This article presents an anthropological account of the European Court of Human Rights' approach to material religion. Focusing on a range of cases involving an alleged violation of Article 9 – the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion – in relation to such diverse religious objects as cassette players, incense, crucifixes, photographs and cross necklaces, it draws on ethnographic studies of material culture to suggest a disconnect between the Court's emphasis on religion as belief and the lived experience of embodied, sensual and object-oriented religious practice. It concludes that Article 9's privileging of the forum internum over material practice has contributed to an immaterial view of religion and religious life. Such an understanding ultimately fails to appreciate the importance of objects in the creation, expression and maintenance of religious worlds.

The legal and regulatory aspects of Islamic banking present a challenge to most financial and regulatory authorities. To many observers, legal and regulatory complexity in this respect stems from the link between the banking business and Islamic law. Compliance with some Islamic rulings forces the sector to operate an unusual business model, which is different from that of their conventional counterparts. After expounding the ideological foundation of Islamic banking and the sector's evolution, this article examines the genesis of the legal and regulatory challenge by conducting a compatibility analysis between Islam and banking. It will be argued that the conceptions of Islam and banking ought not to conflict, which means that achieving regulatory equilibrium in relation to Islamic banking is possible.

According to the Pew Research Centre, 76 per cent of the world's population live in countries where they face ‘high or very high’ restrictions on religion or belief. Over the five years that Pew has been tracking this metric, the percentage of people that face ‘high or very high’ levels of restrictions by their government has risen from 58 per cent to 64 per cent. What is more alarming is the figure for ‘high or very high’ social hostilities (that is, acts of religious hostility by private individuals and groups, including armed conflict and terror), which jumped from 53 per cent in 2011 to 74 per cent in 2012.

For many years, probably for centuries, bats have hunted and roosted in churches. They have now become less than welcome. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a church in Bedfordshire placed a bounty of 6d per dozen on the heads of the animals, and in the 1930s the organist of Binsey found himself unable to distinguish the black keys from the white because the colours were obscured by bat droppings. The problem, therefore, is not new. More recently, a debate in the House of Lords, initiated by Lord Cormack, a former Second Church Commissioner, produced a short-lived but vigorous spate of articles and letters in the national press. Complaints about the activities of bats came from far and wide, from North Yorkshire to Northampton and Oxford. The problem seems to be especially acute in East Anglia, however. The greatest cause for complaint was the damage caused to woodwork, floor tiles, alabaster memorials and monumental brasses by faeces and urine. As a moment's reflection shows, these are corrosive (the latter more so) and the effects can be disastrous. In any case, where bats are present in any numbers, someone has the distasteful task of trying to remove the droppings and the urine stains on pews, window sills and floors each time the church is used. It is not unknown for bats to defecate on the heads of incumbents at the altar, which raises questions as to the consequences of bat infestation for the health of clergy, congregations and other church users, over and above the damage to buildings and their contents.

On 1 July 2014 the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia passed the Canon Concerning Confessions 1989 (Amendment) Canon 2014, which creates a further exception to the confidentiality of a confession. Under this further exception, a member of the clergy is only required to keep the confession of a ‘serious offence’ confidential where reasonably satisfied that that the penitent has reported the serious offence to the police and, if the penitent is a church worker or a member of the clergy, to the Director of Professional Standards (section 2A(2)). In moving this Bill, I argued that the fundamental theological principle to which it gave expression is that the safety of the members of the Church and the public should be of paramount concern when considering the issue of the confidentiality of confessions, and that accordingly confessions must not operate as a cloak for the concealment of serious criminal offences.

In a historic move, the Church of England has achieved legal recognition in Italy. Legal status was declared by a presidential decree signed by the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, in July 2014. This recognises the Church of England as a denomination and a ‘properly organised and authorised’ religion in Italy. The decree gives legal status to the association Chiesa d'Inghilterra (Church of England), which represents the Church of England in Italy, and accepts its statutes. The registered address of the Chiesa d'Inghilterra is in the centre of Rome.

The most significant business – legislative or otherwise – conducted at these three groups of sessions was without doubt that relating to the consecration of women to the episcopate. The report on the Synod's proceedings published in the January 2014 edition of this Journal recounted the Synod's decision in July 2013 to call for draft legislation to be introduced giving effect to one of the options which had been identified by the working group established by the House of Bishops in 2012, immediately following the defeat of the previous legislation.

The Church of Scotland met in General Assembly with the Rt Revd John P Chalmers as Moderator. Owing to the number of wide-ranging issues and topics covered, only a selection of matters discussed and passed are touched on in this report.

In his April Presidential Address the Archbishop noted a number of important current issues – gender, same-sex relationships, assisted dying and ecumenism – and said that he could not recall a Governing Body where so many important topics were all under discussion at the same time. Perhaps the most critical, however, was the Bishops' Code of Practice, published in advance of the Bill that was to come into effect in September to make it possible for women to be ordained as bishops. What followed would be a listening exercise, since no decision on the matter was required of the Governing Body. What all the issues highlighted, however, was that there was genuine principled disagreement among Christians about moral, doctrinal and ecumenical issues. Moreover, no-one approached those matters neutrally; all had been shaped one way or another by upbringing, education and life experiences to see things in certain ways.

In this, the final year of the current triennium, the General Synod met again in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. Whether it will return to this venue, and if so how often, is open to doubt since the Synod directed that efforts be made to find a more satisfactory meeting place in Dublin having regard to the comparative costs of its regular meetings at the alternative venue in Armagh.

This year the General Synod was held in a different venue in Edinburgh, in the former pro-cathedral, which had been renovated and enlarged at great expense, the cost of which had been raised by the congregation. Overall, a useful housekeeping meeting was held, with little contentious argument.