In China, the number of Christians is growing rapidly, despite government opposition which has recently seen many large church buildings damaged or bulldozed. Protestant churches baptised 2.4 million people between 2007 and 2012; if current growth rates continue, there will be more Christians (of all denominations) in China than in any other country by 2030. A young businesswoman from Hangzhou, when asked why she came to church, said “I come because I found a love here that isn't dependent on a person. It is like a river that doesn't go away."
The controversy over the OFSTED inspection of a Christian school in Sunderland has compelled senior political figures to comment. The Education Secretary has expressed support for the so-called “British values” principles on which OFSTED’s inspections are based; and the head of OFTSED has said that, after considering “all available evidence”, the inspectors did their job correctly (though he did not directly address the criticisms that the inspectors asked children what they knew about various sexual practices). However, parents of children at the school have reacted angrily to these comments, calling them “patronising”. One parent said, “How can they have considered all available evidence if they didn’t talk to any staff or parents from the school?” And a parent from a Christian school in nearby Durham, which looks likely to close following a similarly negative OFSTED inspection, said, “My boy has been bullied for being gay at the previous 5 schools he went to. This is the first school where he hasn’t been bullied for being gay.”
President Obama’s visit to the wife of Saeed Abedini, the Iranian-American pastor imprisoned in Iran, was apparently a great success once she revealed that the couple pray for him regularly. Saeed has now written a letter from prison thanking the President for “standing up for the persecuted.”
There has been a marked increase in attacks on Christian women and girls in Pakistan. Attacks typically involve assaults, rapes, kidnappings, forced marriages and/or forced conversions, along with police apathy and threats against those who pursue legal redress. In one such attack in Rana Town, a suburb of Lahore, a pregnant Christian mother who resisted a “ruthless woman’s” attempts to convert her to Islam was attacked by the woman’s brothers; they stripped her, paraded her through the streets naked, then robbed her and beat her to unconsciousness. Local police initially refused to take a report of the incident until pressured to do so by rights activists.
There is disquiet in Scotland over a Bill that is going before the Scottish Parliament to presume consent for organ donation; that is, if the Bill passes, a person’s organs will be donated to others after death unless they have opted out of the register, rather than the current system which requires people to opt in. A former Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland called it a “state-imposed tax on bodies” for anyone who dies without being aware of the opt-out system.
In film news, a documentary film called “Drop Box” has been made about the South Korean pastor who set up a box on the wall of his house in Seoul to help deal with the problem of abandoned babies. Mothers who felt they could not cope with their new born babies could (anonymously) leave their babies, and then ring a bell to notify the pastor that there was a baby in the box. To date, more than 600 babies have been left there. The documentary is showing in cinemas across the USA for three days in early March; no UK release date is yet known. A short preview can be seen at https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=520780904731427
In technology news, the number of times people access online Bibles from different locations has been used to help compile a list of the most (and least) Bible-minded cities in the USA. The so-called “Bible Belt” includes most of the Southern and some of the Midwest states, and the survey supports the view that the Southern states read the Bible most, with Southern states taking 25 of the top 30 positions in the table. In contrast, the bottom 10 cities in the table included New York, Boston, Las Vegas and San Francisco. The overall winner was Birmingham, Alabama; rock bottom was Providence, Rhode Island.
And finally, a Saudi Arabian cleric has been ridiculed even by Arabic Twitter users after issuing a fatwa (prohibition) against the building of snowmen. Following a rare snowfall in the north of the country, someone asked on a website if it was permissible to build snowmen under Sunni Islamic law. However, that law forbids creating any images of people, and the cleric decided that included snowmen. One commenter on the website supported the cleric, saying that building snowmen was “imitating the infidels and promotes lustiness and eroticism”; but one anonymous Twitter user responded by posting an image of a man in formal Arab clothing holding the ‘arm’ of a snow ‘woman’ which was wearing a bra and lipstick.
No comments:
Post a Comment