News from around the world. Curated by Mark McDowell. Posts do not constitute agreement or endorsement.
Key Cases Church Autonomy Ministerial Exception Doctrine Bars Minister-on-Minister Hostile Work Environment Claim In Demkovich v. St. Andrew the Apostle Parish, Calumet City , No. 19-2142, 2021 WL 2880232 (7th Cir. July 9, 2021), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled on interlocutory appeal that the ministerial…
Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro, right, and his new justice minister, André Mendonça, attend his swearing-in ceremony at the Planalto presidential palace, in Brasilia, Brazil, on April 29, 2020. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres) SÃO PAULO (RNS) — Only a few months after taking office in January of 2019, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro…
Key Cases Church Autonomy Ministerial Exception Doctrine Bars Minister-on-Minister Hostile Work Environment Claim In Demkovich v. St. Andrew the Apostle Parish, Calumet City , No. 19-2142, 2021 WL 2880232 (7th Cir. July 9, 2021), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled on interlocutory appeal that the ministerial…
University of Iowa. ST. LOUIS (BP) – Southern Baptist leaders commended the latest court victory for a student faith group that was removed from a state university campus for requiring its leaders to be Christians. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled July 16 that the University of Iowa violated…
University of Iowa. ST. LOUIS (BP) – Southern Baptist leaders commended the latest court victory for a student faith group that was removed from a state university campus for requiring its leaders to be Christians. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled July 16 that the University of Iowa violated…
Can Barronelle Stutzman, a Christian, run her flower shop in keeping with her faith? The Supreme Court — with determinative votes cast by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh — has effectively decided she cannot. “My faith is a part of every aspect of…
Can Barronelle Stutzman , a Christian, run her flower shop in keeping with her faith? The Supreme Cour t—with determinative votes cast by Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Amy Coney Barrett , and Justice Brett Kavanaugh —has effectively decided she cannot. “My faith is a part of every aspect of…
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is among three justices who turned their backs on a Christian flower shop owner. (Photo by GREG NASH/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) Can Barronelle Stutzman, a Christian, run her flower shop in keeping with her faith? The Supreme Court — with determinative votes cast by…
Anticipating the Santa Maria Joint Union High School District’s pending assessment of its Columbus ship logo, I respond to recent commentary that asserted the logo is “fully fitting” for the district. The commentary is informative for evaluating the logo’s appropriateness, but not in the way its author intended. Consider two…
A federal judge has ruled against Montgomery County Judge Wayne Mack’s practice of opening his court with a prayer said by a member of a volunteer chaplain program. Southern District of Texas Judge Kenneth Hoyt on Friday deemed the prayers violated the Establishment Clause, which is the Constitutional provision prohibiting…
A common rallying cry of the right in America, to justify regressive morality laws, is often to say that "America was founded as a Christian country" with "Judeo-Christian values" while the common response from the left is to declare that the United States was founded as an explicitly secular country…
Guest Columnist Annie Laurie Gaylor is the co-founder and co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation A proposal to anoint the Bible as Tennessee’s official state book is not only unconstitutional, it is also an affront to true religious freedom. A resolution to do so passed the House on April…
I should not have to care whether my religious beliefs conflict with the majority of those in any branch of our government. The Constitution — as enumerated in Article VI Section 3 and the First Amendment — is supposed to guarantee that government should not care that for the first…
Across the country, the Satanic Temple, an IRS-recognized atheist church with some 300,000 devotees, is waging a legal battle it says is for religious liberty, using tactics that have proved effective for Christian groups. The church, which preaches both empathy and the "freedom to offend," has filed at least seven…
Across the country, the Satanic Temple, an IRS-recognized atheist church with some 300,000 devotees, is waging a legal battle it says is for religious liberty, using tactics that have proved effective for Christian groups. The church, which preaches both empathy and the "freedom to offend," has filed at least seven…
Across the country, the Satanic Temple, an IRS-recognized atheist church with some 300,000 devotees, is waging a legal battle it says is for religious liberty, using tactics that have proved effective for Christian groups. The church, which preaches both empathy and the "freedom to offend," has filed at least seven…
Jacob Anthony Chansley is shown standing at the dais in the U.S. Senate chamber on January 6 during the riots at the U.S. Capitol. This image from Twitter is part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s complaint. March 3 (UPI) — Special diets for prisoners based on their religious practices…
Are Christmas Carols, Cards, and Greetings at School Constitutional? – By Harold Pease Ph.D. – In the present year of COVID-19 tyrannical governors shut down religious services, a 1st Amendment right, as fast as they could. During the summer months Antifa defaced and with ropes tore down statues of our…
A federal lawsuit challenging restrictions on houses of worship, imposed by Delaware Gov. John Carney at the start of the pandemic, has been settled. In exchange for the Rev. Christopher Bullock dropping his lawsuit, Carney agreed that in any future emergency requiring state actions, the governor "must treat churches and…
Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett listens during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Oct. 14, 2020, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Pool) WASHINGTON (RNS) — Since the moment Judge Amy Coney Barrett was announced as President Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the Supreme…
WASHINGTON, Oct. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today welcomed a Virginia federal court’s ruling in Young v. Newton that Virginia’s Riverside Regional Jail’s Christians-only area of the facility — known as a "God Pod" — had…
Special to The Times The cesspool of our American culture is not the result of too much God, faith, or religion, but too little. With the pending confirmation hearing of nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, it is appropriate to review what our Constitution says about religion.…
Meghan Clark, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies, St. John’s University Massimo Faggioli, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies, Villanova University David Gibson, Director, Center for Religion and Culture, Fordham University Damon Silvers, Director of Policy and Special Counsel, AFL-CIO Convener: Mark Massa, S.J., Director, The Boisi Center for Religion…
Portrait of Justice Ginsburg by Simmie Knox We lost a champion of humanist values and liberal jurisprudence with the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18. One of the most powerful women in US history, she changed fundamental laws before she ever put on the robe…
I think this is generally quite right, and indeed an important victory for academic freedom; professors, including those at public colleges, have to be able to speak freely about religious belief systems (whether Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or anything else), no less than other belief systems. From Sabra v.…