But the three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York noted that the courts have long looked at the motto not so much as the entanglement of government in religion, but as a more general statement of optimism and a “reference to the country’s religious heritage.”   (RNS) Atheists lost their case against the... Continue Reading

Phillips, a devout Christian who owns Masterpiece Cakeshop in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, said the decision violates his First Amendment rights to free speech and free exercise. “I will stand by my convictions until somebody shuts me down,” he told reporters after the ruling. The commission disagreed, ruling that religious liberty does not go... Continue Reading

“They threaten us with consequences if we refuse to call what is good, evil, and what is evil, good,” said George, “They demand [we] conform our thinking to their orthodoxy, or else say nothing at all.” Break their rules and, like the beleaguered Christians in Benson’s novel, we could pay a steep price in our... Continue Reading

Abdullahi Alzareg, an under-secretary at the foreign ministry, said Sudan guaranteed religious freedom and was committed to protecting the woman. Khartoum has been facing international condemnation over the death sentence.   Sudanese authorities are to free a woman who was sentenced to death for having abandoned the Islamic faith, a foreign ministry official says. Meriam... Continue Reading

The sad truth is, when people set themselves against the laws of nature and nature’s God, they have to resort to linguistic games in a hopeless effort to deceive others, and maybe to deceive themselves.  We all know what the civil wrongs movement is about: to abolish all sexual rules of conduct, uproot Judeo-Christian morality,... Continue Reading

Africans have had difficulty developing a sense of nationalism because the boundaries of their countries were determined by Europeans at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. Those lines cut across tribal and linguistic locations, so that tribes got separated and pieces of tribes got thrown in with other pieces of tribes, forming unnatural configurations. No African... Continue Reading

“I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family by marrying a man without our consent, and I have no regret over it,” police investigator Rana Mujahid quoted him as saying. Parveen was attacked as she and her husband, Mohammad Iqbal, arrived at the gates of the Lahore High Court. They went... Continue Reading

“In several countries throughout the world, men, and especially women, are victimized regularly by Islamic and Sharia-inspired law,” said ICC’s Cameron Thomas. “Meriam, the pregnant wife of an American citizen and mother to an infant toddler, epitomizes innocence, and so the abominable charges leveled against her and others stand out even more so when leveled... Continue Reading

The thing is that activists can redefine pregnancy all they want and it won’t change the central issue at hand — the question of whether it’s ok to end the life of a genetically distinct human. We won’t resolve that debate any time soon, but obscuring the facts on when and how human life begins... Continue Reading

“The house churches are not legally protected, so authorities can tolerate them one day and shut them down the next, if political orders came down to tighten up. The Party is under increasing pressure to change the way it regards the desire for faith; China today has sixty to eighty million Christians, a community as... Continue Reading