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A hundred thousand Panamanians took to their capital city’s streets to oppose a new national bill that would introduce both sexuality education and gender ideology into their schools.
"This law is a colonization attempt. It was written and imposed on Panama by UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and it is not the fruit of our legislature’s will," Juan Francisco de la Guardia told the Friday Fax. De la Guardia is president of the Panamanian Alliance for Life and Family and one of the march organizers.
At the beginning of his war memoirs, Charles de Gaulle famously wrote, ‘All my life I have had a certain idea of France’ and its ‘eminent and exceptional destiny’. It was not only an abstract concept: the picture in his mind was of ‘the Madonna in mural frescoes’.
Five books regarded as "extremist" by the Prison Service remained in jail libraries in England and Wales for seven months after a review called for their removal, the BBC has learnt.
Two of the authors are seen as having inspired jihadists in the Arab world.
Extremism academic Dr Chetan Bhatt said the presence of these books within prison libraries was "worrying".
Could the jihadists inspired by Islamic State stoop any lower? Father Jacques Hamel was 85 years old. His young attackers reportedly attempted to behead him in front of the altar of his church. They failed in that but succeeded in killing him and in proving, once again, that an evil is stalking the continent and it is willing to plumb any depths in its attempts to terrorise and enslave us.
Ms Justice Mary Laffoy is to chair the citizens’ convention tasked with examining the Eighth Amendment.
Ms Justice Laffoy, a serving Supreme Court judge, was appointed by Taoiseach Enda Kenny to lead the body.
Her role will be to chair the 100-member convention which has been asked to consider issues including the Eighth Amendment, which places the life of the unborn on an equal footing with the life of the mother.
Firstly, it wasn’t Fireman Sam who apparently slipped on a page of the Qur’an; it was Elvis. But the headline ‘Elvis slips on the Qur’an’ would probably cause problems for Graceland or incite hatred against Priscilla and Lisa Marie, so best to go with the brand name, though one understands that this may cause Sam, who is manifestly innocent, some minor inconvenience.
You’d think this would be a complete non-issue. It is a children’s programme, after all, and neither Fireman Sam nor his mate Elvis is recognisably Muslim (at least not practising), so a page from the Qur’an is, to them, just another piece of paper; the Qur’an just another book. If they (accidentally) tread on it, well, that’s unfortunate, but you’d hardly think it would merit a major media brouhaha, with the BBC, Telegraph and the whole Islamic world up in arms (not literally – yet).
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has announced the appointment of Sarah Snyder as his new Advisor for Reconciliation.
She takes over from Canon David Porter who moved into his new role as Chief of Staff and Strategy to the Archbishop at the beginning of May.
In today’s divided moral landscape, with thoughtful, well-meaning people on both sides of every issue, there’s no better way to show that you’re a serious thinker than by acknowledging that every controversial issue is “complex.” Even among Christians, for whom scripture should be a guide to life’s challenges, many cling to the idea that issues such as abortion and the end of life are so complex that only a simple-minded person, unable to see two sides of an argument, could possibly take a firm stance.
Two years ago, a Jesuit priest and Dartmouth College alumnus visited parishioners at his alma mater, and I and other Catholic students gathered to hear him after Mass. Myles Sheehan, S. J., was no ordinary priest—he had earned his M.D. three years before donning the cloth, and both his medical and his spiritual vocations had shaped his faith. On the day of his visit, Fr. Sheehan had come to discuss the issue that had spurred him to the priesthood: proper care for the sick and elderly in their final days of life.
IN 1954 German Lutheran theologian Horst Kasner brought his wife and three young children across the Iron Curtain to take up a role in a new parish.
Nothing unusual in that – 200,000 Germans headed from East to West Germany that year – except that Mr Kasner was heading in the other direction.
Fourteen years ago today, my wife and I walked out of a Russian orphanage with two little one year-old boys. Suddenly, for the first time, I was a father and she was a mother. Suddenly, little Maxim was “Benjamin Jacob Moore” and little Sergei was “Timothy Russell Moore.” Everything changed, for all of us, for life.
As I’ve written in my book Adopted For Life, God used this experience to upend my whole life. He taught me much about his Fatherhood, much about the gospel, much about community, and much about the mission of the church. But people sometimes ask me, “In the years since, what have you learned about becoming a family through adoption?”