by | May 31, 2024 | Uncategorized
Church leaders mobilized prayer for parliament and state elections, knowing the question wasn’t whether Hindu nationalists would win but the size of their mandate.
As India’s monumental elections finally come to an end this week, all eyes are on the extent of the mandate that will be handed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party. Especially among the subcontinent’s estimated 28 million Christians, for whom the result will test whether religious freedom and secularism will be preserved in the world’s largest democracy.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been in power since 2014. During this time, monitoring groups have documented an alarming increase in incidents of violence, discrimination, and harassment targeting religious minorities–especially Christians and Muslims. Hindu extremist groups, emboldened by the BJP’s ideology of Hindu supremacy or “Hindutva,” have systematically perpetrated abuses ranging from physical assaults to false accusations of forced religious conversions, used as a pretext for persecution.
A massive survey by the Pew Research Center reported that in 2019, about 49 percent of Hindu voters in India backed the BJP, which secured the party a majority in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament, and granted Modi a second term as head of state.
Not who wins, but by how much
The 2024 Indian general election, which started collecting votes on April 19, will conclude on June 1 after being conducted in seven staggered phases. The prolonged election process has drawn criticism from opposition parties alleging it favored the BJP’s “money power.” Meanwhile the Election Commission of India has come under criticism for “failing” its constitutional duty and is seen by many observers as compromised.
At stake is the composition of the 543-seat Lok Sabha, which …
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by | May 31, 2024 | Uncategorized
Among the former president’s antagonists and admirers alike, there is a great deal of calling evil good and good evil.
The homepage of The New York Times announced the conviction of Donald Trump on 34 felony charges Thursday afternoon in the kind of large-scale, black letter headline we typically associate with yellowed century-old newspapers declaring war has come. “TRUMP GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS,” it blared above a photo of the former president looking weary in some crowded public space.
Scrolling down the page a little, you’d have found a link to one story noting the historicity of this moment and a link to another story detailing each of the 34 charges. Together on the homepage, the headline of the first paired with a bulleted summary of the second made for a strange juxtaposition: “Donald Trump has become America’s first felon president,” it said, and below that, a bulleted list: “11 counts related to invoices, 12 counts related to ledger entries, 11 counts related to checks.” Wait, invoices? This isn’t exactly the crime of the century.
And that highlights the core problem with the most common responses to this verdict in our political discourse: Among Trump’s antagonists and admirers alike, there is a great deal of calling evil good and good evil (Isa. 5:20).
I doubt this is deliberate dissembling. The most animated reactions I’ve observed have not been calculated—quite the opposite, in fact. Outside the chattering class especially, those responses have looked like organic outbursts of elation and schadenfreude, or else indignation and resentment. On both sides, I believe that most people sincerely see their reactions as stands for justice. But even with innocent motivation, this is a kind of moral confusion.
Let’s start with Trump’s opponents, among whom there …
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by | May 31, 2024 | Uncategorized
Many white evangelicals don’t trust the felony conviction and still back the former president.
Donald Trump’s historic felony conviction in New York on Thursday hasn’t deterred his evangelical supporters. Instead, along with fellow Trump loyalists, they have directed their ire at the justice system that issued a guilty verdict against him.
“People think this is kind of the end of America,” Chad Connelly, CEO of Faith Wins, a conservative Christian organization, told CT. “I don’t talk to anybody that thinks this is anything other than a sham case.”
A jury of 12 New Yorkers found Trump guilty on all 34 counts brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, concluding that Trump falsified business records as part of an effort to keep a sex scandal from influencing the 2016 US presidential election.
“This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt,” Trump told reporters in a brief statement after leaving the courtroom.
“The real verdict is going to be November 5 by the people,” Trump added. “We didn’t do a thing wrong. I’m a very innocent man. … Our whole country is being rigged right now.”
Connelly, who previously served as the Republican National Committee’s national director of faith engagement, said that he believes the verdict will only “strengthen people’s resolve” to vote for Trump come November.
More than 9 in 10 white evangelical voters said a guilty verdict in the hush money trial would make no difference in their vote or would make them more likely to back Trump, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted last week. Only 7 percent of white evangelicals said a conviction would make them less likely to vote for him for president.
Overall, two-thirds …
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by | May 31, 2024 | Uncategorized
The entrepreneur and social services leader had a unique vision for sharing the gospel and reaching people holistically.
Peter Chih-Ping Lin (林治平), who launched a Christian magazine for those outside the church that grew into a sprawling, eclectic ministry, died of pancreatic cancer on April 27 at the age of 86 in Taipei. With little financial support, in 1973, Lin founded what became Christian Cosmic Light Holistic Care Organization, which sought to reach non-Christians through art, academic research, and social work. As a leader in Christian social services, Lin’s concern for the marginalized led him to lead the Christian drug rehab organization Operation Dawn in Taiwan and to reset the vision of Bethany Children’s Home.
Lin’s work often operated on a shoestring budget, forcing him to be entrepreneurial and to rely on his faith.
“When we walk in God’s calling and what he has entrusted us with faith, God will certainly lead us through all the hardships and trials for us to finish the missions we carry,” Lin wrote in 2023, in an issue commemorating Cosmic Light’s 50th anniversary.
Lin was born in Changsha, a city in Hunan Province in central China, on May 22, 1938, not long after the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out. Because his father served in the Chinese air force, regularly facing Japanese airstrikes and heavy artillery, Lin’s childhood was constantly disrupted. For the first ten years of his life, his family lived in nearly half of China’s 23 provinces, and his parents named their son Chih-Ping (Chih means “to rule,” Ping means “peace”), expressing their desire that, one day, he would know stability.
This dream was only realized after Lin lost his sister, and his mother and the remaining children fled to Taiwan in 1948. At age 10, Lin was now living in a farming …
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by | May 31, 2024 | Uncategorized
Church leaders and human rights experts weigh in on whether raising the legal age is sufficient in shielding minors.
Nearly one in five (18.3%) Pakistani girls are married before age 18, according to data from 2017 to 2018, with over half becoming pregnant as children. Many of these girls are of Christian or Hindu faiths that collectively make up 3.5 percent of the population, which is majority Muslim.
While the government has officially banned child marriage, discriminatory laws and lack of enforcement have allowed the practice to persist. Most child marriages are arranged by families, but an estimated 1,000 girls are abducted, converted to Islam, and then forcibly married to their abductors each year. These child brides face heightened risks of pregnancy-related health complications and maternal mortality.
A recent ruling by the Lahore High Court could provide another tool for advocates and church leaders trying to protect Pakistani girls. In April, it struck down a provision of the 1929 Child Marriage Restraint Act that set the minimum marriage age at 16 for girls but 18 for boys. Deeming this definition of a child as “discriminatory and unconstitutional,” the court directed the province of Punjab to revise the law with a uniform minimum age of 18 for both genders.
The judgment cited Pakistan’s constitutional guarantees of gender equality and protection of women and children’s rights and presented data showing how adolescent pregnancy is one of the leading causes of death for 15- to 19-year-old girls.
“We, as a nation, woefully lag behind in all major indicators, and half of our population cannot be lost to childbearing at an early age while its potential remains untapped,” wrote Justice Shahid Karim. “Equal opportunities for females mean equal restraint on marriage as the males.”
As Punjab …
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