by | May 24, 2024 | Uncategorized
Federal appeals courts are starting to wrestle with how nondiscrimination laws apply to religious organizations when it comes to sexual orientation and gender identity.
After sustaining a court defeat in November, this week Christian humanitarian aid organization World Vision appealed an employment discrimination case to the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. A lower federal judge had set damages at $120,000 in the case earlier this month after ruling that the organization discriminated when it decided not to hire a job candidate in a gay marriage.
The case shows that gears are beginning to turn in federal appeals courts on the unresolved issue of how federal nondiscrimination law applies to religious organizations when it comes to sexual orientation and gender identity. World Vision’s appeal to the Ninth Circuit follows a ruling this month from the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in favor of a Catholic high school in a similar situation.
The courts are specifically considering the implications of the 2020 US Supreme Court ruling Bostock v. Clayton County. In that case, the high court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to gender identity and sexual orientation. The question for appeals courts now: What is the balance between religious liberty and those new Title VII protections against discrimination?
A federal district court judge ruled in November 2023 that World Vision had violated Title VII when it rescinded a job offer for a customer service position from a woman, Aubry McMahon, after learning about her same-sex marriage. World Vision had argued that the employment decision was justified because it has written standards of conduct that marriage is between a man and a woman. The judge had earlier ruled in favor of World Vision and then reversed his own ruling with a 47-page order.
Lawyers CT interviewed at the time said …
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by | May 24, 2024 | Uncategorized
I should have invited Ruth to our wedding—to acknowledge how much our ordinary moments point to the story of Christ.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
On Monday of next week, my wife, Maria, and I celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. As I think about those two kids standing at the altar, I would want to say “I do” all over again to everything. One of the very few exceptions would be one decision that had to do with the wedding, not with the marriage. After 30 years, I’ve changed my mind about the biblical text I wouldn’t let us read.
Somebody suggested that we read at the ceremony a passage from the Old Testament book of Ruth, one that we heard read or sung at almost every wedding at the time. In the King James Version (which was what people almost always used), the text reads, “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God” (1:16). It’s about the young widow Ruth from Moab, pledging to her dead husband’s mother, Naomi, that she would go with her to Naomi’s homeland of Israel.
I believed then, and still do, that all Scripture is inspired and “profitable” (2 Tim. 3:16, ESV throughout), but I didn’t think that particular Scripture was appropriate for a wedding.
“It’s not about marriage,” I said. “It’s about someone taking a trip with her mother-in-law.” I wanted something about the mystery of Christ in Ephesians 5 or about love from Song of Songs or about Jesus at the wedding at Cana. I could even have lived, I said, with 1 Corinthians 13. Of all of the things about the wedding ceremony, I only insisted on two—that we use the traditional vows and that we read some other text than that one. You could say that I was …
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by | May 24, 2024 | Uncategorized
Gospel music is soaring in popularity in Brazil, leading artists with little Christian background to release worship songs and pastors to mull motives.
“Dwell in me, Jesus,” sings Ana Castela in “Agradeço” (I Thank You), a single the 20-year-old Brazilian pop star released in December. The lyrics resemble words that evangelical congregations sing in contemporary church services across the country: I surrender, I trust, I accept, and I thank you.
Castela emerged on Brazil’s music scene two years ago and is also known as “the Boiadeira” (Cowgirl), the title of her first hit, which features lyrics like, “She gave up wine for beer, the preppy girl became a cowgirl.” The majority of her music focuses on relationships, betrayals, and drinking (themes common in sertanejo, a local genre that somewhat resembles American country music).
Though she grew up Catholic and occasionally sang at evangelical youth services as a teenager, Castela broke into the industry as a mainstream pop star. “Agradeço” is her first Christian single as a solo artist. (It also marked the debut of Agropraise, a Christianized branch of the sertanejo label Agromusic.)
The Boiadeira is one of an increasing number of mainstream artists crossing into the Christian market and debuting gospel and worship tracks over the past decade. In 2022, Simone, from the sertanejo duo Simone and Simaria, sang “Sobre as Águas” (Over the Water) with Christian contemporary artist Davi Sacer. In 2021, forró singer Wesley Safadão performed with the band Casa Worship in “Deus tem um plano” (God Has a Plan). In 2018, pop singer Luan Santana and the sertanejo duo Marcos & Belutti recorded versions of well-known gospel songs.
Since 2015, Brazilian gospel music—gospel referring in this context to a generalized …
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by | May 24, 2024 | Uncategorized
Oscar Siwali is mobilizing conflict mediators as the country goes to the polls. He only wishes his organization could train more.
Oscar Siwali remembers watching Nelson Mandela’s triumphant walk as he left prison after 27 years. In 1990, as the young pastor of a Baptist church, Siwali saw himself as an evangelical focused on winning souls and tending to his flock’s spiritual needs, not needing to prioritize political concerns. Nonetheless, he shared the pride of his people’s successful anti-apartheid activism that demanded “Free South Africa Now,” an outcry that inspired worldwide solidarity.
But just three years later, a far-right white nationalist assassinated Chris Hani, a leader of the South African Communist Party —an attack that threatened to derail South Africa’s transition from the oppressive white-minority rule to a democratic government that represented the entire country.
When Hani’s murder threatened to unleash a civil war that South Africans had labored so many decades to avoid, Siwali, like fellow Christian leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu, realized his faith compelled him to action. He began to preach peace in his sermons and to talk to those who had taken to the streets.
“I saw a different way of the work that I was called into, where I wasn’t just in service from the pulpit,” Siwali said. “That was truly my first revelation in seeing the importance of the clergy being out there, engaging with people … and [figuratively] taking that pulpit and placing it in the center of a community.”
In 2013, Siwali founded SADRA, a faith-based organization that trains people of all ages and backgrounds to be conflict mediators in their communities. It also has special programs for local church leaders, whom SADRA believes can be most effective in areas prone to violence …
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by | May 24, 2024 | Uncategorized
Furiosa begins with a retelling of the biblical Fall. After its apocalypse comes something new.
One of the first lines of dialogue in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a question: “As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?”
Across its 148-minute running time, Furiosa offers various responses to that inquiry, presenting a post-apocalyptic set of scenarios bound in blood, gasoline, and bullets. Ultimately, the film settles on hope—however foolish it may seem—as the only way forward. The desolation of what’s old, it insists, can make a way for ‘all things new” (Rev. 21:5).
George Miller returns to direct this spinoff and prequel to his thunderous 2015 epic, Mad Max: Fury Road. That film took place over the course of three days and two nights; Furiosa occurs over almost two decades, told in five pulse-pounding chapters. Miller takes his time exploring the transformation of an innocent young girl into the liberation warrior we find in Fury Road.
We first meet an adolescent Furiosa (Alyla Browne) with her mother (Charlee Fraser) in their home, the Green Place of Many Mothers. The rest of the world is a barren wasteland, ravaged by the compounding effects of climate change and nonstop warfare. The Green Place, by contrast, is a literal Garden of Eden, rife with foliage, wildlife, and fresh water. In a playful riff on the Genesis story, Furiosa opens the film by picking a ripe peach from a tree.
All too soon, paradise is lost. Marauders kidnap Furiosa, seeking to bring knowledge of the Green Place to their leader, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), a cruel and histrionic warlord who dreams of plundering the abundance for himself. Unable to save her daughter, Furiosa’s mother gives her a peach pit to remember home by and urges her to find her way back. From the moment Furiosa …
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