The Christian Century

On the opening day of the U.S. Supreme Court’s fall term, the high court announced that it will not intervene in two prominent church-state cases, one involving a Catholic diocese in Con necticut and the other a former Epis copal parish in southern California.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a city park in Utah does not have to include a monument sought by a small religious sect even though it already features a Ten Commandments monument.

As the rest of the country focused on the presidential election November 4, the Supreme Court danced around the use of dirty words, opting for f-word and s-word as euphemisms for expletives in a chamber that twice erupted in laughter.

Presbyterians in Minneapolis–St. Paul have voted to restore the ordination of an openly gay man who has refused to pledge celibacy, in the latest test of revamped pastoral guidelines in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Five decades ago, third-grader Linda Brown could not attend school in her racially integrated Topeka neighborhood; the law required her to take a bus across town to attend a dilapidated school designated for blacks. Linda’s case and others like it prompted a series of lawsuits that eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1954 in Brown v.

Conservative religious organizations praised the Supreme Court term that ended last month, saying they are pleased with the way the court resolved several high-profile First Amendment disputes.

In upholding a federal ban on a rare kind of late-term abortion procedure, the Supreme Court may have begun undermining its key abortion precedent. Activists on both sides of the abortion issue said the court’s 5-4 decision on “partial-birth” abortion was a possible turning point in the court’s abortion jurisprudence.

The Justice Department has made stamping out fraud by individual voters a priority. Since the 2002 launch of its Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative, 86 individuals had been convicted of ballot fraud, the department boasted in a press release last year. Federal prosecutor David Iglesias of New Mexico, one of the eight U.S.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments February 28 in a case that, on the surface, is about technical issues but could end up having significant ramifications for the way courts handle church-state cases. At stake is the ability of federal courts to hear cases challenging whether a government action favors one religion over another or religion over nonreligion.

For the first time, the Supreme Court will hear a case directly related to President Bush’s faith-based initiative, his attempt to expand the government’s ability to fund social services through churches and other religious charities.