Confessions of a Recovering Pharisee

[Fox News]

A public school teacher in Chicago is in trouble and could lose her job after she mentioned the only Muslim student in her class in an anecdote about terrorists, according to local media.

“The family does want her fired, they don’t believe that she should be teaching students anymore,” said Christina Abraham with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The teacher allegedly used the boy as an example when she described a hypothetical homicide bombing, saying that he would carry explosives on board a plane and blow it up.

Though the 13-year-old declined to speak to the media about the ordeal, his brother Mohammad Fahad Choudhary said that “before he even took his backpack off, he had tears in his eyes already” when he came home from school that day.

The older brother said that Saleh was then relentlessly mocked by the other students after the classroom incident in April.

“Everybody started teasing him and calling him a terrorist after the comments were made by the teacher,” Mohammad said.

Read more here.

[From me]

I hope the school system does a through investigation to make sure the teacher is not falsely accused. However if she is guilty she needs to be fired because that kind of behavior can hurt a child’s spirit.  If the teacher did it, how shameful.

What do you think?

[Time]

Interfaith dialogue has become an important exercise in finding the right words to overcome both extreme violence and ordinary misunderstanding. True progress, however, is best measured in deeds. The inauguration last week of Qatar’s first Christian church — a small Catholic chapel bearing neither bells nor visible crosses — has been hailed as a welcome step forward in relations between Catholicism and Islam. But an even more dramatic development is under discussion just across the border: The Vatican has confirmed that it is negotiating for permission to build the first church in Saudi Arabia.

Read about it here.

[From me]

I wonder if this means evangelical churches can go in there legally?

What do you think?

[From me]

[AP]

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Sunday that God would punish Iranians if they do not support the country’s disputed nuclear program, state radio reported.

“The Iranian people openly announce that they will defend their rights… God will reprimand them if they do not do so,” state radio quoted Khamenei as saying.

Read about it here.

[From me]

I didn’t know God was pro-nuke.

What do you think?

[Christian Post]

Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship, says radical Muslims would make better theologians than most Christians in America.
In his new book, The Faith, the prominent evangelical observes that radical Islamists have a better understanding of the Muslim faith than most Christians in America have of Christianity.

A study by Barna Group shows that 60 percent of Americans fail to name five of the Ten Commandments, cites Colson in his book.

His own interaction with those he deemed as mature Christians also confirmed that many believers are not sure what the biblical core beliefs are.

“One of the problems in the churches today is that we don’t know what we believe and why we believe it and why it matters,” said Colson in a statement for his book. “The result of that is the culture defines us. We are put in a stereotypical pot by the media and, of course, mischaracterized totally by the aggressive atheists who are publishing their books.”

Ignorance of biblical knowledge can lead to a crippled worldview, according to Colson in his book, that prevents Christians from defending their faith against cultural threats such as postmodernism and Islamo-fascism.

Read about it here.

[From me]

I would agree with Colson.  It has been my experience that many in the American church bounce from church to church in order to get fed.  What really needs to happen is believers need to learn to feed themselves.

What do you think?

[breitbart]

A director who shares the ideas of Iran’s hardline president has produced what he says is the first film giving an Islamic view of Jesus Christ, in a bid to show the “common ground” between Muslims and Christians.

Nader Talebzadeh sees his movie, “Jesus, the Spirit of God,” as an Islamic answer to Western productions like Mel Gibson’s 2004 blockbuster “The Passion of the Christ,” which he praised as admirable but quite simply “wrong”.

“Gibson’s film is a very good film. I mean that it is a well-crafted movie but the story is wrong — it was not like that,” he said, referring to two key differences: Islam sees Jesus as a prophet, not the son of God, and does not believe he was crucified.

Read about it here.

[From me]

The problem is if Jesus were only a prophet all of his prophecies would have to be fulfilled, right?  So, if Jesus said He was the Son of God and the only way to heaven and He was a prophet, then why don’t they believe Him?  If what He said wasn’t true then He was a false prophet.

What do you think?