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In the News

  • Guardian: Kim Davis meeting aligns with Pope Francis's message of religious freedom
    September 30th, 2015
    The pope’s hitherto clandestine meeting with Kim Davis, the current heroine of conservative Christianity in the US, has come as a surprise – and a blow – to those who would claim Francis as a standard-bearer of liberalism.
     
    But the 15-minute meeting between the leader of the world’s Catholics and the county clerk from Kentucky who went to jail rather than add her official signature to same-sex marriage licences was entirely in keeping with one of the key themes of the pontiff’s six-day US tour: religious freedom.
     
    Davis, a Pentecostal Apostolic Christian, met the pope at the Vatican embassy in Washington DC last Thursday after Francis had delivered his speech to Congress and before he left the capital for New York. The news of the meeting broke on Wednesday, two days after the pope landed back in Rome after a trip which delighted liberals but disappointed many conservative Catholics.
     
    Davis described the encounter to ABC News: “I put my hand out and he reached and he grabbed it, and I hugged him and he hugged me. And he said, ‘Thank you for your courage’.” She wept at the encounter: “I had tears coming out of my eyes. I’m just a nobody, so it was really humbling to think he would want to meet or know me.”
  • Wales Online: Muslim father criticises social services for not placing his son with Islamic foster carers after boy was taken into care
    September 30th, 2015
    A Muslim man whose son was taken into care by a Welsh local authority has gone to court in a bid to see his son placed with Islamic foster carers.
     
    The boy's religious and cultural heritage could only “properly be safeguarded” if the child lived with Muslims, the man told a judge in the family court.
     
    He asked Judge Gareth Jones to order the council to make “other arrangements” for the boy’s upbringing.
  • CofE Communications: Archbishop welcomes credit champions
    September 30th, 2015

    The Church took another step forward in its efforts to build a fairer financial system last night with the commissioning of over 50 credit champions by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. The event was part of the Church Credit Champions Network, (CCCN) a project which is helping congregations across London and Liverpool to take action on money and debt issues in their community. Archbishop Justin announced that the Network is on track to save more than £2 million by helping people access affordable credit from places like credit unions rather than high-cost providers such as payday lenders.

  • Telegraph: Christian ruled too sexist to care for his daughter
    September 30th, 2015
    A Father who went to court in an attempt to force his 16-year-old daughter to leave her mother to live with him so that he could instil in her his traditional Christian values has had his case rejected by a judge who suggested he was a sexist throwback to another age.
     
    Judge Damien Lochrane said the man, who cannot be identified, had demonstrated an “antediluvian attitude towards women” and appeared to believe they were incapable of making “sensible” decisions on their own.
     
    The father also demonstrated an “arrogant” disregard for the teenager’s own wishes after she made it clear she did not want to live with him.
     
    It was, the judge said, “difficult to imagine” how the man, from Cheshire, functioned in 21st-century Britain “while harbouring such attitudes”.
     
    The judge detailed how the father, a successful professional, wanted the girl to move hundreds of miles away from her mother.
     
    He wanted to take over responsibility for her education, teach her about her paternal heritage and promised he would “ensure that she goes to church”. The judge said the mother and father were never involved in a “proper relationship and that the father had never played a part in his daughter’s care”.
  • Guardian: Kentucky clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses may have met Pope Francis in secret
    September 30th, 2015
    Kim Davis, the Kentucky county court clerk who spent five days in jail for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, is reported to have had a private meeting with the pope during his historic US tour.
     
    According to a statement posted on the website of Christian lobby group the Liberty Council, Pope Francis met Davis and her husband, Joe, at the Vatican’s Washington DC embassy on Thursday. The statement carries the stamp of the Liberty Council’s founder and chairman, Matt Staver, who is acting as Davis’s lawyer in her dispute with the court.
     
    The statement, which is based on a report from Inside The Vatican, says that the pope thanked Davis for her “courage” and told her to “stay strong”. He then said he would pray for her and presented both her and her husband with a rosary, the Liberty Council claimed.
  • World Watch Monitor: Six churches torched in Tanzania
    September 30th, 2015
    Six churches have been burnt down in northwest Tanzania within the past week.
     
    First, on 23 September, three churches were torched – the Living Waters International Church, Buyekera Pentecostal Assemblies of God, and Evangelical Assemblies of God Tanzania churches, which are all located in the Bukoba region, on the shores of Lake Victoria.
     
    Then, during the night of 26 September, three more churches – also in Bukoba – were torched: the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Kitundu Roman Catholic Church and Katoro Pentecostal Assemblies of God Church. All are located in the Katoro region of western Bukoba. 
     
    “The people woke up on 27th Sep to find their sanctuaries burnt down,” an anonymous source told World Watch Monitor. “The scenarios are the same; unknown people broke in, piled things onto the altar, poured petrol over it and set it alight. They fled before anyone could respond and so remain unknown.”
  • BBC: First 10 UK womb transplants approved
    September 30th, 2015
    Doctors have been granted approval to carry out the UK's first 10 womb transplants, following the success of the procedure in Sweden.
     
    Ethical approval has been granted for the transplants - as part of a clinical trial - and will launch in spring.
     
    Around one in 5,000 women are born without a womb, while others lose their womb to cancer.
     
    If the trial is successful, the first UK baby born from a womb transplant could arrive in late 2017 or 2018.
  • Life Site News: French Muslim registrar sent to court for refusing to perform gay 'marriage'
    September 30th, 2015
    A public prosecutor in Marseille, the main city on the south coast of France, has demanded a 1,500-euro fine (about 1,680 dollars) and a suspended prison sentence of three months against a deputy mayor in charge of marriage celebrations who used a "stratagem" in order to avoid registering a same-sex "marriage."
     
    Sabrina Hout was sued by a lesbian couple complaining that they had been discriminated against on the grounds of "sexual orientation." Hout is of North African origin and Islamic background.
     
    The intended "marriage" was between two native Frenchwomen, Claude and Hélène, who wanted their union to be registered in the 8th sector of Marseille, in the northern neighborhood where they live and work and where the population is now mainly of Islamic descent. The ceremony took place on the 16th of August, 2014, more than a year after same-sex "marriage" was made legal in France.
  • Mail: Republicans slam Planned Parenthood chief over secretly filmed abortion videos
    September 30th, 2015
    Congressional Republicans on Tuesday excoriated the head of Planned Parenthood in her first Capitol Hill appearance since a string of secretly filmed videos surfaced this summer showing agency officials discuss the handling of fetal tissue.
     
    Making the most of their opportunity to grill Cecile Richards, the organization’s president, Republicans scrutinized her agency’s salaries, travel costs, accounting and political activity.
     
    The result was a highly charged, four-hour-plus hearing punctuated with sparks and sharp exchanges that often steered back and forth into a political debate over abortion.
     
    Richards is the top executive of the controversial agency, which provides reproductive health services, including abortions. In the last ten weeks it has played a central role in a possible shutdown of the federal government.
  • Times (£): Barlinnie 'twins' with mosque to rehabilitate Muslim inmates
    September 30th, 2015
    Scotland’s prisons are to be “twinned” with mosques in a bid to cut reoffending rates among Muslim inmates.
     
    HM Prison Barlinnie, the country’s largest jail, has established a groundbreaking partnership with Glasgow Central Mosque.
     
    As part of the pilot scheme, believed to be the first of its kind in the UK, Muslim prisoners will be “paired up” as cell-mates to avoid disturbing other inmates when they get out of bed to pray early in the morning.