Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category
Friday, March 19th, 2010
Habib Toumi; 19/3/10
Kuwait’s parliament is heading towards more divisions after a conservative lawmaker pledged to bring up in the parliament the issue of making the veil mandatory for elected and appointed officials. “It is obvious that according to the constitution that states that Islam is the country’s religion, and to the rules, women elected to parliament or appointed as ministers should wear the veil,” MP Mohammad Al Hayef said. “The government is not able to apply the law or to impose the veil on its minister, Moudhi Al Humood. The government seems not able to choose a veiled ministry. Therefore, we will take up the issue to the parliament and allow the nation to see how the law is being broken,” he said at the weekly parliamentary session.
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Tags: Human Rights, Kuwait, Religion, Womens Rights
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Friday, March 19th, 2010
19/3/10
DNA tests have allowed a judge in Miami to reunite a baby rescued from the rubble of the earthquake in Haiti with her parents. Aid workers, meanwhile, say the 33 children illegally taken by US missionaries in the aftermath of the quake have been reunited with their families. The baby was two months old when she was pulled alive from the ruins in Port-au-Prince, four days after the quake in which 220,000 people died. An American rescue team believed baby Jenny was an orphan and flew her to the Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami for treatment. She was dubbed ”the miracle baby” after surviving for so long without milk or water. DNA tests proved she was the daughter of Nadine Devilme and Junior Alexis, who lost everything in the earthquake on January 12.
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Tags: Christianity, Haiti, Human Rights, USA
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Friday, March 19th, 2010
Roger Boyes; 19/3/10
The most famous choir in the world has been caught up in the wave of paedophile scandals sweeping Germany and Austria, with eight former choristers denouncing their teachers in the past few days. An open letter from the management of the Vienna Boys’ Choir to parents expressed regret at the incidents, which were recounted by former singers now aged between 40 and 70. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, called yesterday for truth and clarity in investigating paedophile abuse not only in church institutions but everywhere within the educational system. “We all agree that sexual abuse against children is a despicable crime,” she told parliament. So far about 300 claims of sexual abuse have been made by former pupils of German church schools and of non-denominational boarding schools, which have upset Church-State relations.
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Tags: Christianity, Germany, Pedophilia
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Thursday, March 18th, 2010
18/3/10
A professor of Islamic jurisprudence at Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh has called for the construction of extra floors just for women at the Grand Mosque in Makkah in order to prevent them from mingling with men during tawaf (circling of the Holy Kaaba) and prayers. “Mingling of sexes is not allowed in the Grand Mosque and outside the mosque according to the Shariah,” Dr. Yousuf Al-Ahmed told Arab News. “There are two types of mingling of sexes; mingling that takes place casually in the passages and at the Jamrat in Mina; and permanent mingling that takes place during tawaf causing congestion and harm to women,” Al-Ahmed told Arab News. Al-Ahmed called for the building of separate floors for women after demolishing the expansions carried out during the Ottoman era and the rule of King Saud, adding that it would create more room for the increasing number of pilgrims who come for Haj and Umrah.
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Tags: Human Rights, Religion, Saudi Arabia
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Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Christopher Hitchens; 18/3/10
On March 10, the Vatican’s chief exorcist, the Reverend Gabriele Amorth (who has held this demanding post for 25 years), was quoted as saying that “the Devil is at work inside the Vatican”, and that “when one speaks of `the smoke of Satan’ in the holy rooms, it is all true, including these latest stories of violence and pedophilia”. This can perhaps be taken as confirmation that something horrible has indeed been going on in the holy precincts, though most inquiries show it to have a perfectly good material explanation. Concerning the most recent revelations about the steady complicity of the Vatican in the ongoing, indeed endless, scandal of child rape, a few days later a spokesman for the Holy See made a concession in the guise of a denial. It was clear, said the Reverend Federico Lombardi, that an attempt was being made “to find elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse”. He went on to say that “those efforts have failed”. He was wrong twice. In the first place, nobody has had to strive to find such evidence: it has surfaced, as it was bound to do. In the second place, this extension of the awful scandal to the top-most level of the Roman Catholic Church has only just begun.
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Tags: Christianity, Pedophilia
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Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Tess Livingstone; 18/3/10
Four bishops, 40 priests and thousands of parishioners from the Traditional Anglican Communion will petition the Vatican by Easter to be received into the Catholic Church. Archbishop John Hepworth of Adelaide, primate of the TAC, said 26 parishes in Western Australia, Tasmania, NSW, Victoria, far north Queensland and South Australia hoped to be united with Rome by the end of the year. The move comes as 100 Anglican parishes in the US and some in Canada have announced their decisions to convert to Catholicism en masse, voting to take up an offer made by Pope Benedict XVI in November in his apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus (On Groups of Anglicans). The initiative allows Anglican bishops, priests and entire congregations, if they wish, to join Rome. Archbishop Hepworth, 65, who is married with three children, said the Pope had allowed for a continuation of Anglican practices, including a married clergy.
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Tags: Australia, Christianity
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Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
17/3/10; (4 Items)
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/ theaustralian/comments/disgraceful_crimes/
The cancer of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church seeps ever upwards, and it seems very unlikely that knowledge of these disgraceful crimes did not reach the Vatican. Could it be that even one of the popes was guilty of child abuse offences? Rather than protect the children, the policy of the church was for many years clearly to protect the perpetrators. I wonder how the good Christian gentlemen can live with themselves. Dave Arnold, Calista, WA
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Tags: Christianity, Germany, Human Rights, Ireland, Pedophilia
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Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
Nicolas Rothwell; 16/3/10
It was mid-April 2003 when a young researcher named Judy Lovell first met Kathleen Kemarre Wallace, the best-known artist of Santa Teresa community just south of Alice Springs. The connection forged between Lovell and Mrs Wallace, the name by which the artist is known, was immediate and intuitive. They began sharing stories, impressions and ideas. Their tie deepened into a bond of friendship. Lovell became the long-term art co-ordinator for the little community, which specialises in intricately designed and brightly coloured ceramics and works on canvas. Gradually she grew to be the principal recorder of Mrs Wallace’s memories, reflections and epic tales. The two decided to begin working on a bilingual book project, in English and Mrs Wallace’s Arrernte language, and majestically illustrated, binding art with country, individual artist with old tradition. Listen Deeply, Let These Stories In, published late last year by the Alice Springs-based IAD Press, is a striking production: a kind of multimedia art project in print, complete with photographs of rock engravings and sweeping desert landscapes, accounts of bush fruits and weather phenomena, and an accompanying CD that captures the rise and fall of Mrs Wallace’s voice as she recounts the fine details of her story cycles.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Painting, Religion
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Monday, March 15th, 2010
15/3/10; (4 Items)
The Vatican is fighting attempts to link Pope Benedict XVI to child sex abuse in a counter-offensive against widening pedophilia scandals. “It is clearly evident that in the past few days there are some who have sought – with a dogged focus on Regensburg and Munich – elements to personally implicate the Holy Father in questions of abuse,” spokesman Federico Lombardi told Vatican Radio over the weekend. “It is clear that these efforts have failed.” Earlier, the Pope’s former diocese of Munich had confirmed a report that, as an archbishop in 1980, he approved housing for a priest who had been accused of forcing an 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex. Six years later, the priest was given a suspended sentence for child sex offences. The archdiocese said he still worked in Bavaria, with no known repeat violations.
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Tags: Christianity, Pedophilia
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Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Caroline Baum’ 13/3/10;
Interview: Elif Shafak; The Forty Rules of Love is published by Viking
When I get a text message from Elif Shafak that reads “Meet me at Starbucks”, my heart sinks. Not just because of the coffee but because it’s such an un-Turkish place for an encounter in Istanbul with the country’s best-selling female author. I had hoped for something more exotic. A steamy hamam (bath house), perhaps? Luckily, Starbucks is too busy to accommodate us and Shafak leads me instead to a cafe inside a department store where shoppers whirl around us with dervish-like frenzy. “This is where I write,” she says, settling at the communal table. “Here with the noise, the music, the bustle. I find it stimulating.”
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Tags: Gender Womens Rights, Human Rights, Turkey
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Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Rafael Behr; 13/3/10;
The Invention of the Jewish People; by Shlomo Sand is published by Verso.
Shlomo Sand presses his thumbs together, palms outward, fingers stretching up like the branches of a candelabra. “If you can visualise it …” The air above our table is meant to be the Mediterranean region soon after the birth of Christ. Sand’s hands are rival monotheistic cults. “There are two kinds of Judaism: Christianity and a kind of Judaism that starts to close in on itself because of the success of Christianity.” The hands drift apart. The fingers on the right withdraw into a fist. “The vision that we have of Judaism today came out of this closedness because of fear; because of the conditions imposed on Judaism if it was to continue under Christianity.”
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Tags: History, Human Rights, Israel, Religion
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Saturday, March 13th, 2010
13/3/08;
The Recent Headlines tell only a small part of a bigger, more disturbing story. A Malaysian mother of two caned in public for drinking a beer. A threat by the Malaysian Home Ministry to close down one of the country’s top- selling English-speaking newspapers, The Star, for daring to criticise the caning of three other women for having “illicit sex”, damning the paper’s editorials as “an insult to Islam and Islamic law”. A new law in Sumatra’s Aceh province authorising death by stoning for women caught in adultery.
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Tags: Religion, Womens Rights
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Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Ayaan Hirsi Ali; 13/3/10;
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the author of the memoir Infidel and the forthcoming Nomad. She is the founder of the AHA Foundation (www.theahafoundation.org), which defends the rights of women against militant Islam.
This week brought the 100th anniversary of the founding of International Women’s Day.
- A cause for celebration?
Yes and no.
Women’s emancipation will not progress as fast in the next 100 years as it did in the past century. It may even regress.
Political freedoms — the right to vote and to run for office; free speech; economic freedom; access to education and paid work; sexual freedom; the right for an adult woman to conduct her private life as she sees fit — are relatively new gains for women in the West, all achieved at a breathtaking pace.
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Tags: Religion, Womens Rights
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Saturday, March 13th, 2010
13/3/10; Pat Lowe with Jimmy Pike Magabala Books
This important book about the daily life of Aborigines in the Great Sandy Desert area of Western Australia first appeared in 1990. It is the result of an extraordinary partnership between Jimmy Pike, a Walmajarri man who was born in the Great Sandy Desert, and Pat Lowe, a writer who grew up in England and emigrated to Western Australia in 1972. Lowe lived in the desert for three years with Pike. She observed and was respectful of the traditions and the knowledge Pike had acquired.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, History, Religion
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Saturday, March 13th, 2010
13/3/10
The head of Germany’s Roman Catholic Church has issued a new apology to victims of pedophile priests and announced the creation of a watchdog to deal with the abuse issue. “I want to repeat here in Rome the apology that I made two weeks ago,” Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg told a news conference in the Vatican after meeting Pope Benedict XVI yesterday. Zollitsch said the Pope had praised “the steps taken by the German Bishops Conference (including) the naming of a bishop as a special counsel” who would act as a watchdog on the issue of the sexual abuse of children. Pedophile priest scandals have swept Germany since late January, one coming close to the Pontiff’s brother Georg Ratzinger, a former choirmaster.
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Tags: Christianity, Germany, Pedohilia
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Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Tim Elliott; 13/3/10
Deep within the Pitt Rivers Museum, at the University of Oxford, is a box labelled ”Australia Ngaarindjeri 1900.55.292”. Inside is a human skull, one of four such Aboriginal drinking skulls held by the museum since 1900. Sealed with resin and with string loops for carrying, the skulls were traditionally used as cups by the Ngarrindjeri people of South Australia, who, according to the museum’s historical notes, ”generally prefer the skulls of their deceased parents or other near relations, to those of strangers”. Some time in the late 1800s, however, the skulls were collected by an English explorer and horseman called Harry Stockdale, and from there passed onto the museum. Now the Ngarrindjeri want them back.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Europe, Human Rights
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Racism, Religion | No Comments »
