Indian and Chinese Cultures Favor Baby Boys. Here’s How Immigrant Churches Counsel Expectant Couples

Indian and Chinese Cultures Favor Baby Boys. Here’s How Immigrant Churches Counsel Expectant Couples

Honor-shame dynamics color how Christians have these sensitive conversations.

The two most populous countries of the world, China and India, both suffer from skewed sex ratios due to a cultural preference for boys that causes families to abort or abandon their daughters. From 2000–2020, 115 boys were born for every 100 girls in China, while in India that ratio was 110 boys for every 100 girls. This has led both countries to ban the use of ultrasounds to determine the sex of the baby, although the illegal use of ultrasounds is common.

In Chinese and Indian cultures, giving birth to a girl is traditionally seen as a burden on the family, as women end up joining their husband’s family once they are married. (In India, the wife’s family also needs to pay an expensive dowry.) On the other hand, having a boy not only means passing down the family name and inheritance but also means gaining a daughter in marriage.

In China, the problem has been exacerbated by 40 years under the one-child policy, which led parents to abort their baby girls for a chance to have a son. Since 2016, the government has loosened the policy as the country fears a demographic time bomb. As of last year, China has abolished all fees and fines associated with having more children. While young people have rejected some of the more traditional ideas about gender, in 2021, there were still 112 male births per 100 female births.

Over in India, the country has 9 million “missing” girls from the past two decades due to sex-selective abortions, according to a 2022 report from Pew Research Center. As CT reported last year:

Despite the current significant disparity, researchers found that bias toward sons is waning among all religious groups in India and say that the annual number of missing girls has dropped from about …

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Church Attack Leaves Turkish Christians Troubled and Confused

Church Attack Leaves Turkish Christians Troubled and Confused

Many believers were already avoiding fellowship after warning by ISIS, which claimed responsibility for the killing at a Catholic congregation in Istanbul.

Turkish Christians are shaken by last weekend’s terrorist attack on a Catholic church in Istanbul.

Claimed by ISIS, it comes amid threats that have already caused some believers to shy away from Sunday services. And like the rest of their nation, Christians are confused by details that eschew easy explanations.

“Everyone is a little nervous, questioning the future,” said Ali Kalkandelen, president of the Association of Protestant Churches (TeK). “And for the next few weeks—even months—everyone will watch their backs.”

Two masked gunmen casually walked into Mass at Santa Maria Catholic Church on Sunday morning, shot into the air, and killed one person. Security footage then shows them leaving the building, only slightly less casually than when they entered.

A statement issued by Martin Kmetec, archbishop of Izmir and president of the Episcopal Conference of Turkey, expressed his community’s “shock” that an innocent person was killed in a “sacred space of faith in God.” It demanded better security for churches, a curb on the culture of hatred and religious discrimination, and that the truth be revealed.

Shortly thereafter, security services arrested two foreign nationals, from Russia and Tajikistan. ISIS later published a statement saying the attack was in response to its call to “target Jews and Christians everywhere.” The statement was followed by another from a group calling itself ISIS’s “Turkey Province,” which said that it fired its pistols during the unbelievers’ “polytheistic rituals.”

While ISIS has conducted multiple terrorist attacks in Turkey, this is the first claimed by a local branch. The so-called …

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Protecting the Image of God—Especially on Death Row

Protecting the Image of God—Especially on Death Row

A testimony from Julius Jones and the minister who led the campaign to stop his execution.

In 2018, I was a mom and teaching pastor newly relocated to Oklahoma. That’s when I heard of Julius Jones, who was then on death row following a 2002 conviction for murder.

I stumbled upon his story one night while watching The Last Defense, an ABC docuseries about people facing execution with strong innocence claims. To say I was devastated by the issues in his case can’t capture how much his story affected me. Here was a young, smart, Black man who seemed to have so much going for him, suddenly caught in the grips of the criminal legal system and sentenced to death right in Oklahoma.

I didn’t know anything about the justice system at the time. All I knew was that God was calling me to do something about Julius Jones—to help lead the effort to stop his execution. I convinced several friends from my church and other leaders in the community to join the cause.

For two years, we shared Julius’s story with fellow Oklahomans by showing the docuseries, holding panel discussions, and building social media platforms. Through strategic prayer and a daily grind of connecting with community leaders as well as national influencers and organizations, the Justice for Julius campaign officially launched in 2020. The timing—around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic—wasn’t ideal but couldn’t be avoided: An execution date for Julius was to be announced at any moment.

When I describe the campaign to save Julius’s life, I always talk about it as a human chain, like how strangers on a beach link arms to pull someone from a rip tide. People from every demographic—rich, poor, young, old, progressive, conservative, white, indigenous, Black, and more—came …

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David Brooks: We Change People for the Better by Knowing Them More Fully

David Brooks: We Change People for the Better by Knowing Them More Fully

The New York Times columnist says extraordinary things happen—both personally and socially—when we pay attention to others.

Twenty years ago, I got stuck in the back of a van with a rather dull missionary.

All of us missionaries were on some trip, and I found myself preparing for hours of driving with this man as my companion. I didn’t know him, but I sensed that if we got to talking, then some political and cultural differences were going to become painfully obvious.

In short, I judged this man, fiercely, before he so much as opened his mouth. I had sized him up, categorized him, set barriers between us, and thereby diminished him and myself in the process. All this, I think, makes me a more or less normal human being. We are constantly doing this to each other.

But before the van ride began, I recall feeling a rare and particularly painful prompting of the Holy Spirit. In a moment I have never forgotten, a phrase flashed through my mind: “There is no such thing as a boring person.”

I felt convicted and inspired all at once. As a missionary, I constantly found myself speaking with students about the dignity of human life, and how that couldn’t be explained without God. Yet I had denied my fellow missionary’s image-bearing dignity before I even knew his name.

I ended up spending hours of that van ride getting to know a human being I still think of very fondly. Years later I still smile at his concern for his children, the compliments he gave his wife, and his tired but very real smile. I doubt he remembers this ride, but my life was changed by a small prompting from God to pay attention to someone I had instinctively diminished.

‘Illuminators’ and ‘Detractors’

All of this brings me to the latest book from New York Times columnist David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply …

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Are Pro-Life Laws Working?

Are Pro-Life Laws Working?

The national abortion rate rose slightly after Dobbs but plummeted in states with abortion restrictions.

Last fall, The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro, host of The Daily podcast, declared the overturn of Roe v. Wade had “backfired.”

Barbaro and Times reporter Margot Sanger-Katz said abortion numbers had risen nationwide since the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s HealthOrganization decision, which turned over abortion policy to individual states.

Though abortion rates had plummeted after Dobbs in states with restrictions, Sanger-Katz said, “When you consider that there are all of these states that banned abortion totally, where abortions went to zero, what it’s really telling us is that the states where abortion stayed legal increased by so much that they were able to sort of counterweight that reduction.”

But pro-life activists are celebrating rising birthrates in 2023 and challenging the narrative that abortion restrictions don’t work, or worse—that they actually increase abortions.

The question of the effectiveness of abortion legislation is especially relevant as more states consider whether to restrict, ban, allow, or even promote abortion within their own borders.

Since Dobbs, voters in Vermont, California, Michigan, and Ohio have enshrined a right to abortion in their state constitutions. In Kentucky, voters rejected a constitutional ban on abortion. This year, at least 13 other states will consider new abortion policies ranging from adding abortion rights in their state constitution to banning the practice altogether.

Last October, the Guttmacher Institute, once the research arm of Planned Parenthood, estimated more than a million abortions would be committed in America in 2023. That would be roughly a 10 percent increase over …

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