Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:
- The Supreme Court has relisted two cases involving religious exercise claims, Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission v. Woods and Hedican v. Walmart Stores East, L.P., for its upcoming conference.
- A Kansas teacher filed suit against her school district superintendent, board members, and principal after being suspended for refusing to use a student’s preferred name due to her religious beliefs.
- In Heras v. Diocese of Corpus Christie, a Texas appellate court affirmed the dismissal of two priests’ defamation suits on ecclesiastical abstention grounds.
- Ohio Governor signed into law Senate Bill 181, which allows students to wear religious apparel while competing in athletic competitions or extracurricular activities.
- In Resham v. State of Karnataka, a 3-judge panel of the High Court of the Indian state of Karnataka upheld a ban on hijabs in schools and colleges. The Court stated that the “wearing of hijab by Muslim women does not form a part of essential religious practice in Islamic faith.”
- Quebec’s new Bill 21 bans Canadians working as teachers, lawyers, police officers, and more from wearing religious symbols such as crosses, hijabs, turbans and yarmulkes.
- Israel’s Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi David Lau, in a letter to Israel’s attorney general, has proposed setting up a special religious court to assist the expected 30,000 plus Ukrainian refugees.
studies on India and South Asia have proliferated but their analyses often fail to identify why violence flourishes. Unwilling to simply accept patriarchy as the answer, Tamsin Bradley presents new research examining how different groups in India conceptualise violence against women, revealing beliefs around religion, caste and gender that render aggression socially acceptable. She also analyses the role that neoliberalism, and its corollary consumerism, play in reducing women to commodity objects for barter or exchange. Unpacking varied conservative, liberal and neoliberal ideologies active in India today, Bradley argues that they can converge unexpectedly to normalise violence against women. Due to these complex and overlapping factors, rates of violence against women in India have actually increased despite decades of feminist campaigning.
only after India became an independent secular state. Based on extensive ethnographic and archival work, Becoming Religious in a Secular Age tells the story of this discovery and how it transformed a community’s relations to its past, to its members, and to those outside the community. And, as Mark Elmore demonstrates, Himachali religion offers a unique opportunity to reimagine relations between religion and secularity. Tracing the emergence of religion, Elmore shows that modern secularity is not so much the eradication of religion as the very condition for its development. Showing us that to become a modern, ethical subject is to become religious, this book creatively augments our understanding of both religion and modernity.
of survival for societies characterized by religious diversity. Yet it remains unclear what the crisis is all about. This book argues that its roots are internal to the liberal model of secularism and toleration. Rather than being neutral or non-religious, this is a secularized theological model with deep religious roots. The limits of liberal secularism go back to its emergence from the dynamics and tensions of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. From the very beginning, it went hand in hand with its own mode of intolerance: an anticlerical theology that rejected Catholicism and Judaism as evil forms of political religion. Later this framework produced the colonial descriptions of Hinduism (and its caste hierarchy) as a false and immoral religion. Thus, secularism was presented as the only route forward for India. Still, the secular state often harms local forms of living together and reinforces conflicts rather than resolving them. Todays advocacy of secularism is not the outcome of reasonable reflection on the problems of Indian society but a manifestation of colonial consciousness.