February 22, 2021
“Really, wasn’t he Swiss?” More often than not, that’s the reaction I get when, traveling abroad, I mention that John Calvin was a Frenchman born in France. If people are often confused, it’s because he had to emigrate to Geneva due to strong persecution in his home country.
It is true that since Calvin, the relationship in France between State and religion has been, at-best, complicated. After Calvin came the Huguenots, French Protestants who were persecuted by the state and fled to various countries across the world. Shortly after the French Revolution in 1801, Napoleon created a State concordat recognizing State-funded religions. Some evangelical groups, such as Baptists, were not recognized, and pastors & preachers found themselves sometimes imprisoned. So, when the discussions started in the late nineteenth century about a law that would separate churches and State, most Evangelicals were not only very keen but actively encouraged it.
Read the rest of our March coverage of multicultural churches: Korie Little Edwards looks at how far the movement has come and how far it has to go, and Michael J. Rhodes unpacks prejudice in the early Corinthian church.
Evelyn Perez tried to share her trauma. Five years ago, she met every week with a small group of women whom she calls “great people” at her large nondenominational church in the San Francisco Bay Area. She told the group of mostly white women, plus two other women of color, that her marriage had grown dangerous. The relationship was breaking down, and her husband was physically and emotionally abusive.
A woman holds a sign during a rally calling for the passage of a clean Dream Act outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., September 26, 2017. | REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Several faith-based immigration advocacy and humanitarian organizations have voiced support for the immigration proposal President Joe Biden sent to Congress on his first day in office Wednesday and the immigration-related executive orders he signed.
However, some conservatives have voiced opposition to the legislative proposal, saying that it opens the door to “mass amnesty.”
The first day in the White House was a busy one for the Democrat as he signed more than a dozen executive orders to rescind many of the Trump administration s policies. But one of the first acts the new president did was send a sweeping immigration reform legislative proposal, known as the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, to the Democrat-controlled Congress.
Members of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at the University of Iowa. (Photo via Becket)
(CN) The University of Iowa asked an Eighth Circuit panel Wednesday to rule that university officials are not individually liable for violating a Christian student group’s First Amendment rights.
A federal judge in Des Moines ruled in September 2019 that the Iowa City-based university violated InterVarsity Graduate Christian Fellowship’s constitutional rights to free speech and free exercise of religion by revoking the group’s status as a registered student organization.
The university said InterVarsity’s requirement that its leaders abide by its Christian religious beliefs opposing same-sex relationships violated the school’s nondiscrimination and equal-opportunity policy.