Hate Crime Opponent Becomes A Victim • Abercrombie to Change "Look" Policy After Religious Discrimination Ruling • Virginia candidate says non-Christians worship ‘false religions’ • The Evangelical Orphan Boom • Atheism starts its megachurch: Is it a religion now?
Last week's top news, from our perspective:
Hate Crime Opponent Becomes A Victim
Last year, Prabhjot Singh wrote an op-ed calling for the government to track anti-Sikh violence. This month, he became a victim of a similar attack near his home in New York City. He talks with NPR host Rachel Martin about the attack, and what he hopes comes out of it.
His gratitude is particularly hopeful: "I feel very fortunate that it wasn't worse because I've certainly seen worse. I'm deeply fortunate that my child and my wife, who I dropped off at our house just seven to 10 minutes earlier, weren't with us."
Abercrombie to Change "Look" Policy After Religious Discrimination Ruling
Following a spate of anti-discrimination lawsuits, the company will have to change its "Look" policy to accommodate all forms of religious dress. Specifically, it can no longer penalize employees for wearing hijabs, which were long considered an affront to the company's "all American" ideal.
The court battles began in 2010, when a then 18 year-old Halla Banafa sued Abercrombie for denying her a stockroom job at the Abercrombie Kids store in Milpitas, on grounds that she wore a headscarf. Another Muslim woman named Hani Khan sued the company in 2011, alleging that she had been fired after a manager objected to her headscarf as well.
Virginia candidate says non-Christians worship ‘false religions’
Jewish groups called on the Republican candidate for Virginia’s lieutenant governor to explain a sermon in which he said non-Christians are engaged in a “false religion.”
E.W. Jackson, a pastor, on Sunday preached at the Restoration Fellowship Church in Strasburg, Va.
“Any time you say there is no other means of salvation but through Jesus Christ, and if you don’t know him and you don’t follow him and you don’t go through him, you are engaged in some sort of false religion, that’s controversial,” Jackson said, according to a recording first reported Monday by the Washington Post. “But it’s the truth.”
Evangelical adoptions picked up in earnest in the middle of the last decade, when a wave of prominent Christians, including the megachurch pastor Rick Warren and leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, began to promote adoption as a special imperative for believers.
Atheism starts its megachurch: Is it a religion now?
Yesterday, The Sunday Assembly—the London-based “Atheist Church” that has, since its January launch, been stealing headlines the world over—announced a new “global missionary tour.” In October and November, affiliated Sunday Assemblies will open in 22 cities: in England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, the United States and Australia. “I think this is the moment,” Assembly founder Sanderson Jones told me in an email last week, “when the Sunday Assembly goes from being an interesting phenomenon to becoming a truly global movement.” Structured godlessness is ready for export.