A Christian Response to Brittany Maynard’s Decision to Die. Cardboard Stories That Will Make You Rethink The Way You Feel About Homeless People - #RethinkHomelessness. Critical Thinking Video Series: Should Felons Be Allowed to Vote? - Felon Voting - ProCon.org.
18 secrets to giving a presentation like Steve Jobs. Florida executes mentally ill man despite constitutional prohibition | World news. Florida has executed a schizophrenic man who believed that he was the immortal prince of God vested with superhuman powers including an ability to control the sun, despite the US constitution's prohibition against putting mentally ill people to death. John Ferguson, 65, was killed by lethal injection at 6pm on Monday. Earlier in the evening the US supreme court declined to hear a final petition from his lawyers. Although there was overwhelming evidence that the court's own interpretation of the US constitution was being disregarded, the justices gave no explanation for their decision to remain on the sidelines and allow the killing to go ahead.
Ferguson's legal team, backed by a raft of prominent legal and mental health organisations, had appealed to the nation's highest legal panel to step in on grounds that the execution would be a flagrant violation of the Eighth Amendment of the US constitution that bars "cruel and unusual punishment". "John Ferguson is without a doubt mentally ill. Do Corporations Have Religious Rights? New Crux of Contraceptives Court Fight. For-profit companies are still not exempt from the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) employer-provided contraceptives mandate, but that could change if Hobby Lobby successfully argues its case in federal court.
In the highest-profile of 60 lawsuits of this nature, the retail-craft giant asked the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals for an exemption from the HHS mandate Thursday, arguing that for-profit business owners " shouldn't face fines for not complying with mandatory contraceptive coverage simply because their business makes a profit. " It's an argument that courts previously have been hesitant to address, because it means weighing in on a key question , which CT addressed in February: Do corporations have federal religious freedom protection under the First Amendment?
According to the Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life, individuals and faith-based organizations have clear religious liberty protections. Federal appeals courts have split thus far. You Can't Buy Your Way to Social Justice | This Is Our City. I'm afraid of some American Christians. I am an American, but I haven't lived in the United States in a while. I live in Djibouti, a country in the Horn of Africa, and when you pick me up at the Minneapolis airport, I might invite you to coffee and suggest the wrong place—you know, one that doesn't serve fair-trade coffee.
I will arrive wearing the wrong jeans—ones sold by companies that don't offer fair wages. And I won't use the right vocabulary—the language used by Western bloggers to talk about social justice. I've spent more than a decade living among the wealthy and the poor and the uneducated and the doctoral students and Christians and Muslims. I'm trying to figure out how to love radically like Jesus and how to be radically in love with Jesus in a place with 60 percent unemployment, where the oldest university recently turned 13, and where 99.99 percent of nationals don't look like me, talk like me, think like me, or worship like me.
And so some American Christians scare me. Should Christians Be Rich? As members of the Church, we’ve all been exposed to various levels of teachings on prosperity and blessings. Honestly, all of the talk gets kind of confusing after a while. There are extremes on both sides—from those who believe that God wants to make us materially wealthy and that suffering means you aren’t right with God, to those who believe that material wealth is evil and we are only guaranteed trials this side of eternity. What's tricky is that everyone seems to have a verse to back up their beliefs. So what is the truth? If the Bible says, “We rejoice in our sufferings (Romans 5:3),” and also, “Test me in this ... and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it (Malachi 3:10),” then what can we really expect in this lifetime in regard to prosperity and wealth?
In my life, “considering everything as loss” was a process of giving up the temporary joy that I found in my “stuff.” 1. 2. 3. How Not to Die - Jonathan Rauch. Eric Ogden Dr. Angelo Volandes is making a film that he believes will change the way you die. The studio is his living room in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston; the control panel is his laptop; the camera crew is a 24-year-old guy named Jake; the star is his wife, Aretha Delight Davis. Volandes, a thickening mesomorph with straight brown hair that is graying at his temples, is wearing a T-shirt and shorts and looks like he belongs at a football game.
Davis, a beautiful woman of Guyanese extraction with richly braided hair, is dressed in a white lab coat over a black shirt and stands before a plain gray backdrop. “Remember: always slow,” Volandes says. “Sure, hon,” Davis says, annoyed. Volandes claps to sync the sound. You are seeing this video because you are making medical decisions for a person with advanced dementia. Her narration will be woven into a 10-minute film. This woman lives in a nursing home and has advanced dementia. “You sound proud of that,” I say. Volandes nods. Astounding View Of The US-Mexican Border. Richard Cohen: Seeking vengeance, not justice, for Colorado theater killings.
Colorado has a long way to go before it can execute Holmes. The barriers to execution are always high, and in this case they might be insurmountable. Holmes would be in considerably more jeopardy if he were in Virginia. The commonwealth, sir, is No. 1 in the country in the ghastly statistical category of executions per sentencing. From 1977 through 2010, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, Virginia condemned 149 people but executed only 108 of them. This gives the state an execution per sentencing ratio of 0.725. (Texas is second — 932 death sentences and 464 executions for a ratio of 0.498.) Colorado handed down only 15 death sentences in that period and executed only one person. These numbers provide some insight into how randomly and capriciously the death penalty is applied. In Colorado, all systems failed the victims of the Aurora movie theater shooting. We did not know what to do about Holmes before his crime and we don’t know what to do with him now.
GOP should stand firm against drug legalization. For his part, President Obama has said more about the NCAA men’s basketball bracket than he has about the dangers posed by illegal drugs. Gil Kerlikowske, the president’s “drug czar,” said last month that “The administration has not done a particularly good job of, one, talking about marijuana as a public health issue, and number two, talking about what can be done and where we should be headed on our drug policy.” This is a startling admission, and there is a cost to abdication. The drug-legalization movement is well-funded and making inroads. Voters in Washington state and Colorado passed ballot initiatives in November legalizing marijuana for recreational use. A bill to legalize marijuana was introduced in the Maryland House of Delegates last month. And Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to end federal prohibitions on marijuana use.
This is the perfect time for Republicans to offer counterarguments grounded in medical science, common sense and human experience.
A Mighty River or a Slippery Slope? - Leadership Journal - ChristianityTodayLibrary.com. A Mighty River or a Slippery Slope? Examining the cultural and theological forces behind the new interest in justice.Mark Labberton September 27, 2010 Why would Lakeside Covenant Church cancel its Sunday services in order to assemble AIDS caregiver kits for use in Africa instead? What's happening when the Sunday coffee hour on the patio at Praise Center becomes a weekly open-air breakfast for indigent people? Why would 25 adults in one church use most of their annual vacation to travel to New Orleans and clean houses ruined by Katrina, while another 10 from this same congregation go to Washington, D.C., to lobby their congressional representatives to continue support for Katrina victims five years after the tragedy?
Are these signs of a dynamic ministry embodying the wholistic gospel of Jesus Christ for all, including the poor and vulnerable and oppressed? Understanding the times. Obama Affirms 'Evangelical' Principles for Immigration Reform. Do We Live in a Post-Truth Era? "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) famously quipped. But when it comes to social and environmental problems nowadays, nearly everyone thinks he is entitled to his own facts, and an army of experts is on hand to manufacture and promote the carefully curated truths they require. The Progressive Era dream of empowering nonpartisan experts to solve social, economic, and environmental problems has failed spectacularly. What happened? Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger grapple with this question in their recent essay "Wicked Polarization: How Prosperity, Democracy, and Experts Divided America," which in turn highlights insights from a 1973 paper by the urban planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber.
Rittel and Webber drew a useful distinction between "tame" and "wicked" social problems. That would indeed be a good start, but Rittel and Webber hit on a better way to adapt. Why Matthew Vines Is Wrong About the Bible and Homosexuality. Matthew Vines has made a name for himself. He took two years off from college to study the question of homosexuality and the church. At the end, he came out bearing what he takes to be good news: Same-sex sexual activity is not contrary to the teaching of the church, or so he tells us.
His arguments are nothing new. They are the same historical and exegetical claims that have driven revisionist readings on this question for decades. What he has done is to present these claims in the relatively approachable format of an hour-long video online, a video which to date has garnered an impressive 400,000 views. His arguments vary in strength. The fact that malakoi is, in 1 Corinthians 9, paired with arsenokoitai makes the most plausible reading a reference to active and passive partners in same-sex intercourse, rather than a broader sense of immoral indulgence. C. No approach to Scripture can be unmediated. What is the role of the Holy Spirit in all of this? Dan Savage Was Right.
Out of Ur: Gay Rights & Religious Liberty. *NOTE: This message was delivered at the Q Cities conference in Denver on September 27, 2012. My actual comments may have been slightly different from what is written here. Q restricts presentations to a maximum of 18 minutes, so this message could only skim the surface of the complicated intersection of gay rights and religious liberty.
When I was a freshman in college, the GLBA–the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Alliance–organized an annual Gay Awareness week. What I remember most was "Jean Day. " The student leaders of the GLBA posted signs all over campus announcing that students could express their support for gay rights by wearing jeans on Thursday. Of course denim is a second skin for most college students, and it was obvious the GLBA was seeking to inflate their perception of support. The tactic was so transparent few people paid attention—until a conservative Christian student group began putting up their own signs. The battle lines were drawn. Science Proves the Unborn Are Human Beings. Abortion is a controversial issue, and at the center of the controversy is the question of whether the unborn are human beings. If they are, then abortion kills a human being. Many people think that this is somehow a religious issue and involves religious questions like when the soul arrives. Some people deliberately try to frame the issue this way in order to shut down rational discussion of the subject.
So let's set the question of religious aside entirely. Instead, let's look at something we should all be able to agree upon: science. What does science say about whether the unborn are human beings? The "Don't Kill Humans" Rule It's a fair question. After all, if somebody is an adult we don't say it's a "religious issue" whether he is a human being. It is a human universal--a principle honored in all human cultures--that you cannot kill other human beings at will. It is always and everywhere wrong to deliberately kill an innocent, non-aggressive human being. What Next? Scholars Online | Choices Program. Teaching Tools | Choices Program. The Choices Program provides a number of teaching tools for use with Choices resources in the classroom. They include teaching activities, graphic organizers, and assessment tools. Most can be used with a range of units. Scholars Online Videos Brings university scholars into your classroom.
Each video features a scholar answering a specific question in his or her field of expertise. Brief and informative, these videos are designed to supplement Choices curricula and are conveniently organized by readings, by lessons and by scholars, so you can choose how to access them. Scholars Online Videos are also embedded in our iBooks textbooks. Considering the Role of Values in Public Policy Activity One of our mandates as teachers is to help students become active citizens by entering into the national dialogue on public policy issues. Online Learning Module Guidelines for Deliberation These guidelines are designed to help students understand and practice deliberative dialogue. Assessment Tools. Doing the Right Thing. Growing Up With Two Moms: The Untold Children’s View. Forty-one years I’d lived, and nobody—least of all gay activists—had wanted me to speak honestly about the complicated gay threads of my life.
If for no other reason than this, Mark Regnerus deserves tremendous credit—and the gay community ought to be crediting him rather than trying to silence him. Dr. Lopez is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Northridge The children of same-sex couples have a tough road ahead of them—I know, because I have been there. The last thing we should do is make them feel guilty if the strain gets to them and they feel strange. [...]
Regnerus’s study identified 248 adult children of parents who had same-sex romantic relationships. Like my story, these 248 people’s stories deserve to be told. So why the code of silence from LGBT leaders? Note: The Witherspoon Institute is an independent research center that works to enhance public understanding of the moral foundations of free and democratic societies. Let Chick-fil-A Fly Free. RECENTLY, Dan Cathy, the president of the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A, commented publicly on his beliefs about same-sex marriage. He emphasized that his business is very supportive of family and that Chick-fil-A is family-owned and family-led. He advocated for what he called “the biblical definition of the family unit” and observed that supporting same-sex marriage invites “God’s judgment on our nation.” Predictably, Mr.
Cathy’s comments drew a strong response from opponents and supporters alike. In protest, the Jim Henson Company said it would no longer make toys for Chick-fil-A; in support, the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, now a television host, declared a Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day. But less predictable — and troubling — was that officials in a number of cities expressed not only their ire but also their desire to keep Chick-fil-A out of their towns.
As a gay man, I’m disheartened by statements like Mr. But that’s my opinion. ProCon.org - Pros and Cons of Controversial Issues.
Gay Marriage. Abortion.