- Michael Nazir-Ali: The uncertain future of Syria’s Christians
The protests by Christians in Damascus over the Christmas period show that there is widespread anxiety within the Christian population of what the future will hold for them. Their population has already been reduced drastically during the civil war and the extinction of some of Syria’s oldest communities would be a tragedy.
Of course, what may be happening to the Christians cannot be separated from what is happening to other vulnerable groups. The BBC has reported attempted confiscations of Alawite property in Latakia province by rebel groups and there have been reports of summary executions of captured Christian and Alawite soldiers by some groups. Given their experience of Islamic State in Iraq, the Yazidis are also anxious about the future, as are the Druze. I understand that Armenians have already begun to flee.
Support for religious freedom hit its highest score ever of 70 on a scale of 0 to 100. Across a wide variety of questions, Americans expressed their wariness of government interference in religious affairs, with 80% of Americans supporting the freedom for people to run their businesses or private organization according to their religious beliefs. The 2024 polling also revealed that, despite divisions over the issue of abortion, Americans remain united in their support for everyone’s right to live out their faith freely: 70% of Americans oppose requiring religious nonprofits to cover abortions for their employees.
Sister Vincentia Maria Nwankwo and Sister Grace Mariette Okoli, who were returning from a vocational associations’ meeting and were taken along Ufuma Road, are members of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Mother of Christ of Onitsha, in southern Nigeria.
…
The two nuns both head Catholic schools: Sister Vincentia Maria is the principal of Archbishop Charles Heerey Memorial Model Secondary School in Ufuma, and Sister Grace Mariette is the principal of Immaculate Girls Model Secondary School in Nnewi.
4. Nigeria tops report for number of Christians killed, kidnapped in 2024
5. Washington Post: N.J. will stockpile abortion pills, governor says before Trump inauguration
- Is Womanhood So Bad? — The first episode of Mona Charen’s new podcast. She chats with Pamela Paul.
- Peter Savodnik: The Tiger Mother Roars Back
While [Amy] Chua didn’t set out to attack the emerging, more mediocre, more illiberal campus—with its emphasis on safe spaces and trigger warnings and microaggressions and all the other inanities we now associate with so-called elite universities—her book undoubtedly alarmed those who had helped bring this campus into being. Those who subscribed to the new ethos, those who enforced its values. To the enforcers, Chua was not just wrong but offensive, even “dangerous.”
Over the next decade, Chua was accused of all species of impropriety: racism, misogyny, grooming. Her critics eventually trained their sights on her husband, fellow Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld. That prompted a two-year investigation into Rubenfeld, who was ultimately suspended for two years for allegations of verbal harassment, unwanted touching, and attempted kissing—all of which, he said, he “absolutely, unequivocally, 100 percent” denies.
Many professors—many human beings—would have been undone. But Chua has somehow emerged from her inquisitions stronger, more famous, more infamous.
She has been vindicated.
On Inauguration Day, she’ll be in Washington with her husband—as special guests of the vice president-elect.
- Podcast: Brad Wilcox on Americans without Families
There are now more kinless adults than those with children.
- Naomi Schaefer Riley: Child abuse is child abuse, regardless of the circumstance
We have laws like the Indian Child Welfare Act that create a higher barrier for determining whether a child has been abused. Minnesota recently passed a law that would institute a different standard for whether to remove children who are Black from homes that are abusive or neglectful. The point is that all children should have the same right to safety, and we cannot pick and choose based on which group of perpetrators we think is most deserving of our sympathy.
- Rafael A. Mangual & Christian Browne: New York City Is Failing to Keep Kids Safe
After a recent string of heinous crimes, New Yorkers have rightly demanded that officials address core public safety issues like subway crime and severe mental illness. The city’s child-welfare failures have received less coverage. The most egregious of these are child fatalities in homes where the Administration for Children’s Services was already aware of alleged abuse, neglect, or maltreatment. In 2022, the city saw 39 such cases, nine of which were ruled homicides. While the 2024 data are pending, reports show that several young children known to ACS suffered horrendous deaths over the past year. Despite this grim reality, nothing has changed at the agency, which has largely evaded calls for reform.
Accountability for ACS’s performance starts with its commissioner, Jess Dannhauser, whose performance at ACS mirrors that of Alvin Bragg in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office: he has used his tenure primarily to reduce enforcement while pursuing ideological projects to placate activists. Dannhauser seems to regard as his crowning achievement the expansion of Collaborative Assessment, Response, Engagement & Support (CARES), a diversion program that the agency describes as “an alternative, non-investigatory child protection response to reports” of child abuse. The agency purportedly uses the program to “partner” with families to help them “develop their own solutions” to their “problems.” ACS claims to use the program only in cases involving “no allegations of serious child abuse,” but it raises the question of what kinds of abuse are deemed mild enough to qualify. It’s also unclear how the agency determines the degree of danger a child faces, given the program’s non-investigatory nature.
- Archbishop José H. Gomez: Finding God in the Wildfires
Every crisis is a crossroads. And in every crisis we have a decision to make.
We can respond with anger and despair, and that’s a natural temptation.
Or we can decide to accept our sufferings as somehow sharing in the sufferings of Jesus, who suffers for us and with us and who will never abandon us no matter how dark the path may seem.
Even when we have been left with little, we still have love to give.
- The Lila Rose Podcast: LA Fire Victims Speak Out After Losing Their Home w/The Halpins
17. George Weigel: From Doubting Thomas to Doubting Peter?
Doubt is not the passageway to mystery. In the Christian understanding of the term, a “mystery” is a supernatural reality whose meaning can never be fully plumbed intellectually, but which can be confidently grasped in love.
- Father Robert Sirico: Home Schooling Saved a Dying Church
Our families sought an education that formed minds and souls. Too many Catholic schools have drifted toward secular models, using public-school curricula that present a fragmented understanding of the world rather than a vision of the whole and the way beauty, reason, prayer, science and other disciplines are integrated in the pursuit of truth. We chose the latter and also removed public-school teachers funded by the state, whose employment required us to remove religious symbols in the classroom. That was a costly but necessary decision to preserve our Christ-centered identity.