Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:
- The Freedom from Religion Foundation filed a formal complaint with the Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct, claiming it was “inappropriate” and “unconstitutional” for a state judge to have given a Bible to a former Dallas police officer after she had been convicted of murder.
- Enes Kanter, a Turkish player for the Boston Celtics and an outspoken critic of the Turkish regime and its human rights record, claims two supporters of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan harassed him outside a Massachusetts mosque.
- Bryan Fulwider, a popular local Christian radio show personality who co-hosts “Friends Talking Faith” along with a rabbi and an imam, is being held without bail in Florida on thirty counts of sexual battery of a minor by a person in a position of custodial authority.
- The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted a stay of execution for Randy Halprin, a Jewish death row inmate, and remanded his case back to the Dallas County court so it can review whether his trial judge was anti-Semitic and thus biased against him.
- Pope Francis created thirteen new cardinals on Saturday, many of whom have missionary experience in countries with nearly no Catholic presence, demonstrating his vision that the Catholic Church be “a missionary Church that acknowledges the importance of interreligious dialogue.”
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.
It was rare, if not impossible, to find in ’80s and ’90s a Muslim cleric who spoke in favor of democracy, integration with the Western world, and universal human values. Fethullah Gülen was one of those. Many of his avant-garde ideas did not only earn him one of the largest and most influential faith-inspired social movements of recent history, but also many foes, especially from the Turkish ruling elite, placing him in the center of many social and political developments in Turkey. Despite the enormous defamation from some political groups in Turkey, Gülen is recognized in the world as a devout Muslim cleric, whose thoughts and life style are deeply rooted in the Islamic faith, but who also believes Islam is not in conflict with the progressive values of the modern world. This book collates Gülen’s ahead-of-his-time comments on some of the debated issues as he phrased in interviews in the past few decades.
The Diyanet is the ‘Presidency of Religious Affairs’, the official face of Islam and highest religious authority in Turkey, and is a governmental department established in 1924 after the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. In this book, Emir Kaya offers an in-depth multidisciplinary analysis of this vital institution. Focusing on the role of the Diyanet in society, Kaya explores the balance the institution has to strike between the Islamic traditions of the Turkish population and the officially secular creed of the Turkish state. By examining the various laws that either bolstered or hindered the Diyanet’s budgets and activities, Kaya highlights the institutional mindsets of the Diyanet membership as well as evaluating its successes and failures as a governmental department that has to consistently operate within the context of the religiosity of Turkish society. By situating all of this within the context of the two competing but often complimentary concepts of religion and secularism, Kaya offers a book that is important for those researching the role of religion and the state in society in the Middle East and beyond.”
This book considers the key issue of Turkey’s treatment of minorities in relation to its complex paths of both European integration and domestic and international reorientation. The expectations of Turkey’s EU and other international counterparts, as well as important domestic demands, have pushed Turkey to broaden the rights of religious and other minorities. More recently a turn towards autocratic government is rolling back some earlier achievements. This book shows how these broader processes affect the lives of three important religious groups in Turkey: the Alevi as a large Muslim community and the Christian communities of Armenians and Syriacs. Drawing on a wealth of original data and extensive fieldwork, the authors compare and explain improvements, set-backs, and lingering concerns for Turkey’s religious minorities and identify important challenges for Turkey’s future democratic development and European path. The book will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of minority politics, contemporary Turkish politics, and religion and politics.
The right to freedom of religion or belief, as enshrined in international human rights documents, is unique in its formulation in that it provides protection for the enjoyment of the rights “in community with others”. This book explores the notion of the collective dimension of freedom of religion or belief with a view to advance the protection of this right.