Gaza Christian forced to marry Muslim
A Christian university professor in Gaza was kidnapped, forced to marry a Muslim professor at the same university, and now her family is being told she wants no contact with them unless they convert to Islam.
Sana al-Sayegh, head of the Science and Technology Department at Gaza City’s Palestine International University, disappeared June 24, according to Palestinian Authority officials and the woman’s family. Five days later, she contacted her family to say she was being held against her will so she could be married to a Muslim man.
Officials of Gaza’s Hamas government denied the charge, but her family says she would never willingly convert to Islam, according to Mission Network News. A few days after the phone call, they received a copy of conversion documents signed by two witnesses, one of which is the president of the university. Requests from Sayegh’s family and Christian leaders for a meeting with Hamas leaders were denied.
Returning to Christianity is a crime worthy of death in many Muslim societies. The kidnapping, rape, “marriage” and “conversion” of Christian girls and women is a common occurrence in some predominantly Muslim countries.
Cuban believers receive 200,000 Bibles
The largest shipment of Bibles in the history of Cuba has been delivered by the American Bible Society and WorldServe Ministries, a missions organization with offices in Texas and British Columbia.
The shipment of 200,000 children’s Bibles is more than twice the size of the previous largest delivery, according to WorldServe’s Darryl Wright. Since November 2005, the organization and its partners have delivered 100,000 complete Bibles, 100,000 New Testaments, and 500,000 copies of the Gospel of John to Cuba.
Bibles are scarce in Cuba, and few Cubans could afford them if they were available. The problem is compounded by the rapid growth of house churches in the country. In 1990, there were about 1,100 churches and house churches in Cuba, Wright said. Now the total number of congregations is estimated at close to 17,000.
Church growth in China a potent force
Ten thousand Chinese become Christians each day, and by mid-century the People’s Republic of China may be home to the world’s largest concentration of Christians – a prospect that holds serious political implications for the entire world.
The World Christian Database at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary estimates the number of Chinese Christians at 111 million – an increase of approximately 4,300 percent growth in the past 50 years.
China’s “house church” movements now minister to as many as 100 million Christians.
Noonan: Riches have made us ruder
Columnist Peggy Noonan, a speechwriter for former President Ronald Reagan, recently addressed a facet of American culture that often is overlooked: the erosion of manners.
Noonan said America is experiencing “the second great Gilded Age, a time of startling personal wealth” in which what the “superrich do for a living now seems utterly incomprehensible.”
But one thing Americans are losing is an appreciation for the manners they show each other on the street, she said.
“I think riches, or the pursuit of riches, has made us ruder. You’d think broad comfort would assuage certain hungers. It has not. It has sharpened them,” Noonan wrote July 27 for The Wall Street Journal.
As an example, she told of a couple of forceful sales clerks she encountered in some stores along Madison Avenue in New York. “Hi! Let me help you find what you’re looking for!” one yelled as she entered. Noonan assessed the clerk’s style as “aggressive friendliness.”