Attention: Physical Presence for Court and the Catholic Church

Matthew Cavedon is a criminal defense attorney in Gainesville, GA

Moving the world onto Zoom was not as dramatic a break from history as you might think. After all, it’s been 170 years since Marx & Engels wrote that “[a]ll that is solid melts into air.” In many ways, then, moving everything onto actual Wi-Fi is just another blip in a centuries-long trend of airier and airier “modernization”—that is, of more abstraction, of the move away from place and flesh and time into a new world of idea and identity and the instant. Why, then, does it feel so sad? Americans are not handling the COVID-19 pandemic well. A third of us are experiencing stress and anxiety. Why? Shouldn’t we be ready for this next stage of human evolution, away from conference rooms and handshakes and hugs? For at least twenty years, some say, we have all been “chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs.” And yet we don’t seem to have assimilated very well.

Two sanctuaries of resistance to the technology trend—the courtroom and the Catholic Church—help explain why we can’t just effortlessly float off into the cloud as a species. Both have only grudgingly gone online in recent months, even as much of the business world breathlessly predicts that couches are the new offices. This is because both are expert in focusing attention. And that requires forming consciousness through the senses in ways that virtual reality does not allow.

(more…)

Continue Reading Attention: Physical Presence for Court and the Catholic Church

The Impact of Coronavirus on Public Funding of Religious Organizations

Adelaide Madera is Associate Professor of Canon Law and Law and Religion at the Department of Law of the University of Messina, Italy

Since Everson v. Board of Education, access to public funding for religious organizations has been a controversial issue and fiercely litigated. During the pandemic crisis lockdown, the enactment of the CARE Act that established the Paycheck Protection Program, raised new challenges for religious charities.

The PPP appeared attractive to many organizations and businesses, both religious and secular, which needed to maintain their employees on their payroll. However, many concerns arose as to whether religious nonprofits were eligible for government funding, whether accepting PPP loans implied that religious organizations were federal contractors, and to what extent access to public funding could affect their religious identity. On April 3, the SBA issued guidelines to clarify some key points. First, receiving the loan has no implications on church autonomy, religious identity, internal governance, or on the exercise of rights guaranteed by federal statutes (RFRA, section 702 of Title VII, First Amendment). Accepting a PPP loan “constitutes Federal financial assistance” and implies “certain nondiscrimination obligations,” even though they “are not permanent.” The only limitation applies to all beneficiaries: 75% of the loan must be used to cover payroll costs. The SBA’s frequently asked questions underlined that the SBA’s nondiscrimination rules, as Title VII provisions, include an exemption allowing religious organizations to employ staff sharing their religious beliefs “to perform work connected with [the organization’s] religious activities.” The crucial question is whether this exemption allows religious organizations to select employees who also share their standards of behavior. Certain academics incline toward a narrow reading of this provision,[1] and a textualist reading of the expression “because of sex” of Title VII resulted in the Supreme Court’s inclusion of gender identity and sexual orientation under the protection offered by Title VII.

(more…)

Continue Reading The Impact of Coronavirus on Public Funding of Religious Organizations

Comparative Church Law and Juridical Ecumenism

Professor Mark Hill QC is an adjunct professor at Cardiff University, Pretoria University, Notre Dame University Law School, Sydney and King’s College, London; and is a fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, Atlanta. He practices at the Bar in London and sits as a judge on the Midland Circuit.

The vast majority of scholars of law and religion tend to focus on the interface between church and state. This is unsurprising. From the medieval philosophers to the present day, the respective spheres of the spiritual and the secular authorities have been the subject of contest and engagement. These are matters upon which I have written and lectured over the past thirty years. But I have long been intrigued by the internal laws of religious organizations, which led me to write my definitive textbook Ecclesiastical Law on the law of the Church of England, now in its fourth edition. The Church of England is unusual, being established by law as a state church. Its laws (Measures) have the same status as Acts of Parliament [1].

(more…)

Continue Reading Comparative Church Law and Juridical Ecumenism