Last week the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a district court’s ruling, paving the way for a Santeria priest in Euless, Texas, to resume goat sacrifices as part of religious ceremonies.

His lawyer tells the Wall Street Journal why he choose to represent the priest in court.

In what religious freedom advocates regarded as a breakthrough in Vietnam, authorities granted rare permission to unregistered house church groups to hold a large, public Easter-related service here last night.

More than 15,000 people gathered at Tao Dan Stadium.

Leaders of the celebration and religious freedom advocates in Vietnam said the event was significant in that unregistered house churches were allowed to hold a large public celebration. They added that authorities must have felt enough pressure to consider the event less harmful than possible negative publicity from denying permission.

In a surprise move, a Saudi Christian arrested in January for describing his conversion from Islam and criticizing the kingdom’s judiciary on his blog site was released on March 28 with the stipulation that he not travel outside of Saudi Arabia or appear on media.

The country’s penalty for “apostasy,” or leaving Islam, is death, although in recent years there have been no known cases of kingdom citizens formally convicted and sentenced with capital punishment for the offense.

A Liberian woman accused of smuggling endangered monkey meat from Africa to New York has failed to persuade a judge that she shouldn’t be prosecuted because she needed the butchered carcasses for religious reasons.

The judge also noted that her claim didn’t address the main point of the criminal charge: That she hadn’t applied for the permits needed to import such exotic foodstuffs and had misled border officials about what she was shipping into the country.

Nothing in her religion, Dearie wrote, “required her to abstain from truthful completion of paperwork.”

Today’s issue of RNB QuickLinks brings you Satanic bikinis vs. full-body swimwear (yes, we’re talking Islam, of course), atheists upset at being shunned by an interfaith service, religious freedom, hell, Scientology whistleblowers and BB King…

Brian Barnard has not only defended polygamists in the past, later this year he will even appear before the U.S. Supreme Court on another matter.

And Barnard says the legalization of polygamy may not be that far away.