by | Feb 22, 2024 | Uncategorized
The first-of-its kind decision affirms life at its earliest stages but complicates the future of IVF.
Last week, Alabama extended protections beyond the unborn in the womb to the unborn outside it, becoming the first state to rule that frozen embryos are children under the law.
The decision has elicited praise from some evangelicals who, believing life begins at conception, want to see these “snowflake babies” treated as people rather than as commodities.
It’s also complicated the future of in vitro fertilization (IVF) across the state, upsetting parents and prospective parents who have turned to the procedure. At least one hospital system has halted IVF treatments for now.
After Roe v. Wade was overturned, parts of the pro-life movement evoked the 14th Amendment, which bars depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property,” and rallied around fetal personhood laws to ban abortion and grant human rights at conception.
The move to protect embryos was anticipated by both anti-abortion and reproductive rights activists. It follows a pattern of pro-life policies in the Southern state: Alabama’s constitution protects “the rights of the unborn child,” and the state’s abortion ban went into effect after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022.
In a case brought by the parents of several embryos destroyed at a fertility clinic, the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed on Friday that unborn children fall under its Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, regardless of “developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristics,” that is, even if they are stored in a freezer and have not yet been implanted.
An estimated 1.5 million embryos are on ice in the US, and fertility treatments like IVF are becoming more common. …
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by | Feb 22, 2024 | Uncategorized
Birds of a feather might flock together, but Christians must flock to Christ.
Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Forgive and forget.
Growing up in my conservative, mostly evangelical, rural Texas town, I went looking for accepted truisms in the Bible—only to discover they’d never been there at all. Gradually, I came to realize life could be more complicated than those sayings allowed, and yet I’m still surprised every now and again when I find myself clinging to some pithy proverb with the spiritual ardor that ought to be reserved for chapter and verse.
This too shall pass.
God works in mysterious ways.
I walked the aisle of my Baptist church when I was nine years old, accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and never looked back. I was active in Girls in Action, Bible Bowl, and my best friend’s charismatic church youth group. I attended Baylor, a Christian university. Everywhere I turned, I saw people who looked like me, talked like me, thought like me, and worshiped like me.
You are the company that you keep.
Birds of a feather flock together.
I assumed that kind of flocking was biblical in the prescriptive sense. Didn’t the Bible exhort us not to forsake the gathering of the saints (Heb. 10:25), placing a high value on “doing life with” like-minded people? Living in such a homogeneous world seemed like the natural order of things. I couldn’t yet see the shadow side—how easily we slip into idolizing our own reflections, mistaking the familiar for the proper and the customary for the righteous.
Today my thinking is more complicated. Now that my eldest is a teenager, I see the benefit of encouraging her to flock with friends who share our values or faith. There are no guarantees in parenting, but the company children keep, especially at such a crucial …
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by | Feb 22, 2024 | Uncategorized
An excerpt on identity, hope, and glory from My Divine Natural Hair: Inspiration and Tips to Love and Care for Your Crown.
In Chad, the women say God left a gift in the mountains to make their hair grow. If the flowering plant that produces the seeds, which these women have been blending into a silky powder and applying to their hair with oils for a millennium, is a gift from God, it would only be one of the innumerable ways the Creator’s abundant grace is revealed through Black women’s crowns of glory, given by the God who numbers the very hairs on our heads (Luke 12:7).
My own hair story is braided with the story of my faith. Like a crown is to a queen, a regal mane is to a lion, or leaves are to a tree, hair is a visually powerful symbol of identity.
Thousands of years ago, Nazirites—men and women who showed their dedication to God by letting their hair grow—also believed that hair was inseparable from the identity of a person. The Hebrew root word for Nazirite translates to “an unpruned vine.” Similarly, cutting the hair, or “pruning the vine,” for a Black person can be the same as being cut off from the symbol of one’s identity.
The most famous Nazirite was Samson. Unlike other men and women who took the vow to become Nazirites for a period of time, Samson was a Nazirite “from the womb” (Judges 13:5), his entire life dedicated to God. As he grew up and into the purpose God had placed on his life, performing superhuman feats throughout the land, Samson wore his unshorn hair in seven long, thick braids (16:19). He was stronger than any other foe because no razor had ever touched his head—until his lover, Delilah, betrayed him. After she had his braids chopped off, Samson awoke to find himself shaved, weakened, and surrounded by his enemies. They gouged out his eyes and enslaved …
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by | Feb 21, 2024 | Uncategorized
Alexei Navalny was willing to stand alone—knowing he’d never be alone in the bigger story.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Russian president Vladimir Putin murdered another Christian this week. It was just another day in Putin’s supposed project of protecting “the Christian West” from godlessness. After all, they tell me, one can’t create a Christian nationalist empire without killing some people.
Before the world forgets the corpse of Alexei Navalny in the subzero environs of an Arctic penal colony, we ought to look at him—especially those of us who follow Jesus Christ—to see what moral courage actually is.
Navalny was perhaps the most-recognized anti-Putin dissident in the world, and he is now one of many Putin enemies to end up “suddenly dead.” He survived poisoning in 2020, recuperated in Europe, and ultimately went back to his homeland despite knowing what he would face. Speaking of his dissent and his willingness to bear its consequences, Navalny repeatedly referenced his profession of Christian faith. My Christianity Today colleague Emily Belz discovered a 2021 trial transcript at Meduza, in which Navalny explains, in strikingly biblical terms, what it means to suffer for one’s beliefs.
“The fact is that I am a Christian, which usually sets me up as an example for constant ridicule in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, because mostly our people are atheists, and I was once quite a militant atheist myself,” Navalny said (as rendered by Google Translate). “But now I am a believer, and that helps me a lot in my activities because everything becomes much, much easier.”
“There are fewer dilemmas in my life, because there is a book in which, in general, it is more or less clearly written what …
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by | Feb 21, 2024 | Uncategorized
Four watchdog groups unite to urge UK parliament to hold Tehran accountable for “faceless victims” of Islamic reeducation and other religious freedom violations.
Religious reeducation did not work on Esmaeil Narimanpour.
First arrested by the Iranian government in 2021, he and seven other converts to Christianity were cleared by the state prosecutor, who stated that their change of religion was not a crime under Iranian law. The following year, he was ordered with several others to attend ten sessions with Muslim clerics to “guide” him back to Islam.
Last December, Narimanpour was arrested again, this time on Christmas Eve.
The case is one of several highlighted by “Faceless Victims: Rights Violations Against Christians in Iran,” the 2024 annual report released jointly by advocacy organizations Article18, Open Doors, Middle East Concern, and CSW and presented at the British Parliament.
“This is a great example of agencies working together,” stated Mervyn Thomas, founding president of CSW (formerly Christian Solidarity Worldwide), at the event. “Iran claims to ensure freedom of religion or belief for all; but that is nonsense, as this report shows.”
Not yet convicted, Narimanpour is one of 166 Christians arrested and 103 detained by Iran during the 2023 reporting period. Another 22 have been sentenced, and 21 imprisoned.
While sentencings decreased by 8 from 2022, this year witnessed an additional 32 arrests and 41 detainments. Article18 has tracked incidents in Iran since 2015, when arrests were at a peak of 193. Detainments have fluctuated yearly between 26 in 2018 and this year’s high, while sentencings ranged between 12 in 2015 and a high of 57 in 2020.
The British parliament gathering included testimony from former prisoner Farhad Sabokrooh. Arrested with his wife in 2011, the couple served one year in prison and had their previously …
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