Religion Dispatches
…od. Foolishly, I did not take his national identification card and his car registration — I just asked him to open the trunk of his car. He opened it with pleasure, and was about to drive off, when Muhammad, one of my neighbors, recognized him. “Oh, hello. Wait a minute — aren’t you the police officer we saw here yesterday?” Bashfully, he replied, “Um, yes.” Muhammad responded, with all the righteousness evident in his voice, “So, no work for you…
Read More…nd action, the love of Christ for every human being,” he told the Guardian newspaper. Church of England Bishop Alan Wilson, who has been strongly critical of the church’s ban on clergy performing same-sex weddings, told the Religion News Service that gay clergy should come out. He said he could “confidently name” 13 gay bishops in the church. Not coming out, he says, amounts to “moral cowardice.” Ethiopia: Religious Activists Push for Harsher Anti…
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…dents are encouraged to participate in summer camps such as iGovern, voter registration drives, regional clubs, and an intriguing feature called Student Action Teams (SATs). These adult-supervised teams of students engage directly with the political process through participation in electoral campaigns. Several prominent politicians credit the efforts of GenJ’s SATs with their campaign victories, most recently Rep. Tom McClintock, who won Californi…
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…dopted the 1997 law “On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations.” Promoted by the Orthodox Church and directed specifically against new religious movements, the law distinguished between the four traditional faiths—Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism—and non-traditional groups such as Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Latter-Day Saints, and Hare Krishnas. In order to maintain legal status, churches had to prove that they had…
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…ons of the YFZ community. There are many examples: a story published on ABCNews.com April 16, 2008, countered the measured voices of H. Newton Maloney, professor of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, and Nancy Ammerman, professor of sociology at Boston University, critiquing assumptions about “brainwashing,” with statements from an anti-cultist with no advanced degrees in the relevant fields of religious studies, psychology, or sociology….
Read More…stitutional Court, and will listen to opinions from all sides. Costa Rica: New Political Party Advocates for LGBT Equality A new political party, Vamos (“let’s go”), is focused on making LGBT equality an issue in coming legislative elections. The party’s leaders say that making progress on human rights and marriage equality and combating gender violence have been held up by Christian deputies. Indonesia: Anti-LGBT Campaign Expanded to Ban on LGBT…
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…olitical and media attention. Following the hearing, Bishop Andudu flew to New York to join human rights groups in urging members of the Security Council to take action. News organizations led coverage of their press conference with the Bishop’s call for intervention by the Security Council. Sudanese exile and human right groups organized a rally across from the UN. Hutson and the Bishop spoke along with a woman named Gedila Musa, a Nuban expatria…
Read More…at church; ways to improve evangelical Christian voter participation; and promotions for revival rallies, registration events and distribution of voter guides listing candidate positions on abortion, prayer and gay marriage. Churches have been sponsoring some of those activities for years, but the St. Louis event, with so many clergy members participating in statewide training and political events, is unprecedented. Pastors cannot, incidentally,…
Read More…re, groups are affected by the cultures of the people within them. LifeSiteNews, however, was not impressed. They say that the group left a local parish “blindsided,” its priest “alarmed.” Rev. John Echert, pastor of Holy Trinity Parish in South St. Paul, Minnesota, told LSN that he immediately broke his church’s ties with the Twin Cities group, and announced the rupture to his congregation, after learning the group had permitted open homosexualit…
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…bit like that. had she read letters? had she known the story? I think she knew a fair amount. Perhaps he shared with her this sense of impotence in his inability to bring Valy to America after he left Vienna. I don’t know what my grandmother knew, exactly, but whatever she did know made her uncomfortable. My father and aunt had both heard the name, but not the extent of the story. Not at all. You write in the book about lengthy visits to Europe yo…
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