Scrolling around...February 16, 2013

Fourth Grader Receives Assignment About Infidelity

The teacher hadn’t actually read the assignment she gave out?

It’s That Burn-a-Church-after-Friday Prayers Time of the Week
Mid East Christian News (MCN) reports with breaking news that a crowd of enraged Muslims in the town of Sarsana, Fayoum [southwest of Cairo], set fire to the Mar Guirguis Church today, Friday, February 15, after prayers.
The angry mob set the entire roof alight, says MCN, “and the priest was smuggled out before the crowd could assault him.” I wonder if he was lowered in a basket through an opening in the wall like Saul of Tarsus? Actually this was the only bright spot in the entire story because the priest was helped to escape by a Muslim family...

No exams on Wiccan, Pagan holidays at University of Missouri?
...The university’s latest “Guide to Religions: Major Holidays and Suggested Accommodations” — designed to help faculty know when and when not to schedule exams and other student activities — lists eight Wiccan and Pagan holidays and events right alongside more mainstream occasions...

So, not only are taxpayers funding free cell phones, we're also paying for street teams to hock them at hospitals, soup kitchens, carnivals and shelters.

Westernized Zen and the art of hiding sexual abuse
...In this case, however, the leader is Joshu Sasaki Roshi, one of the most famous Zen Buddhist monks in the world and a teacher who has had a tremendous impact in American elite culture. Now, it is being alleged (and in some cases confirmed) that since the 1960s he has sexually abused many, perhaps 100s, of his followers in Southern California and elsewhere...The allegations had lingered, literally, for decades and were allowed to become, in the words of one figure in the scandal “a tribal secret for 50 years.”...