Jim Davis on the death of a predatory priest. Amy Levin on liberalism and feminism. The Immanent Frame’s fantastic “Politics of Religious Freedom” series. Catholics roll up their sleeves over a Wendell Berry lecture. Hasidic Jews trying to stay out of court. Rowan Williams on the blood market.

Ashley Baxstrom:  The Swiss upper house on Monday buried a motion to ban the burqa, which had passed the lower house in September of 2011 by a margin of 101 to 77.

The proposal, dubbed “Down with masks,” could have eventually banned full-face veils including the Muslim burqa from public transportation or government buildings. Proposed by SVP (Swiss People’s Party) representative Oskar Freysinger – of the same party that lead a 2009 campaign to prevent the construction of new minarets – the ban followed similar movements in France, the Netherlands and Belgium, countries which have banned veils or are considering such measures.

Freysinger has said in his proposal that the ban would improve public security, but a statement on the Islamic Central Council of Switzerland’s website argued that such a ban was discrimination against a religious group. Furthermore, they argued, it would have a negative affect on the Swiss tourist industry by preventing women from the Gulf from taking the train; Lake Geneva is a popular destination for wealth.

Ashley Baxstrom: Ladies, let’s celebrate! Check out this breaking blog post from Think Progress: Obama administration approves rule that guarantees near-universal contraceptive coverage, by guest blogger Jessica Arons, Director of the Women’s Health and Rights Program at American Progress. She writes:

Today, in a huge victory for women’s health, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that most employers will be required to cover contraception in their health plans, along with other preventive services, with no cost-sharing such as co-pays or deductibles.

Twenty-eight states already require employers to provide some coverage; but now, full coverage will be required in all.

Wowza! You know what that means – yup, Viagra no longer corners the coverage market. (Cuz, you know, Viagra has been fully covered for years. Good for men. Sucked for women who thought they should have equal rights or fair treatment or whatever.)

Besides that, it means that even most religiously-affiliated organizations have to comply. Obama decided to “maintain the narrow religious exemption that it initially proposed. Only houses of worship and other religious nonprofits that primarily employ and serve people of the same faith will be exempt.”

Ashley Baxstrom:  It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Christmas tree lots sprouting up like weeds, Christmas lights hung on trees in every wannabe-hip-neighborhood in the five boroughs, a whole new set of Christmas displays in the Macy’s windows. And of course, the turtledove on top:  pundits and politicians decrying the “War on Christmas.” There may not be snow on the ground (the rolling Texas farmland ground), but there are Kay Jewelers commercials on the air, which means the culture wars – like poinsettias and gingerbread lattes – must be back in season.  Today Gov. Perry released a brand new campaign ad, keeping pace with the other GOP candidates and the changing season.

“I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a Christian,” Perry says. “But you don’t need to be in the pews every Sunday to know that there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.”  (Really, if you didn’t watch it before, just – just watch it. If you close your eyes, you can almost hear the voice of the Ghost of a Certain Texas President Past.)

Perry promises (drawls) that if he’s elected he’ll stop “Obama’s war on religion” and will fight against “liberal attacks on our religious heritage.”

Angela Zito:  The Bible as a book, printed, physically available for Christian devotion, remains a powerful and contested artifact in this digital age.  Just winding up its US tour, a traveling exhibition of the Bible in China—entitled “Thy Word is Truth: the Bible Ministry Exhibition of the Protestant Church in China”—might have slipped my notice. Today, however, I saw a posting in the online newsletter of the US China Catholic Bureau of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops news service about a planned counter exhibit of a small portion of a hand-copied “prison bible” smuggled out of the Chinese labor reform camp system ten years ago, and recently donated to the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas.

Abby Ohlheiser: All the religious language of the last fortnight’s Perry and Ames fest ’11 (or should that be ’12) made me click on this tweet (despite the parenthetical clue) without thinking for a second that it would be a comment on anything other than something Bachmann or Perry have talked about recently. By the way: don’t google “perry bondage.”

It was, in fact, an article about the sort of bondage with a bigger but quieter internet presence: BDSM, which stands for bondage, discipline, sado-masochisim.

Amy Levin: When the American Atheists group filed a lawsuit to oppose a 17-foot cross-shaped beam discovered in 9/11 wreckage to be placed in the World Trade Center Museum, I experienced a major flashback. The newborn controversy over the so-called World Trade Center Cross spewed an outburst of dialogue over religious equality and the politics of memorializing quite familiar to popular media outlets and those who read them.

The Christian Century reports that China’s Minister of State Administration for Religious Affairs, Wang Zuo’an, is in Nairobi for a visit with the Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Kenya to “enhance the relationship between the Anglican Church, the Global South Anglican Communion and the Chinese church.”

“In short, every place where Osama bin Laden fled had either perpetrated or tolerated world-class violations of religious freedom and other human rights.” — Leonard Leo and Don Argue at The Hill

One storyline that’s making the rounds in the wake of ongoing protests in Egypt is that an applicable comparison can be made to Iran’s “green revolution” of 1979.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali has an op-ed in today’s New York Times titled, “Get Ready for the Muslim Brotherhood” that states as much, warning the U.S. that it [...]