When Shrugging is Not an Option
- May/June 2025
- April 30, 2025
The sound and smell of motorcycles roaring down a street in Kandahar must have overwhelmed 16-year-old Atifa in the moments before the attack. Before she really knew what was happening, one of the cyclists approached Atifa, her sister Shamsia, and several other girls and threw acid onto their faces. Atifa’s scarf melted into her hair,
READ MOREJust two years after the Seventh-day Adventist Church officially organized, it met for its third General Conference session in 1865. The church made one of its first official statements on voting at that time: &”Resolved, That in our judgment, the act of voting when exercised in behalf of justice, humanity and right, is in itself
READ MOREBy now most of us are familiar with Christopher Hitchens. Christopher1 is, among other things, the author of the 2007 work God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Everything? Apparently so, in the eyes of Christopher Hitchens. That his journalist brother, Peter, has now produced a volume in opposite is by its very nature
READ MOREI esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other. John Locke, in A Letter Concerning Toleration, 1689.
READ MOREIt's a geographical fact, based on the geometry of the earth, that springtime in one part of the world means cold weather in another. Though an analogy only, it fits what's being hailed as the "Arab Spring," the uprisings that have either toppled or challenged the rule of dictators throughout the Arab world, from North
READ MOREEach year the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) releases a report of nations whose conduct marks them as the world's worst religious freedom violators and human-rights abusers. USCIRF is composed of nine private-sector commissioners and the U.S. ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom, the recently confirmed Dr. Suzan Johnson Cook, who gave the keynote
READ MOREWhile some have decided to stay and fight, other homeschooling families in Sweden are emigrating after losing a years-long battle with the government over the right to educate at home. Last summer Parliament passed what it calls "The New Education Act—for Knowledge, Choice, and Security." The 1,500 pages will bring vast changes to the educational
READ MOREWhen Proposition 8 was proposed in California to make marriage between a man and a woman the state's only valid marriage format, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) piled into the political fray in support. They joined Roman Catholics, evangelical Christians, some city governments, and many conservative individuals and groups
READ MOREI just spent a goodly portion of this morning mulling over and then writing the editorial for this issue. The unfortunate part of the story is that it was not this editorial. It was another version. One begun in a flurry of brain activity and pattered down on the keyboard as I proceeded. In fact,
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