Time magazine’s ever-on-top-of-things David Van Biema has a helpful explainer on Friday’s ruling in the Virginia Episcopal Church property lawsuit.

(In case you missed it, a Virginia judge ruled that a Civil War-ear statute applies in the case involving 10 breakaway churches. The statute essentially says that when a church is split, the majority gets to keep the property. The Episcopal Church obviously disagrees, saying the property belongs to the national church, not the local parish.)

As a sizeable minority of conservative congregations leaves Episcopalianism, the struggle over who gets hundreds of millions of dollars of church property is becoming more and more intense. Passions range so high that the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts-Schori, the head of the

national Episcopal body, in effect indicated during discovery in the Virginia case that she would rather see the churches sold and deconsecrated for secular purposes than passed on to the departing congregations.