Religious News From Around the Web August 30, 2021

PBS Video: David Brooks on Kabul, Afghanistan; Iranian Government Seizes Baha’i Property; Supreme Court and Religious Liberty; Potsdam Gets First Synagogue Since WWII; Christianity Principles Under Attack in Canada?

PBS Video: David Brooks on Kabul, Afghanistan
“One of the good things that has happened in the Middle East over the last several years, is that people have taken a look at the Taliban and they hate it. In a survey of 11 Muslim countries only 13 percent have positive views of the Taliban. In country after country, people are sickening of religious theocracy because they just find it doesn’t work. That’s in Iran, that’s across the region. And so at a time when democracy is beginning to have a little momentum, and theocracy is taking some blows, we have a period where we seem to be brutally abandoning Muslims, not living up to our allies, betraying the people who helped us … this is what national decline looks like.”

Iranian Government Seizes Baha’i Property
A fresh wave of economic strangulation is being unleashed against the Baha’is in Iran, as the Iranian authorities move to confiscate properties belonging to six Baha’is in the province of Semnan. Confiscation of properties remains a tactic used in the persecution of Iran’s Baha’is, over the past four decades, because of their beliefs.

Supreme Court and Religious Liberty
Has the Supreme Court sold out to religion? You could be excused for thinking so if all you had to go on was the hue and cry protesting things the court did last term. And now that furor is growing even more intense in anticipation of a new term with abortion and aid to religious schools on the agenda.

Potsdam Gets First Synagogue Since WWII
The city of Potsdam, Germany, has its first new synagogue since the Holocaust – part of the newly inaugurated European Center for Jewish Learning at the University of Potsdam, which will also be the umbrella for the school’s School of Jewish Theology founded in 2013. The synagogue is also the first synagogue ever to open as part of a university in Germany, according to historian Ulrich Knufinke.

Christian Principles Under Attack in Canada?

A Christian group built a 10-bed facility for those who wanted to die a natural death in peace and comfort. They did not offer euthanasia. For the local health authority and others that was unacceptable. A small facility that offered choice was considered an outlier. For those who decided they did want euthanasia it was a two-minute wheelchair ride to a hospital that performs it. The Delta Hospice Society facility in a Vancouver B.C. Suburb has been forced to lay off staff because of its opposition to on-site euthanasia, according to B.C. Catholic News.