The X Factor
- July/August 2024
- July 1, 2024
Faith-based charities come to grips with new church-state rules for government funding. The Biden administration recently has revised the regulations that govern how faith-based organizations can participate in federal, state, or local social service programs funded by federal dollars. These rules cover a broad range of services, from low-income housing and workforce development programs to
READ MOREA state court resists an all-or-nothing approach. Controversy continues in courts across the nation over pronoun use for transgender students in public schools. It’s a controversy that state legislatures are increasingly engaged with as well. In April, for instance, Colorado adopted a law—which is certainly likely to be challenged—requiring teachers to use students’ preferred pronouns
READ MOREMapping the unique experiences of women and religious persecution What do these individuals have in common? Gulmira Amin. Wife and moderator of a Uyghur news and cultural website who is imprisoned for her ethnoreligious identity and protesting against the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghurs. She is serving a 20-year sentence in the Xinjiang Women’s Prison.
READ MOREInterview with former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison. On the wall of his office in Australia’s Parliament House, Scott Morrison hung a framed newspaper dated May 1, 2019, proclaiming: “ScoMo’s Miracle!” It was a headline that appeared the morning after Morrison’s poll- and pundit-defying election to Australia’s top political job. The evening before, Morrison had
READ MOREHow Not to Build a Christian America By January 1 next year all public school classrooms in Louisiana, from kindergartens to universities, will display posters of a Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font.” Depending on your perspective, this is either a much-needed step toward “acknowledging the Christian foundations of America”
READ MOREA church-state tragedy in three acts The day after Pope Francis II made his historic July 25, 2022, apology to survivors of the residential schools for Indigenous children run by the Roman Catholic Church in Canada, the New York Times ran a front-page story and photo of the pontiff amid white crosses. They were grave
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