Here’s the thing: I live in a country that is predominantly Buddhist. Here, little kids are taught to hold incense and kneel and bow at ancestor tablets and a variety of gods. Do you know how cute it is to see a little kid praying with pure devotion to a Buddhist god? It is JUST AS CUTE as the blonde headed little girl singing Jesus Loves Me.
A child’s faith is not a testimony of the power of God to evangelize them. It demonstrates how malleable and impressionable children are to the faith values exposed to them at a young age. Children must trust wholeheartedly in order to survive. Their dependence on adults undergirds their entire worldview. Like it or not, as parents we are entrusted with this enormous responsibility to build the structures of faith in which our children will inevitably live fully into, especially when they are little.
Because of this drastic inequality of power between adults and our dependent children, we must take tender care to wield our tremendous spiritual influence on them in a way that is respectful of their autonomy, that listens to their concerns, that empowers them to grow into wholeness, and to ultimately make their own faith choices. We must always be aware of the power differential even as we act as the portal through which they come to know God.
The White House has hired its first openly transgender staff member, the Washington Post reports.
The staffer, Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, will work as a recruitment director for presidential personnel. She is not the first transgender staff person to be hired by other agencies under this administration, but is the first to work in the White House. She is also a transgender woman of color, which LGBT groups noted as significant a news release.
The free English-language Patrum app showcases a selection of works at the Vatican Museums, featuring everything from an Etruscan tomb to 13th-century Chinese scrolls. The brief descriptions are accompanied by other articles detailing daily life at the Vatican Museums. App users are invited to join the conversation through the comment and chat sections.
Art lovers can also tailor their own profiles by picking out their favorite works, allowing them to receive specific updates and chat with others who express interest in the same pieces. While there are other apps that serve as virtual tour guides to Vatican treasures, that is not Patrum’s intent — its layout does not correspond to the museums’ vast network of corridors.
Supporters of the Islamic Declaration on Climate Change included the grand muftis (highest authorities in religious law) of Uganda and Lebanon and government representatives from Turkey and Morocco. The conference itself, the International Islamic Climate Change Symposium, was co-sponsored by Islamic Relief Worldwide, the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences, and GreenFaith.
The declaration comes at a moment ripe for climate change discussion, in the wake of President Obama’s announcement of a Clean Power Plan on Aug. 3. The plan requires states to reduce carbon emissions from coal power plants starting in 2017. It’s also a timely precursor to the upcoming United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Paris this December.
The declaration cites climate change research, followed by a detailed call to action. Among other things, it puts pressure on those attending the United Nations Conference on Climate Change to set clear goals, calls on wealthy and oil-producing nations to be leaders in curbing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and asks that all nations commit to 100 percent renewable energy or a zero emissions strategy.
It’s a pretty sweet situation to be in. I’ve been mostly satisfied with my lack of national allegiances.
But I am starting to feel that my neither-here-nor-there status is not the responsible choice for me. This land where I’ve lived for 23 years is my home, and I feel like I need to fully claim that fact. I lingered for a long time on the fringes of this community. Living on the edge is nice because I can keep my hands clean of the messiness of American civic life (and it does get messy), but this also keeps my hands out of the activity of helping clean up the mess and build a stronger nation. My hands aren’t stained with the faults of this country, but neither are they calloused from building it up.
As an undergraduate student at a Christian university, I realize that my degree of experience within American social trends is limited to the last two decades. However, my age does not disqualify my faith as a Christian, nor should my faith as a Christian disqualify my faculty of reasoning.
I cannot speak as one who knows the mind of God, but as a Christian I have been called to have the mind of Christ. And through careful inspection of the texts left for us, it is possible to discern what a Christ-like mind is — what a Christian mind is supposed to be.
It can be dangerous to be black. In 2012, a black person was killed every 28 hours by law enforcement officials or self-styled "vigilantes." About 27 percent of African-Americans live below the poverty line. Black families are seven times more likely to be homeless than white families. African-Americans are four times more likely to be murdered than the national average.
It's not about semantics. It's about systems (and minds) that need to be changed for the betterment of the future. And that future will, in fact, be better for all lives.
Prominent artists and human rights campaigners have criticized the National Youth Theatre in London for canceling a play because its theme is the radicalization of young British Muslims and their attraction to terrorist organizations such as the militant Islamic State group.
There is growing concern the play, Homegrown — by British–born Omar El-Khairy — was shut down before its scheduled opening on Aug. 15 because of pressure from the British police.
A report in The Times by Jack Malvern, the paper’s arts correspondent, quoted Nadia Latif, the play’s director, saying the police had asked to see the final script of Homegrown before the play opened at a school in Brixton, a part of South London with a large Muslim community.
The prevailing narrative of our time is one of not-enough, lack, insufficiency — or even self-sufficiency. But that’s not what God says to us or about us. As pastor and author Jo Saxton writes, “Contrary to the many mantras of our day, our identity is not found deep within us: it's given.”
Identity is given by God, our Creator, the One who made us in his image, the One who knit us together in our mother’s womb, the One who knows what’s best for us.
Because of this, it’s important for boundary-setting to begin not with externals or with symptoms but with identity — because who you are determines how you live, and what kind of boundaries you’re willing and able to put up. In short, we need to know who we are and whose we are.