The Bishops and Sharia Law--My article for Commonweal

A few weeks back I did a short post on the Catholic Bishops' statement on religious freedom, taking special note of the absence in it of any mention of anti-Sharia law. From that I received an opportunity to write a more substantive reflection for Commonweal, which I am proud to say is now up at their website.
It begins like this:

The U.S. Catholic bishops' recent statement “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” which calls for resistance to growing threats to religious freedom, mentions Islam once. Defending religious liberty, the bishops wrote, “is not an Orthodox, Mormon, or Muslim issue. It is an American issue.” The bishops’ case for the universality of their cause would have been more persuasive if, in their list of specific concerns, they had included examples of how compromised religious liberty is, in part, a “Muslim issue.” One phenomenon they might easily have mentioned is the rise of “anti-sharia” laws in the United States.

Read more here.