Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

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

  • A California federal court recently issued a temporary injunction barring the University of California from allowing protestors to prevent Jewish students from attending class. The lawsuit was initiated by three Jewish students who claimed they were prevented from accessing certain portions of UCLA’s campus without wearing a wristband signifying their refusal to recognize the State of Israel.
  • In Saint Dominic Academy v. Makin, a Maine federal court refused to enjoin the enforcement of a statute that requires schools receiving tuition aid for out-of-district students to refrain from discriminating on the basis of religion or sexual orientation. The Court found that the statute met the strict scrutiny standard of review placed upon it by the Supreme Court, despite the Plaintiff’s claim that it amounts to a de facto ban on parochial schools receiving the desired aid.
  • In In re Covid-Related Restrictions on Religious Services, the Delaware Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of two challenges to the Governor’s orders restricting religious gatherings in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Court held that any injury caused could not be redressed by the suit due the lifting of the restrictions as well as a binding commitment by the Governor not to impose similar restrictions in the future, rendering the desired declarative judgment incapable of changing the status quo.
Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

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

  • In Queens, NY, statues depicting Christ and the Virgin Mary were vandalized and decapitated outside of a Catholic Church, resulting in the perpetrator being charged with a hate crime. The incident took place outside of Holy Family Catholic Church in Fresh Meadows, Queens, with the attack being fully recorded by the church’s camera.
  • The Center for Religion, Culture, & Democracy recently released the 2023 iteration of their Religious Liberty in the United States survey, which measures each state’s statutory protections against religious discrimination. West Virginia finished last, whereas Illinois finished first, providing an insight into how cultural norms can misalign with formal legal protections.
  • In Chino Valley Unified School System v. Newsom, a California school district sued the state of California, claiming that recent legislation prohibiting parental notification of a child’s gender transition violated parents’ free exercise rights.
  • In Behrend v. San Francisco Zen Center, Inc., a Buddhist novice’s disability discrimination suit was dismissed due to the ministerial exception doctrine.
  • In L.F. v. M.A., a New York state trial court held that a Coptic Orthodox wedding was sufficient to render a couple civilly married for the purposes of a divorce action. The court held that the belief of both parties, as well as testimony from the officiating bishop, were enough to overcome the lack of formal marriage license.
Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

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

  • In French v. Albany Medical Center, the Northern District of New York found that a hospital did not violate the religious rights of a nurse who refused to receive a flu shot on religious grounds. The Court held that the requested accommodation was not reasonable due to her proximity to flu patients and vulnerable individuals.
  • In Bacon v. Woodward, the Ninth Circuit reversed the dismissal of a suit by firefighters who claimed their free exercise rights were infringed by the City of Spokane’s refusal to accommodate their religious objections to the COVID-19 vaccine. The Court held that the city’s termination of the plaintiffs while inviting potentially unvaccinated firefighters from neighboring departments for assistance constituted more favorable treatment for a secular group.
  • In Blackmon v. State of Missouri, a Missouri trial court held that the references to God and the belief that life starts at conception do not translate into various pro-life statutes running afoul of the Establishment Clause. The Court likened the mention of God to that found in the State’s Constitution, and refused to consider the latter belief as religious.
  • In Russia, a self-proclaimed witch was detained in court after disseminating literature calling for violence against clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church. She was also charged with insulting the feelings of religious believers as well as distributing extremist literature.
  • In Pakistan, a Christian man was killed by a mob of hundreds of individuals after being accused of desecrating a Quran. The United States Center for International Religious Freedom claims that the attack was inspired by Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which explicitly provide for the death penalty upon anyone found to insult the Islamic faith.
Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

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

  • In Bardonner v. Bardonner, the Indiana Court of Appeals upheld a custody order that prohibited a father from taking his son to his church. The court held that his free exercise rights were not infringed upon by this restriction as the child’s mother, the legal guardian of the child, had the right to determine the religious upbringing of her child.
  • In Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. State of Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that the Catholic Charities Bureau and four of its sub-entities were not exempted from the state’s unemployment compensation law. The court reasoned that the controlling factor for qualification was whether the charity was operated primarily for religious purposes, and held that the charity’s purposes were instead charitable and secular.
  • The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom ended an official visit to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia following a demand by Saudi officials to have USCIRF Chairman Rabbi Abraham Cooper remove his kippah while visiting a religious site.
  • In Miller v. McDonald, the District Court for the Western District of New York upheld the State of New York’s removal of religious exemptions from its mandatory student vaccination requirement. The Court held that the law was facially neutral, and the mere removal of existing religious exemptions is insufficient to prove hostility towards religion.
  • An observant Jewish passenger on a JetBlue flight filed suit against the airliner in the District Court for the Southern District of New York after being forced off the flight when he refused to sit next to a woman who wasn’t his wife or blood relative, on account of his religious beliefs.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire?

Gibbon famously wrote that Christianity was partly responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire. By encouraging pacifism and other-worldliness, he argued, Christianity sapped Rome’s fighting spirit. Who knows? Correlation isn’t causation, after all, and anyway a Christian version of the empire survived another 1000 years in the east. But if the rise of Christianity explains Rome’s fall, what explains the apparent decline of the Pax Americana? Surely not the spread of Christian identity: the decline of American influence correlates with a decline in the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians. This week, Yale publishes a book that attempts to explain what’s going on, Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West. The authors are historians Peter Heather (King’s College, London) and political economist John Rappley (Cambridge). Looks fascinating. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, around the start of the new millennium, history took a dramatic turn. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in rapid decline compared to the global periphery it had previously colonized. This is not the first time we have seen such a rise and fall: the Roman Empire followed a similar arc, from dizzying power to disintegration.

Historian Peter Heather and political economist John Rapley explore the uncanny parallels, and productive differences between ancient Rome and the modern West, moving beyond the tropes of invading barbarians and civilizational decay to unearth new lessons. From 399 to 1999, they argue, through the unfolding of parallel, underlying imperial life cycles, both empires sowed the seeds of their own destruction. Has the era of Western global domination indeed reached its end? Heather and Rapley contemplate what comes next.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Kronman on Disbelief

“I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race,” the author of Ecclesiastes writes. “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Yale law professor Anthony Kronman takes on this burden in a recent book, After Disbelief, which Yale releases in paperback form this month. The book tries to make sense of the essential human wish to understand eternity in a disenchanted world. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Many people of faith believe the meaning of life depends on our connection to an eternal order of some kind. Atheists deride this belief as a childish superstition.

In this wise and profound book, Anthony Kronman offers an alternative to these two entrenched positions, arguing that neither addresses the complexities of the human condition. We can never reach God, as religion promises, but cannot give up the longing to do so either. We are condemned by our nature to set goals we can neither abandon nor fulfill, yet paradoxically are able to approach more closely if we try. The human condition is one of inevitable disappointment tempered by moments of joy.

Resolutely humanistic and theologically inspired, this moving book offers a rational path to the love of God amidst the disenchantments of our time.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New History of the Transcendentalists

The 19th century Transcendentalists cast a long shadow in American religious culture. Their insistence that the individual is the sole measure of religious truth has greatly affected our law as well, notwithstanding Chief Justice Burger’s famous dismissal of Henry David Thoreau in Wisconsin v. Yoder. And you might say Transcendentalism is having a moment today, with the rise of the Nones, a movement that represents a mainstreaming of many ideas bruited about in Concord parlors in the 1830s and 40s.

A new history from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, The Transcendentalists and their World, by Robert Gross (University of Connecticut) situates the Transcendentalists in their hometown, showing the ways that their daily interactions influenced their ideas. Looks very interesting. Here is the publisher’s description:

In the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World, a paradigm-shaping study of Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, in this highly anticipated work, Gross returns to Concord and explores the meaning of an equally crucial moment in the American story: the rise of Transcendentalism.

The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers.

The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived through a transformative epoch of American life. A place of two thousand–plus souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was dramatically unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy and tightly integrated into the wider world. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice. They exposed people to cosmopolitan currents of thought and endowed them with unparalleled opportunities. They fostered uncertainties, raised new hopes, stirred dreams of perfection, and created an audience for new ideas of individual freedom and democratic equality deeply resonant today.

The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Legal Spirits Episode 041: Learning in War-Time

In this episode of Legal Spirits, Center Co-Directors Mark Movsesian and Marc DeGirolami explore C.S. Lewis’s great essay on the calling of the Christian scholar, “Learning in War-Time.” Lewis wrote the essay at the start of World War II, but it continues to speak to students and faculty today–Christian and non-Christian. As Lewis observes, “human life is always lived on the edge of a precipice,” and the question why people should devote what little time they have on earth to academic pursuits when so many other things call for our attention is a perennial one. Lewis’s message is one of humility, courage, and controlled hope, even in the worst of times. Listen in!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Posted on by ascarcella

Around the Web

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

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Gonzalez, “A Brief History of Sunday”

Strict Sunday observance is less and less common among Christians in the West, and Sunday closing laws–although the US Supreme Court famously upheld their constitutionality in McGowan v. Maryland (1961)–have fallen into disuse, in those jurisdictions where they haven’t been repealed. As Robert Louis Wilken once said, the only thing that currently distinguishes Sunday from other days of the week is that the malls open a little later. At one time, though, Sundays were a day of observance, and the laws reflected that fact.

A new book from Eerdmans, A Brief History of Sunday: From the New Testament to the New Creation, by Justo González, offers a history of Christians’ Sunday observance and of laws that date back to Constantine, and reflects on current practice in the West and beyond. Here’s the description from the Eerdmans website:

9780802874719In this accessible historical overview of Sunday, noted scholar Justo González tells the story of how and why Christians have worshiped on Sunday from the earliest days of the church to the present.

After discussing the views and practices relating to Sunday in the ancient church, González turns to Constantine and how his policies affected Sunday observances. He then recounts the long process, beginning in the Middle Ages and culminating with Puritanism, whereby Christians came to think of and strictly observe Sunday as the Sabbath. Finally, González looks at the current state of things, exploring especially how the explosive growth of the church in the Majority World has affected the observance of Sunday worldwide.

Readers of this book will rediscover the joy and excitement of Sunday as early Christians celebrated it and will find fresh, inspiring perspectives on Sunday amid our current culture of indifference and even hostility to Christianity.