National Cathedral Sees No Islamic Evil; Westminster Abbey acknowledges Mohammed...more

Nigeria Says It Rescued Hundreds From Suspected Boko Haram Territory...The army asserted in a Twitter post on Tuesday that it had rescued 200 girls and 93 abducted women in the Sambisa Forest, where Boko Haram has long been suspected of operating. The army offered few details, but the hundreds of schoolgirls kidnapped from Chibok more than a year ago were not among those rescued, a spokesman later told Reuters.

 

The mass abduction ignited international alarm at Boko Haram’s unchecked rampages across northern Nigeria. In response, the government has repeatedly declared in the past year that it had reached a cease-fire with Boko Haram, that the girls would soon be rescued, that they had been located and even, on a previous occasion, that they had been rescued. The claims quickly proved to be untrue.

 

Human rights groups say Boko Haram has kidnapped hundreds of women, and possibly thousands, in recent years...

200 Women and Girls Rescued from Sambia Forest are Not from Chibok

Nepal Earthquake Death Toll Passes 5,000 People; Samaritan's Purse Reports 'Incredible Destruction, Death, and Tragedy'

The Blue-City Model: Baltimore shows how progressivism has failed urban America ...Nothing excuses the violence of rampaging students or the failure of city officials to stop it before Maryland’s Governor called in the National Guard. But as order starts to return to the streets, and the usual political suspects lament the lack of economic prospects for the young men who rioted, let’s not forget who has run Baltimore and Maryland for nearly all of the last 40 years.

The men and women in charge have been Democrats, and their governing ideas are “progressive.” This model, with its reliance on government and public unions, has dominated urban America as once-vibrant cities such as Baltimore became shells of their former selves. In 1960 Baltimore was America’s sixth largest city with 940,000 people. It has since shed nearly a third of its population and today isn’t in the top 25.

The dysfunctions of the blue-city model are many, but the main failures are three: high crime, low economic growth and failing public schools that serve primarily as jobs programs for teachers and administrators rather than places of learning...

Update from Dean of Nepal on the Nepal Earthquake

National Cathedral Presentation Sees No Islamic Evil  “My Christian faith coexists happily with the largely Muslim culture in which I grew up” in the Middle East, stated counterfactually Grace Said while introducing the April 7 National Cathedral presentation “An Introduction of Islam in the U.S.”  Said, sister of the late leftist academic and Arab/Islam apologist Edward Said, set the tone for an event before a conference hall audience of about 60 that glossed over the troubling Islamist and anti-Israel aspects of its participants.

The Episcopalian Said revealed a strange priority of religious repression concerns.  Overlooking a long history of Islamic persecution of Christians and other minorities (see here, here, here, and here), Said worried that “Islamophobia is on the rise” in the United States “based in large part on fear of the other.”  National Cathedral Canon Patty Johnson’s opening prayer emphasized Said’s and the evening’s ecumenical theme by imploring the “Holy One” to unite Christians with “Muslim brothers and sisters” into “one loving people.”...

Westminster Abbey acknowledges Mohammed in succession of prophets  ...In Islamic theology, Mohammed was ‘The Prophet’ who came to fulfil and complete the partial revelations of all preceding prophets. Muslims believe that his coming was prophesied by Jesus: ‘But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father..‘ (Jn 15:26). The ‘Comforter’ or ‘Advocate’ (NIV) whom Christians believe to be the Holy Spirit is, for Muslims, Mohammed. So when he is declared in Westminster Abbey to be ‘The Chosen One’, it is not simply a benign multifaith expression of ecumenical respect in a commemorative service of reconciliation: it is a dogmatic affirmation of a perfected prophethood to which Jesus is subordinate, and His divinity thereby denied.

It may not be very PC or neighbourly or conducive to interfaith relations to say it, but Mohammed was a false prophet (Jer 14:14-16; 1Jn 4:1; Acts 4:12; 2Cor 11:3f). By rejecting the crucifixion and denying the resurrection of Christ (who is not the ‘Chosen One’), Islam espouses ‘another Jesus’, ‘another spirit’ and ‘another gospel’. They are and ought to remain free to proclaim their religiosity, however false and erroneous it may be. But not, please God, in The Collegiate Church of St Peter (aka Westminster Abbey), which is a Royal Peculiar of the Supreme Governor.

Are Millennials Really Leaving the Church? Yes — but Mostly White Millennials ...About a third of young (18-29 year old) Americans — and more than half of younger Christians — are people of color, according to data from the Public Religion Research Institute. White Christians, on the other hand, make up only a quarter of younger Americans. In fact there are more Nones — those with no religion — than white Christians in this age group.

That’s a remarkable demographic change from older Americans, where nearly 7 in 10 are White Christians, according to PRRI. “What you have in American religion today are the nonwhite Christians and the Nones,” says Mark Silk, professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

But the switch from most Christians being white to the majority being non-white has largely gone unnoticed. Instead, most of the focus has been on the idea that “young people are leaving the church.” That idea is true among white evangelicals, who show a dramatic decline in PRRI’s polling. Among Americans 65 and older, nearly 3 in 10 (29 percent) are evangelicals. That number drops to 1 in 10 for younger Americans...