Anglican Mainstream

Authors offer sound advice on giving without doing harm | Joel Belz

Are poor people poor because they’re paying the price for their own personal failures—or because the systems in which they find
themselves have been broken and have failed the people within them?

It is, of course, an age-old question. Authors Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett, in a brand new book called When Helping Hurts, note that political conservatives have tended to stress the former explanation, while liberals have emphasized the latter. Which, they ask, is correct? 

Before jumping to their answer, I can’t help thinking how different the responses might be right now, if I posed that question to all of WORLD’s readers, from the answers I might have gotten 18 months ago. If a whole lot of us find ourselves poorer than we were at the end of 2007, how many of us are admitting that our new "poverty" is the result of our own failures and bad decisions—versus those of us who are complaining that a broken system has let us down?

Read here

Staff Writer, PinkNews.co.uk • 27 August 2009   

Terrence Higgins Trust has been awarded £432,000 by the Big Lottery Fund’s Young People’s Fund to offer sexual health counselling to 10 – 18 year olds in London.

Support will also include mentoring and volunteering opportunities and will be offered online, via text and through face to face counselling.

Read here

Not all Pink News Readers were pleased, however.  According to two respondents,

My God,this is frankly insane! THT should not be allowed within spitting distance of any 10-18 year old. This is incredibly serious  … Enough is enough! There is enough dissent espoused on Pink News's forums these last few days to get a pressure group of some kind formed to protest at this abuse; not just an abuse of public funds but full-on child abuse! If we as a community care enough about what is going on right under our noses under the guise of HIV prevention then we must not let this rest and demand change in the whole approach to sexual health to prevent the next generation of gay men – today's 10-18 year olds – being effectively groomed for HIV infection and lined-up for a life time on Aids meds, failing which the national press must be informed what is going on. This is a utterly scandalous!   and   

by Regina Griggs – August 25, 2009

Washington, D.C. – In a precedent setting case, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia has ruled that former homosexuals are a protected class that must be recognized under sexual orientation non-discrimination laws.  The Court held that, under the D.C. Human Rights Act, sexual orientation does not require immutable characteristics.

"We are gratified that the ex-gay community in Washington D.C. now has the same civil rights that gays enjoy," said Regina Griggs, executive director of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX), which had filed the lawsuit against the District of Columbia government for failing to protect former homosexuals in the Nation’s Capital.

In a discrimination complaint filed by PFOX against the National Education Association (NEA) for refusing to provide public accommodations to ex-gays, the D.C. Office of Human Rights (OHR) had agreed with the NEA that sexual orientation protection did not extend to former homosexuals.  "By failing to protect former homosexuals, the sexual orientation laws gave more rights to homosexuals than heterosexuals who were once gay," said Griggs.  "So PFOX asked the Court to reverse OHR’s decision, which it did.  The Court held that ex-gays are a protected class under ’sexual orientation.’"

"All sexual orientation laws and programs nationwide should now provide true diversity and equality by including former homosexuals," said Greg Quinlan, a director of PFOX.  "I have experienced more personal assaults as a former homosexual than I ever did as a gay man."

"PFOX calls on the NEA to add ex-gays to its sexual orientation resolutions which favor gays, bisexuals, and transgenders while denying equality to former homosexuals," said Griggs.  "The NEA must also stop its bias against the NEA Ex-Gay Educators Caucus by appointing an ex-gay caucus member to the NEA Sexual Orientation Committee.  This committee is staffed with members of the NEA’s gay and transgender caucus, although the ex-gay caucus has asked for inclusion."

The NEA successfully argued before the Court that it was not guilty of sexual orientation discrimination because its gay caucus would have protested the presence of PFOX’s ex-gay exhibit at the NEA’s annual conference.  "Gay activists demand equality while denying it to others," said Griggs.

Revealing your conservative leanings can be tricky, and sometimes it’s easier just to keep quiet.  One of Stein’s conservative acquaintances, for example, didn’t want his name used in the book.  "’Why get into arguments with people?’" he told Stein. "’Your kids have to go to school with their kids, and it just leads to no good.’" 

A few years ago I chose not to allow my then elementary school-aged children to attend a school assembly promoting same-sex
"marriage."  After babysitting them and a handful of other children in the school library until the assembly was over, I ran into a couple of mothers who’d come to watch the assembly for themselves.  One was a friend who knew and accepted my point of view and gave me her take on the series of skits called "Cootie Shots."  The other made it clear that she was happy about the school’s decision to put on the assembly.  After all, she pointedly remarked, she didn’t want her kids growing up to be rednecks. 
 
Stein asked a liberal editor at a publishing house he knows for "a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives."  Without missing a beat she replied, "Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists….They hate everyone who’s not a rich white guy."
 
I have long thought that one of the striking differences between liberals and conservatives is this: liberals believe conservatives are evil, while conservatives believe liberals are wrong [emphasis added].  Stein recounts something his friend Marlene told him, which makes the point.  "[S]omeone I’ve known for 27 or 28 years actually said to me, ‘Marlene, I know you’ve worked with the mentally ill, so I know you care about people. But how can you be a good person and a conservative?’"
 

Read Marcia here

New York Times Magazine Tina Rosenberg August 19, 2009  Hat-tip: Maggie Gallagher

In the late 1970s, a Ph.D. student named Monica Das Gupta was conducting anthropological fieldwork in Haryana, a state in the north of India. She observed something striking about families there: parents had a fervent preference for male offspring. Women who had given birth to only daughters were desperate for sons and would keep having children until they had one or two. Midwives were even paid less when a girl was born. "It’s something you notice coming from outside," says Das Gupta, who today studies population and public health in the World Bank’s development research group. "It just leaps out at you."

Das Gupta saw that educated, independent-minded women shared this prejudice in Haryana, a state that was one of India’s richest and most developed. In fact, the bias against girls was far more pronounced there than in the poorer region in the east of India where Das Gupta was from. She decided to study the issue in Punjab, then India’s richest state, which had a high rate of female literacy and a high average age of marriage. There too the prejudice for sons flourished. Along with Haryana, Punjab had the country’s highest percentage of so-called missing girls — those aborted, killed as newborns or dead in their first few years from neglect.

Here was a puzzle: Development seemed to have not only failed to help many Indian girls but to have made things worse.

It is rarely good to be female anywhere in the developing world today, but in India and China the situation is dire: in those countries, more than 1.5 million fewer girls are born each year than demographics would predict, and more girls die before they turn 5 than would be expected. (In China in 2007, there were 1.73 million births — and a million missing girls.) Millions more grow up stunted, physically and intellectually, because they are denied the health care and the education that their brothers receive. Read the rest of this entry »

A book review by Charles Colson

"Can a country known for radical brutality become a country known for an even more radical forgiveness?"

That’s the question BreakPoint’s own Catherine Claire Larson asks in her new book, As We Forgive.

Larson, whose book was inspired by the award-winning documentary film of the same name, paints a gripping picture of the Tutsi survivors of genocide, who in 1994 endured 100 days of unimaginable violence at the hands of their Hutu neighbors. In just three months, nearly a million people were shot, macheted, raped, and tortured. The survivors lost everything — homes, families, hope.

But that was only their first trial. Seven years after the storm, the Rwandan government started releasing from prison more than 70,000 perpetrators of genocide.

Larson vividly describes the dreadful decision the survivors had to make. The people who had destroyed their lives were returning. Would they choose fear and hate? Or forgiveness and reconciliation?

As Larson writes so beautifully, many are choosing forgiveness. Take the story of Rosaria. Her sister and her two children were pummeled to death by a group of Hutu men from their village. Among them was a man named Saveri.

While in prison Saveri heard the Gospel. He repented of his cruelty, and through a reconciliation program begun by Prison Fellowship Rwanda, asked Rosaria for forgiveness. After a series of painful meetings, she forgave him — freeing him from despair, and herself from the coils of hatred.

Read the rest of this entry »

Is Social Justice just ice? 
 It takes relational justice to melt frozen hearts | Marvin Olasky  World

Read here

By Fr John Flynn, Zenit

Fundamental Liberties Call Out for Defense

Working out how to protect human rights remains a thorny problem, as recent events demonstrate. On Wednesday the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

Sudan’s leader is accused of being responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of people in the Darfur region of the country in past years.

Bashir reacted to the move, explained a Washington Post article Thursday, by expelling many of the foreign aid organizations that provide assistance to the refugees, numbered at more than 1 million, in Dafur.

On the other extreme, in Canada human rights tribunals are under attack for running amok. Margaret Wente, a columnist for Canada’s Globe and Mail Newspaper, described the plight of John Fulton, a gym owner in St. Catharines, Ontario, in a March 3 article.

Fulton, who runs a women-only gym, is faced with heavy legal expenses in order to fight an action taken before the Ontario Human Rights Commission for having refused membership to a man who is a "preoperative transsexual."

Wente explained that while people who initiate such claims have their legal expenses financed by the state, the defendants can face costs of up to $100,000.

The gym case is far from an isolated episode, Wente noted, and repeated instances of such frivolous claims are laying a heavy burden on Canadian businesses.

Meanwhile, in Australia, last year the federal government appointed a committee to investigate if the country needs a charter of rights. The head of the committee, Jesuit Father Frank Brennan, recently warned of an "evangelical fervor" in the legal community for a bill of rights, reported an article in the Australian newspaper, Feb. 27.

Father Brennan declared that there is no clear evidence that the two charters already in existence, in Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory, had done anything to better the protection of rights.

According to the article, he warned the Victorian model was "a device for the delivery of a soft-Left sectarian agenda — a device which will be discarded or misconstrued whenever the rights articulated do not comply with that agenda."

Read the rest of this entry »

Three Christians Dead in Eritrean Prisons VOM

Since October, three Christians imprisoned for their faith have died in Eritrean military prisons, according to Compass Direct News.

Mehari Gebreneguse Asgedom died on Jan. 16 from torture and diabetes while in solitary confinement at the Mitire Military Confinement Center. Asgedom’s death followed the revelation in January that another Christian died in the same prison, Compass reports. Mogos Hagos Kiflom was said to have died as a result of torture he endured for refusing to recant his faith, but the exact date of his death was unknown.

In October, Teklesenbet Gebreab Kiflom died while imprisoned for his faith at the Wi’a Military Confinement Center. He reportedly died after prison commanders refused to give him medical attention for malaria.

These latest deaths reflect the Eritrean government’s harsh treatment of believers. The Eritrean government targets Christians, often placing them in metal containers that are extremely hot during the day and cold during the night. Nearly 1,800 Eritrean Christians are believed to be under arrest because of their religious beliefs, held in police stations, military camps and prisons in 12 known locations across Eritrea. It is believed more than 28 clergymen are being held. Read the rest of this entry »

From the Church of Nigeria 

The newly enthroned Bishop of Kubwa Anglican Diocese, The Rt. Rev. Duke Timothy Akamisoko has publicly decried the sit-tight syndrome of myopic leaders who cling to power despite dismal performance. According to Bishop Akamisoko leaders are appointed to solve problems.He gave this criticism on Sunday at the enthronement service held at the Cathedral Church of St. Bartholomew, Kubwa. 

According to him, so many office holders today do not understand or have the faintest idea of what their task is but have refused to vacate their seats honorably.  He said God has a great plan for his people and has called us to fight for just and fair play.  

Join us in praying for God’s healing at this crucial moment in history.

Love Zim is a campaign supported by a coalition of UK organisations and churches already working for and in Zimbabwe. Love  Zim aims to increase active support for Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans, especially amongst UK churches and Christians. Initially the campaign will focus on a month of prayer and fasting for Zimbabwe.

Love Zim was launched on Valentine’s Day 2009 at a particularly crucial time in the history of Zimbabwe as a new unity government was sworn–in. The government, Zanu-PF and MDC alike, face huge challenges in working together and tackling the current economic and humanitarian crises. Whilst we will continue to work hard for the welfare of the Zimbabwean people we also need to pray for God’s blessing on Zimbabwe. Britian has a particularly complex and difficult relationship with Zimbabwe and for this reason the British church has an even greater responsibility to pray and act in the present situation.

See http://www.lovezim.org/ for more.  

UGANDA: Christians to fast 40 days over child sacrifice     Hat-tip:  VirtueOnline 
By Josephine Maseruka
February 19, 2009

CHURCHES countrywide will pray and fast for 40 days starting on Wednesday over the increasing cases of human sacrifice.

The prayers will be guided under the theme ‘Weeping for Uganda’s children who are no more.’

The Anglican Archbishop, Henry Luke Orombi, yesterday made the announcement at the provincial offices in Namirembe at a conference with leaders of Pentecostal churches.

Orombi said the leaders of the Orthodox, Catholic and the Seventh Day Adventist churches had already assented for the campaign.

He said the drive was aimed at making Ugandans repent and ask God to forgive and heal the land.

"There is greed, corruption and an inhuman thirst to spill innocent blood because our society is degenerating owing to greed, Godlessness and moral corruption," he said. Read the rest of this entry »

Lisa Severine Nolland  6 December 2008  Part I 

Doctors shocked at hostages’s torture:  from 30 November 2008   Rediff.com    Hat-tip Bill Muehlenberg

[Victims Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg had dual Israeli-US citizenship; Rivkah Holtzberg was an Israeli citizen. Image:  Boston Globe]

Doctors working in a hospital where all the bodies, including that of the terrorists, were taken said they had not seen anything like this in their lives.

"Bombay has a long history of terror. I have seen bodies of riot victims, gang war and previous terror attacks like bomb blasts. But this was entirely different. It was shocking and disturbing," a doctor said.

Asked what was different about the victims of the incident, another doctor said: "It was very strange. I have seen so many dead bodies in my life, and was yet traumatised. A bomb blast victim’s body might have been torn apart and could be a very disturbing sight. But the bodies of the victims in this attack bore such signs about the kind of violence of urban warfare that I am still unable to put my thoughts to words," he said.

Asked specifically if he was talking of torture marks, he said: "It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood," one doctor said.

The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: "Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again," he said.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dr Storkey (see below) noted the impressive work of CMS’ Heal Africa in response to the appalling situations which many women and girls in the Congo have found themselves.  Please be remembering these people in your prayers, as well as those who are standing against these atrocities and those bringing help and hope to individuals and their families. For those who wish to know more see here: [Image from http://healafrica.org/cms/stories/ursula-story/]

‘One human-rights activist has described the Congo as “the most dangerous place on earth for women”: a place where rape as a weapon of war, mutilation, gang torture, blinding, and maiming are all inflicted indiscriminately on women and young girls.’   

Our Responsibility in the Congo by Dr Elaine Storkey Fulcrum Republished on Fulcrum, with permission, from The Church Times, 7 November 2008 

‘It is common to contrast the breathtaking natural beauty of the Eastern Dem­o­cratic Republic of Congo with the barbarism of the armed conflict there. The tall moun­tains, sparkling lakes, and fertile mango forests seem too pure a setting for the inhu­man­ity and desecration caused by the brutal militia.

Since 1998, war has claimed more than five million lives in the Congo, and, in spite of a peace deal and a transitional government in 2003, the country has remained volatile, especially in the east. Warring rebels, tribal groups, quarrels im­ported from Rwanda, battles for gold and coltan, corrupt officials, and trade in arms all increase the instability.

The situation is under an international gaze, however. Last December, the United Nations renewed the mandate for the UN peacekeeping force in the Congo, and in January the United States, the European Union, the UN, and the Africa Union brokered a peace conference in Goma which resulted in a ceasefire. The Act of Agreement was signed by the Congolese govern­ment and its adversary, General Laurent Nkunda’s CNDP, with 21 other armed groups. 

Nine months later, when one million people have been displaced from North Kivu alone, peace seems a remote and forlorn hope.

Yet it was important that demands were named in the peace accord; for it outlines neces­sary conditions for peace and justice. It also highlights one significant omission — a require­ment to end sexual violence towards women (Features, 15 August). Read the rest of this entry »

by Julia Duin   The Washington Times    Hat-tip:  David Virtue
 
November 27, 2008

He sat in my office, a Turkish scholar and theologian who helps people who are tortured for their faith.

According to Ziya Meral it’s the converts from Islam to Christianity who are some of the most forsaken on Earth.

The police don’t help them; their families hate them; and their friends want to kill them. And some of the worst treatment occurs in the gulags of America’s allies.

"Egypt is one of the worst countries in terms of torture," Mr. Meral said. "Once you are detained, that’s it. The security services can keep you without charges for six, seven months, and then renew those charges."

It was there he encountered a man who had endured horrific suffering for leaving Islam.

"A few days into his torture, he broke down and gave up hope," Mr. Meral said. "They were laughing and saying, ‘You’re screaming and there is no one out there. No one can help you.’"

Of the world’s 2 billion Christians, 200 million are persecuted in some way. Many of them are in Islamic countries or in rabidly anti-religious regimes such as North Korea’s. These countries ignore the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which grants people freedom to choose their religion.

Read here 

A  Christian who had imagination, humanity and a hatred of Nazis 

Embracing a Holistic Gospel: Being the people of God in light of a world in need  EA 

A worldwide commission of evangelical theologians has declared that Christians must not separate social action and evangelism, despite the tragic murder of Gayle Williams ….

In light of the murder of Gayle Williams in Afghanistan earlier this week, the commission acknowledged that some parts of the British media have been calling for the disconnection of evangelism from social action. However, they believe as strongly as ever that if evangelical Christians are to be true to their identity as evangelicals, and true to the good news of Jesus Christ as they understand it, then these two aspects of their ministry and service cannot and must not be separated.

David Roldan, Dean of FIET Theological Institute and member of the World Evangelical Alliance Theological Commission said, “Speaking as an Argentinean, I understand the importance of standing up for the right to speak freely about one what believes. Therefore, I think it is important that evangelical Christians continue to proclaim what they believe whatever country they find themselves in while treating people with respect.” Read the rest of this entry »