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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by | May 30, 2024 | Uncategorized
The TV series had to wait months to go up online due to a legal dispute with its former partner Angel Studios over content licensing.
After months of delay and a legal dispute, the first episode of The Chosen, Season Four, will drop on the show’s app at 7 p.m. Eastern on Sunday.
“The wait is finally over. The response from those who’ve seen Season 4 in theaters was that this is our best season, so I can’t wait to deliver these episodes free and easy to the world,” said Dallas Jenkins, the creator, producer, and director of the wildly popular TV series on Jesus’ life, in a press release Wednesday.
Jenkins first announced the stalling of Season Four to the app in early March, citing legal matters as reason for the delay. The season had premiered in theaters in February 2024, and after the delay was announced, all eight episodes were released in theaters the week of Easter at a discounted price.
The Chosen will release two new episodes a week on the app through the month of June, on Sundays and Thursdays. Season Four DVDs, Jenkins said, are also shipping out, allowing viewers to watch all eight episodes at once.
The legal dispute behind the delay involved The Chosen LLC, a company that now has 65 full-time employees, and its onetime partner Angel Studios, a media company based in Provo, Utah.
While Angel Studios—which was also behind the 2023 Christian thriller Sound of Freedom, which grossed over $250 million at the box office—was initially responsible for the primary distribution of the show, “that is no longer the case,” Jenkins told Religion News Service in an interview on May 21.
Jenkins said The Chosen LLC and Angel Studios had “different ideas of how to interpret both the contract and what’s going to sustain us in our future.” Ultimately, he said, the …
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by | May 30, 2024 | Uncategorized
His porcelain figurines sold millions while he built a church inspired by the Sistine Chapel.
Sam Butcher sometimes struggled to explain why Precious Moments figurines, his signature artistic creation, became such a cultural phenomenon. Half a million people joined special collectors’ clubs to get them. The manufacturer released 25 to 40 new ones every year. And Butcher, an art school dropout, earned tens of millions of dollars in annual royalties.
“I’m still … trying to figure out what it’s all about,” he once said. “I’m just an artist. I just license my art.”
But if you asked the women and men who bought the porcelain statuettes—rosy-cheeked children with teardrop-shaped eyes that filled mantels, shelves, tables, and curio cabinets—they could tell definitely you.
“They’re cute,” an Illinois woman explained to the Chicago Tribune. “And they have an inspirational title that has a lot of everyday meaning.”
A man in East Tennessee who collected more than 200 with his wife said he found the figurines irresistible. He always had to pick them up to read the titles on the bottom. One was called “God Loveth a Cheerful Giver,” and it was a little girl with a wagon full of puppies to give away. Another said “I Will Make You Fishers of Men,” and it was a boy with a pole and line, hook snagged in the waist of his smaller friend’s pants.
“I really like the little sayings,” the retired postal worker told the Knoxville News Sentinel.
A woman at a collectors’ club at a Lutheran church in Moline, Iowa, said the figurines were just “silly things” that nevertheless “grow on you,” but her friend, who started collecting Precious Moments pieces after she got her first as an …
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by | May 30, 2024 | Uncategorized
An Orthodox Jew advises American evangelicals on how to keep—and pass on—the faith in an increasingly pagan culture.
Consider this a dispatch from my neighborhood to yours. Christianity Today doesn’t typically publish Orthodox Jewish writers, so you might consider me a distant cousin, writing in an effort to understand and encourage American evangelicals as they adjust to a dominant culture that is increasingly postmodern and even pagan. While Jews see this era as but another chapter in a long journey, many American evangelicals seem to have lost their ballast—and with it, the cohesion and vision necessary to flourish as a minority.
What can this distant cousin offer? Let me take you on a tour of my community. Anchored by the rules of Shabbat (Sabbath), we live one day a week (plus major holidays) as if we were, as one visiting pastor friend remarked, “from the 1950s,” before automobiles, television, and apps came to dominate daily life.
Streets fill with people walking—to a neighbor’s house, a park, a prayer service, a celebration—and we encounter many familiar faces and get caught up in conversations along the way. Weekly life is sustained day in and day out by a strong set of place-based institutions working in tandem—schools, synagogues, restaurants, charities, and interfamily networks—together creating a string of close-knit communities across the country.
How is this different from what CT readers most likely observe and experience in their daily rhythms? Socialized to believe that their culture was the majority, it seems Christians have invested much less than Orthodox Jews in four key elements of faithful living required to thrive as a minority: educating children separately from the broader society, marking space and time to bolster community cohesion, …
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by | May 30, 2024 | Uncategorized
The New York Times reporter’s memoir can refine our perspective on pursuing justice in a fallen world.
I’ve got my top summer reading recommendation ready for you. In fact, I’m recommending you buy two copies of the book, Nicholas Kristof’s Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life. There are two reasons why.
I’ll get to the second eventually. But the first is more straightforward: This is a memoir from someone who has led one of the most dramatically interesting lives of the last half-century, as an acclaimed foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times.
If you make a list of the world’s most shattering and consequential conflicts, catastrophes, and convulsions over the last 40 years, the odds are very high that Kristof was present to witness them. So too are the odds that someone was threatening to shoot him: warlords smuggling conflict diamonds in the Congo, Sudanese soldiers roaming the deserts amid the Darfur genocide, Egyptian security gangs wielding straight razors in Tahrir Square, Israeli soldiers patrolling the dark streets of Beirut, ragged teenagers marauding with AK-47s in West Africa, or nervous American soldiers trying to contain an Iraqi mob robbing a bank in Basra.
There is an even longer list of terrifying events where the weapons were being directed at people standing next to Kristof. Such scenes involve Tiananmen Square protestors being massacred by the Chinese army, heroin traffickers in Afghanistan, security forces in collapsing Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, or rioting mobs parading heads on pikes in Indonesia.
The book’s narrative would be implausible as a movie script, but it’s irresistible as personal storytelling because there is no hint of bravado, attention seeking, or adrenaline addiction. We simply find ourselves following a very sincere …
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