The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, holding that religious schools cannot be excluded from a state program of financial aid to private schools, is another incremental step in the Court's long-running project to reform the constitutional law of financial aid to religious institutions. There was nothing surprising about the decision, and it changed little; it was the inevitable next link in a long chain of decisions. To those observers still attached to the most expansive rhetoric of no-aid separationism, it is the world turned upside down. But the Court has been steadily marching away from that rhetoric for thirty-five years now. The more recent decisions, including Espinoza, do a far better job than no-aid separationism of separating the religious choices and commitments of the American people from the coercive power of the government. And that is the separation that is and should be the ultimate concern of the Religion Clauses—to minimize the government's interference with or influence on religion, and to leave each American free to exercise or reject religion in his or her own way, neither encouraged by the government nor discouraged or penalized by the government.

Article 534 of the Lebanese Penal Code, effectively, criminalizes homosexual practices. Most commentators have claimed that its existence in modern Lebanon is a “colonial relic,” specifically of the French Mandate, 1920–1946. But since 1791, French penal codes have not criminalized same-sex relations. I argue, instead, that Article 534 was the product of native religious, legal, and moral thinking among the Maronites, reinforced by the Thomistic and post-Tridentine moral theology taught in Lebanon by the Jesuit missions. Thomistic and post-Tridentine moral theology classified same-sex relations as worthy of condemnation as “unnatural acts”—the same language used in Article 534. Therefore, as a product of Lebanese political and religious sectarianism, Article 534 is a specific case of a congenial collaboration of Jesuit moral theology and a conservative Maronite ethical and legal koine.

This article analyzes how concepts of gender, gender equality, and secularism have been addressed by the higher judiciary in India in cases dealing with matters of religion. The discussion focuses on three landmark decisions of the Indian Supreme Court on gender equality. The cases involve challenges to discriminatory religious practices that target women in the Muslim-minority and Hindu-majority communities. In each case, gender equality is taken up in relation to religion in ways that produce several outcomes for women that are problematic rather than ones that are unequivocally progressive or transformative. The judicial reasoning in each case resonates with the Hindu Right's approach to gender, gender equality, and secularism. Each concept is used to advance the Hindu Right's majoritarian and ideological agenda, which seeks to establish India as a virile “Hindu” nation. Ironically, interventions by progressive groups, including feminist and human rights advocates opposed to the Hindu Right's makeover of the Indian nation, have not proved to be disruptive of gender norms; nor have they pushed back the tides of Hindu (male) majoritarianism that are increasingly determining the terms of engagement on issues of gender and faith in law.

In August 2018, revelations of the sexual, financial, and administrative misconduct of a high-profile Chinese Buddhist monk named Xuecheng 學誠 were in the spotlight of domestic and international attention. The validity of the allegations and their social and religious impact have been widely debated, and this article focuses on the legal procedures used in handling the allegations and traces their source back to the Republican era (1911–1949). The state's governance of Buddhism and the efficacy of the Buddhist clergy's jurisdictional self-governance operating in Xuecheng's case in China today are significantly older than the People's Republic of China. As early as 1929, ordained Buddhists collectively denounced personal clerical privileges, in exchange for the state law's protection on monastic properties. Then, while protesting against unfavorable articles in the Charter of the Buddhist Association of China (Zhongguo fojiaohui zhang cheng 中國佛教會章程) proposed by the Nationalist government in 1936, the Buddhist clergy lost their legal jurisdiction over adjudicating internal disputes among ordained Buddhists. These two events have come to define the relationship between the state and the Buddhist establishment in contemporary China, where state law is harsh on religion while enforcement through legal practice is lax.

Constitutionally, Indonesia is a state “based on Almighty God,” but the Constitution does not specify any religions or belief systems. This is left to statute, which establishes six official religions that the state supports and helps administer: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. But Indonesia is home to a rich kaleidoscope of other beliefs (kepercayaan), ranging from indigenous practices predating the arrival of many of the official religions to new age spiritual movements. The constitutional status of these beliefs is contentious, and their followers have long complained of government discrimination, primarily in matters of civil registration services, education, and employment. This reinforces the view, propounded by some adherents to official religions, that beliefs are inferior to official religions. This view, in turn, perpetuates the socioeconomic and cultural marginalization of belief-holders. In 2017, Indonesia's Constitutional Court was asked to examine the constitutional status of these beliefs. Its decision appears to constitutionally recognize these beliefs; accordingly, it has been heralded as an advance for religious freedom in Indonesia. Indeed, it has spurred limited administrative reforms to remove discrimination in several parts of Indonesia. But the Court's decision is muddled and inconsistent. It does not clearly establish that beliefs enjoy the same level of constitutional protection as do religions—if they are, in fact, constitutionally protected at all. The likely result is continuing faith-based discrimination and marginalization in Indonesia.

This article analyzes the origins of the concept of symphonia, its historical development, and its utilization by the Russian Orthodox Church as a normative ideal for church-state relations. In various historical contexts, this concept has referred to different normative requirements; it relied on different paradigms in Byzantium and in medieval Russia and it acquired new meanings in Imperial Russia. The reinterpretations of this concept by the Russian Orthodox Church in order to legitimize its position in the political life of contemporary Russia take this concept far from its original meaning. Using methods from the history of concepts of, among others, Reinhart Koselleck and Quentin Skinner, the author considers how the semantic transformations of symphonia in modern contexts by the Russian Orthodox Church lead to a hollowing of this concept. This conception is hardly reconcilable with the normative logic of the actual Russian political and legal systems.

This article presents and evaluates the legal thought of Muhammad ʿAllāl al-Fāsī (1910–1974) with a focus on his discourse on the objectives of Sharīʿa and the motives behind his reformulation of these objectives within the broader context of his political agenda. Al-Fāsī's concerns were not purely academic. As a political leader who struggled for the independence of his country and as a decision maker within the newly established Moroccan state, his theorization of Islamic law departed from traditional and modern efforts to negotiate the supposed status of Sharīʿa within the institutional structures of postcolonial Muslim states. The questions engaged in this article are to what extent did al-Fāsī's contribution to Maqāṣid go beyond its classical reformulations as represented by the Andalusian Māliki jurist Ibrāhīm Ibn Mūsā Abū Isḥāq al-Shāṭibī (d. AH 790/1388 CE) in his seminal work, Al-Muwāfaqāt fī Uṣūl al-Sharīʿa, and whether al-Fāsī's work represents a turn in the field of Maqāṣid when compared with that of other modern Muslim jurists, among them Muhammad al-Ṭāhir Ibn ʿĀshūr (1886–1970). This article focuses on al-Fāsī's book on Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa, Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa al-Islāmiyya wa Makārimuhā, and its contribution to the ongoing efforts to accommodate Islamic law within the corpus of modern secular laws.