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The Advocate

Courts, law, and religious liberty. Know the cases. Win the conversations.

Everyone Says Arizona Saved the Confessional. Read the Holding. It Did Something Larger.

Everyone Says Arizona Saved the Confessional. Read the Holding. It Did Something Larger.

A unanimous Arizona Supreme Court did not rule that confession is privileged. It ruled that no judge or jury may ask whether a clergy member read his own doctrine correctly. That is a much larger rule.

Engraving of a gavel at rest on its block beside a bound volume of case reports and a furled document tied with a crimson ribbon.

A Texas Judge Just Declined to Take the Posters Down. He Did Not Say They Were Lawful.

A denied temporary restraining order is not a ruling on the merits. The hearing that matters is August 17, and the standard at stake is one Texas Christians wrote for themselves.

New York Did Not Lose in Court. It Agreed to Wait.

New York Did Not Lose in Court. It Agreed to Wait.

The July 30 order protecting four orders of Catholic nuns was entered by consent. That distinction is the whole story.

Engraving of three women climbing courthouse steps at dawn, sunrise caught in one window

The New Ten Commandments Lawsuit Runs on Laws Christians Wrote. That Is the Whole Point.

Three mothers from the Houston area walked into a Harris County courthouse at the end of July and asked a judge to take the Ten Commandments off their children’s classroom walls before school starts in mid August. One of them is raising her children without religion. One is raising

Engraving of a village house at dusk, a birthday garland across the veranda and one paper lantern glowing above the empty doorway

The Evidence Was a Birthday Party. The Sentence Is Five Years of Hard Labor.

On April 27, 2024, in a village in Dindori district in central India, a man named Suday Singh Maravi threw a birthday party for his daughter. She was turning five. Friends and relatives came, and among the guests were six pastors and another Christian man. By evening a crowd of

Engraving of a Punjab courtyard at dusk, an oil lamp kept burning in the doorway

A Judge Handed Her to the Man Accused of Kidnapping Her. She Is Thirteen.

Amber Nadeem walked out of a courtroom in Faisalabad on July 25 with the relatives and lawyers of the man accused of abducting her. Her parents stood in the courtroom and wept. The law had just told them, in effect, that it was finished with their daughter. She is thirteen

Engraving of a nun at the bedside of a dying patient, morning light through a tall window

Assisted Suicide Becomes Legal in New York This Week. The First Fight Was Over the Nuns.

Start with what the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne actually do. They run a 42 bed home in New York where the dying poor are cared for without charge until natural death. It is the kind of ministry that exists because someone believes every hour of a human life is worth