex with his girlfriend, violated their religious free exercise rights. The court found that although premarital sex is against the parents’ religious beliefs, the school did not coerce the student into violating the parents’ religious beliefs.
  • In Alulddin v. Alfartousi, an Arizona state appeals court held that civil courts can enforce an Islamic marriage contract’s dowry provision. The court found that in deciding the dowry provision was a valid premarital agreement, it did not violate the 1st Amendment’s free exercise clause.
  • In Foundation for the Advancement of Catholic Schools, Inc. v. The Most Reverend Leonard P. Blair, a Connecticut trial court held that “the constitutional bar on court jurisdiction over religious matters” required it to abstain from a suit over whether the Archbishop could appoint Board of Trustee members other than those recommended by the Governance Committee.
Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

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

Posted on by amnania

Around the Web

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

Posted on by L&R Forum

An Orthodox Perspective on Mixed Marriage

Mixed_Marriage__77125.1543351168.300.300Roughly half of those Americans who marry today choose a spouse from a different religious tradition. The high rate of intermarriage, which both reflects and promotes a basic American tolerance of religious difference, has major implications for the future of religion in our country. It also poses canonical and pastoral problems for those traditions, like Orthodox Christianity, which discourage and, in some circumstances, prohibit mixed marriage. A new book from St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Mixed Marriage: An Orthodox History, by church historian Anthony Roeber (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary) offers some perspective on the question from an Orthodox perspective. Here’s a description from the publisher’s website:

Fr. Roeber’s excellent book offers a lucid and fascinating history of marriage and its relationship to the Church, the authority of the bishop, pastoral practice in relation to the administration of the Mysteries (how can a couple sharing in the sacrament of Orthodox marriage not be allowed thereafter to share in the Eucharist from which it flows?) and how that important, but often ill-defined term of oikonomia can address the issue of mixed marriage today. The study’s strength is that it looks to the historical documentation of what happened in relation to mixed marriage in Orthodox past history, rather than following what is vaguely ‘supposed’ to have happened. Brilliantly and elegantly written, with a calm and surefooted perspective, it offers great interest for the specialist and layperson alike. This book will surely become a standard work on the subject.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Regnerus, “Cheap Sex”

9780190673611We’re a little late getting to this, but a few months ago Oxford published a new book by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, which has received a lot of attention. Regnerus addresses millennials’ apparent lack of interest in marriage and family and says much of the problem (if it is a problem) results from the fact that sex has become more accessible and less costly, and not only in monetary terms. As religious scruples fade, the spiritual costs of easy sex decrease as well — and when the cost of something goes down, more people decide they can afford it. In fact, Regnerus argues, for some people sex may take the place of traditional religion, offering a substitute, though ultimately dissatisfying, path to the transcendent. There are interesting gender dynamics, too. Regnerus, a conservative, points out that a regime of cheap sex favors men more than women–another irony of the sexual revolution, which was supposed to lead to greater equality between the sexes. Here’s the description from the Oxford website:

Sex is cheap. Coupled sexual activity has become more widely available than ever. Cheap sex has been made possible by two technologies that have little to do with each other – the Pill and high-quality pornography – and its distribution made more efficient by a third technological innovation, online dating. Together, they drive down the cost of real sex, and in turn slow the development of love, make fidelity more challenging, sexual malleability more common, and have even taken a toll on men’s marriageability.

Cheap Sex takes readers on an extended tour inside the American mating market, and highlights key patterns that characterize young adults’ experience today, including the timing of first sex in relationships, overlapping partners, frustrating returns on their relational investments, and a failure to link future goals like marriage with how they navigate their current relationships. Drawing upon several large nationally-representative surveys, in-person interviews with 100 men and women, and the assertions of scholars ranging from evolutionary psychologists to gender theorists, what emerges is a story about social change, technological breakthroughs, and unintended consequences. Men and women have not fundamentally changed, but their unions have. No longer playing a supporting role in relationships, sex has emerged as a central priority in relationship development and continuation. But unravel the layers, and it is obvious that the emergence of “industrial sex” is far more a reflection of men’s interests than women’s.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Birge, “Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan”

In June, the Harvard University Press will release “Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan: Cases from the Yuan dianzhang,” by Bettine Birge (University of Southern California).  The publisher’s description follows:

The Mongol conquest of China in the thirteenth century and Khubilai Khan’s founding of the Yuan dynasty brought together under one government people of 9780674975514-lgdifferent languages, religions, and social customs. Chinese law evolved rapidly to accommodate these changes, as reflected in the great compendium Yuan dianzhang (Statutes and Precedents of the Yuan Dynasty). The records of legal cases contained in this seminal text, Bettine Birge shows, paint a portrait of medieval Chinese family life—and the conflicts that arose from it—that is unmatched by any other historical source.

Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan reveals the complex, sometimes contradictory inner workings of the Mongol-Yuan legal system, seen through the prism of marriage disputes in chapter eighteen of the Yuan dianzhang, which has never before been translated into another language. The text includes court testimony—recorded in the vivid vernacular of people from all social classes—in lawsuits over adultery, divorce, rape, wife-selling, marriages of runaway slaves, and other conflicts. It brings us closer than any other source to the actual Mongolian speech of Khubilai and the great khans who succeeded him as they struggled to reconcile very different Mongol, Muslim, and Chinese legal traditions and confront the challenges of ruling a diverse polyethnic empire.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

“Justice and Mercy Have Met” (Martens, ed.)

In January, the Catholic University of America Press released “Justice and Mercy Have Met: Pope Francis and the Reform of the Marriage Nullity Process,” edited by Kurt Martens (The Catholic University of America).  The publisher’s description follows:

With the promulgation of the motu proprio Mitis iudex Dominus Iesus for the Latin Church and the motu proprio Mitis et misericors Iesus for the Eastern Catholic Churches,hfs.bibliometa.jpg both dated August 15, 2015, Pope Francis addressed the calls during the Third Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops (October 5-9, 2014) for a simplified procedure for the declaration of the nullity of marriages. Pope Francis introduced a briefer process to be conducted by the diocesan bishop and he simplified the current ordinary nullity process. The new procedural norms went into effect on December 8, 2015.

New legislation always challenges first and foremost the practitioner: how is the new legislation to be understood and applied? Immediately after the new law was made public, a number of articles on this new legislation were published in The Jurist. The School of Canon Law of The Catholic University of America organized a March 2016 Workshop on the very topic of this important procedural reform.

These articles are now brought together in one volume to assist those who work with these norms in the various tribunals dealing with marriage cases. It is hoped that this volume will be of great service to all those who serve the people of God in the ministry of justice, and that these contributions will truly be a help in understanding and applying the new norms.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Cristellon, “Marriage, the Church, and its Judges in Renaissance Venice, 1420-1545”

In January, Palgrave Macmillan will release “Marriage, the Church, and its Judges in Renaissance Venice, 1420-1545,” by Cecilia Cristellon (Konstanz University).  The publisher’s description follows:

This book investigates the actions of marriage tribunals by analyzing the richest source of marriage suits extant in Italy, those of the Venetian ecclesiastical tribunal, 9783319387994between 1420 and the opening of the Council of Trent. It offers a strongly representative overview of the changes the Council introduced to centuries-old marriage practices, relegating it to the realm of marginality and deviance and nearly erasing the memory of it altogether. From the eleventh century onward, the Church assured itself of a jurisdictional monopoly over the matter of marriage, operating both in concert and in conflict with secular authorities by virtue of marriage’s civil consequences, the first of which regarded the legitimacy of children. Secular tribunals were responsible for patrimonial matters between spouses, though the Church at times inserted itself into these matters either directly, by substituting itself for the secular authority, or indirectly, by influencing Rulings through their own sentences. Lay magistratures, for their part, somewhat eroded the authority of ecclesiastical tribunals by continuing to exercise autonomous jurisdiction over marriage, especially regarding separation and crimes strictly connected to the nuptial bond and its definition, including adultery, bigamy, and rape.

Posted on by Jason Mansmann

Holmes, “The Church of England and Divorce in the Twentieth Century”

In October, Routledge will release The Church of England and Divorce in the Twentieth Century: Legalism and Grace by Ann Sumner Holmes (Louisiana State University). The publisher’s description follows:The Church of England and Divorce in the Twentieth Century

Attitudes towards divorce have changed considerably over the past two centuries. As society has moved away from a Biblical definition of marriage as an indissoluble union, to that of an individual and personal relationship, secular laws have evolved as well. Using unpublished sources and previously inaccessible private collections, Holmes explores the significant role the Church of England has played in these changes, as well as the impact this has had on ecclesiastical policies. This timely study will be relevant to ongoing debates about the meaning and nature of marriage, including the theological doctrines and ecclesiastical policies underlying current debates on same-sex marriage.