Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:
- Amid several governors issuing orders to curb large gatherings to slow the spread of COVID-19, at least a half-dozen states have exempted some level of religious activity.
- Police in Italy have been issuing citations to priests and worshippers gathering in churches for violating the rules of the nationwide lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Alliance Defending Freedom filed a petition for a writ of certiorari asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on a Pittsburgh censorship-zone law that restricts speech on public sidewalks outside abortion facilities.
- Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed into law, inter alia, a bill that reduces the penalty for consenting adults engaging in polygamy and a bill that would ban elective abortions if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.
- The man accused of murdering fifty-one worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, last year pleaded guilty to all counts last week.
operations. This is true not only for religiously radicalized fighters but also for professional soldiers. In the last century, religion has influenced modern militaries in the timing of attacks, the selection of targets for assault, the zeal with which units execute their mission, and the ability of individual soldiers to face the challenge of war. Religious ideas have not provided the reasons why conventional militaries fight, but religious practices have influenced their ability to do so effectively.
practitioners who have lived, taught, or worked in the areas of conflict about which they write. Connecting the theory and practice of religious peacebuilding to illuminate key challenges facing interreligious dialogue and interreligious peace work, the volume is explicitly interreligious, intercultural, and global in perspective. The chapters approach religion and peace from the vantage point of security studies, sociology, ethics, ecology, theology, and philosophy. A foreword by David Smock, the Vice President of Governance, Law and Society and Director of the Religion and Peacebuilding Center at the United States Institute of Peace, outlines the current state of the field.
analyze groups who have peacefully intermingled for generations, and who may have developed aspects of syncretism in their religious practices, and yet have turned violently on each other. Such communities define themselves as separate peoples, with different and often competing interests, yet their interaction is usually peaceable provided the dominance of one group is clear. The key indicator of dominance is control over central religious sites, which may be tacitly shared for long periods, but later contested and even converted as dominance changes. By focusing on these shared and contested sites, this volume allows for a wider understanding of relations between these communities.
Catholics who had for the most part been living peaceably since the sixteenth century. In 1999, brutal conflicts broke out between local Christians and Muslims, and escalated into large-scale communal violence once the Laskar Jihad, a Java-based armed jihadist Islamic paramilitary group, sent several thousand fighters to Maluku. As a result of this escalated violence, the previously stable Maluku became the site of devastating interreligious wars.