LEAD STORY
FAITH UNDER THE FLAG: Adventism in Modern Cuba. Cuba has 35,000 Seventh-day Adventists and one of the denomination’s most active church-planting programs in the Western Hemisphere, all operating under a communist government that controls property, limits imports, and monitors religious organizations. The latest feature examines how Cuban Adventists navigate state surveillance and resource scarcity while sustaining a distinctly American-origin faith — and what their experience says about religious liberty in a country with no First Amendment. (ReligiousLiberty.TV)
LEGAL & LEGISLATIVE
Wyoming’s fetal personhood question, still unanswered. Wyoming’s latest legal battle over its Heartbeat Act has once again surfaced the question that neither Roe nor Dobbs actually resolved: whether the unborn are legal persons under state law. ReligiousLiberty.TV’s analysis argues that every post-Dobbs state fight is a skirmish around that unresolved threshold question, and Wyoming’s courts are the latest to dance around it without settling it. (ReligiousLiberty.TV)
California fingerprint law tightens grip on church volunteers. AB 506 requires California congregations serving minors to submit volunteers to LiveScan fingerprint background checks — the same system used for school employees and foster parents. The piece by Michael Peabody, Esq. frames this not as anti-religious animus but as a child-safety mandate that nevertheless forces churches to choose between institutional familiarity and compliance. Noncompliance carries real legal exposure. (ReligiousLiberty.TV)
Muslim father’s suit against Trenton schools dismissed. A federal court dismissed a religious liberty lawsuit brought by a Muslim father who claimed a Trenton, N.J., school district violated his free exercise rights. The case drew on competing interpretations of school neutrality obligations under the First Amendment. (ReligiousLiberty.TV)
Alabama Supreme Court: Methodist property disputes belong in civil courts. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that trial courts may apply neutral property law principles to resolve the widening schism between United Methodist congregations and the denomination over church assets. The ruling reflects the ongoing national fallout from the UMC’s denominational split. (ReligiousLiberty.TV)
INTERNATIONAL
Canada’s Bill C-9: hate speech law or Scripture suppression? Canada’s proposed Combatting Hate Act would expand criminal liability for hate speech and, critics argue, is broadly enough drafted to criminalize religious speech that characterizes certain behaviors as sinful. The analysis notes that the bill’s definitional ambiguities leave faith communities in Canada genuinely uncertain about whether their own texts place them in legal jeopardy. (ReligiousLiberty.TV)
Iran, prophecy, and the Messiah. An Israeli Orthodox newspaper declared that the ongoing Iran conflict is prophetic confirmation that the Messiah will arrive this year — a claim ReligiousLiberty.TV covers alongside a companion analysis, “What the West Gets Wrong About Iran,” examining how Twelver Shia eschatology shapes Iranian strategic behavior in ways Western analysts consistently misread. The pairing illustrates how apocalyptic frameworks are actively driving policy assumptions on both sides of the conflict. (Messiah piece; Iran analysis)
USCIRF 2026 Annual Report: conditions worsening globally. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s 2026 report documents escalating violence, legal repression, and policy shifts targeting religious minorities in countries across multiple regions. ReligiousLiberty.TV’s coverage highlights the report’s key findings. (ReligiousLiberty.TV)
INSIDE THE CHURCH
Pacific Union Recorder retracts evolution article. The Pacific Union Conference’s official publication walked back an article that readers interpreted as accommodating evolutionary theory, reaffirming the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s commitment to six-day creationism. The author maintained he was misunderstood. The episode illustrates the ongoing pressure within Adventism to hold its distinctive doctrinal commitments against the grain of mainstream scientific consensus. (ReligiousLiberty.TV)
Podcast: Prophecy, politics, and the Third Temple. The latest ReligiousLiberty.TV podcast surveys recent coverage of the Israel-Iran conflict through the lens of dispensationalist, Adventist, Catholic, and Messianic Jewish prophecy frameworks — asking what each tradition makes of the current moment and why their answers diverge so sharply. (ReligiousLiberty.TV)
EXPLAINER
The Supreme Court’s shadow docket, explained. As the Court’s use of emergency orders, stays, and summary dispositions continues to draw scrutiny, ReligiousLiberty.TV published a primer on the shadow docket — what it is, why it matters, and how it has been used in religious liberty cases including Mirabelli v. Bonta. Required reading for anyone tracking how the Court’s formal docket increasingly understates its actual output. (ReligiousLiberty.TV)