The glory of God always felt like something far off. God is way up in heaven, and if we’re lucky enough or work hard enough, we can see it. That’s not how it is. It was this shift to wondering if glory was all around and we’re just missing it, to truly seeing and paying attention and noticing things.

In one corner, there is a man with a famous voice; in the other, a group of women who have been, until now, silent. Everyone in the country, it seems, has an opinion about the allegations of violence that have been directed against former CBC radio star Jian Ghomeshi....

Around the country, people huffed in judgment. Why were the other women anonymous? Why hadn't they spoken earlier? Why had no one called the police? The judgmental brigade didn't consider that the 10 seconds it takes to type a condemnation on Twitter or Facebook is hardly comparable to the epic slog that "speaking up" actually entails – the courage it requires, and the commitment.

But it is a story about why women are often silent about the crimes of sexual violence committed against them. And why these reasons – which are internal and external, personal and cultural – are so similar wherever women are assaulted around the world. Which is to say, everywhere.

THERE IS much outrage in the United States that a foreign state might have attempted to influence its 2016 presidential election. The release on October 17 of a cache of previously classified telegrams sent from the U.S. embassy in Jakarta provides new and damning evidence that the U.S. is no stranger to the dark arts of covert regime change.

Nothing justifies the mass extermination of civilians. The telegrams confirm the U.S. government knew full well that this is what it was supporting. We live in a time when truth and lies are becoming increasingly blurred. This makes it only the more important to hold those in power to account.

Conservative Christians, said Molly Worthen, a historian of American religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have developed an intellectual strategy for engaging with the public called “presuppositionalism.”
It holds that evangelicals should examine other people’s underlying suppositions before debating them. If those people or groups don’t adhere to the right worldview — one that accepts the Bible as the inerrant word of God — they should not be trusted.

This spring, Bible classes such as Trenton’s are on the minds of many here in Mercer County. For decades, the county’s public schools have offered a weekly Bible class during the school day — 30 minutes at the elementary level and 45 minutes in middle school. Bible classes on school time are a rarity in public education, but here they are a long-standing tradition. The program is not mandatory, but almost every child in the district attends. And there is widespread support for the classes: Parents and community members help raise nearly $500,000 a year to pay for the Bible in the Schools program....

Now Bible in the Schools is facing a stiff legal challenge. Two county residents with school-age children argue in a lawsuit that the program violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment and the West Virginia constitution.

SUPPORTERS OF reproductive rights mobilized in Madison, Wisconsin, on November 4 to expose a fake clinic in a rally called for by the Madison chapter of the National Organization for Women.
The rally was held outside a Madison-area "crisis pregnancy center," which poses as an abortion provider to lure vulnerable pregnant people through its door and then coerce them into not choosing to have an abortion.......

Currently, there are five separate anti-choice bills making their way through the state legislature, with little in the way of vocal opposition from the left.

One thing is definitely going right for U.S. President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans who control Congress: they are steadily getting conservatives appointed as judges, advancing their long-held ambition of reshaping the federal judiciary.

The bakery chain Greggs has apologised for offending Christians with a nativity scene advert that replaces Jesus with a sausage roll.

But what about the premise—that Sophia Robot might, in theory, be considered Muslim, or Christian, or Jewish, or Buddhist, or Jain? Could Sophia, or somebot (sic) like her, be raised within, or convert into, and practice a faith? And, if so, could a robot serve as a rabbi or imam, or as Pope?

About three hundred years before Ashkenazi pondered the golem, the Muslim scholar Muhammad ibn Abd Allah Shibli took up the question of whether, according to Sharia law, a jinn, or spirit, could marry a human