Wednesday Link Link

Got a blog post that deserves more attention?   Use the contact page to submit the item you want the world to read.   We promise you at least three or four extra readers!!!

• Blogger Dennis Muse notes the upcoming 50th Anniversary of Youth With a Mission, aka YWAM.  (Canada’s Brian Stiller once called YWAM, “The Evangelical Community’s best kept secret.”)
  
• Cornerstone Television’s home page notes the loss of Ron Hembree.   Although I can’t get their signal, I paid tribute to their quality programming in this blog in March of 2008.
• USAToday Religion notes the number of pastors in bi-vocational ministry adding fresh meaning to the phrase, “Keep your day job.”
• A Christian bookstore in Helsinki holds an event where you can trade porn for Bibles.  (And the concept isn’t copyrighted!  You can do this, too.)
• Justin Taylor gives me a chance to be introduced to the music of Trip Lee; I can enjoy hip-hop more when I can read the lyrics such as on Justin’s blog post and audio of this song, “The Invasion (Hero)“.
  
• Jason Boyett reposts a proposal that the thing that’s really missing from your local Christian bookstore is Christian cosmetics.
  
• The family that owns the chain of Hobby Lobby stores, according to the New York Times, wants to build a major Bible museum possibly in Dallas.
  
• Encouraging Youth Dept.:  The blogger otherwise known as No Bull Noble, offers three apologetics videos on YouTube.
• Tim Challies runs some analysis on the four available answer options to, “Why Does The Universe Look So Old?”
  
• Part two of Matthew Warner’s “10 Types of Blog Comments” is about how to respond.  So once again, here’s part one, and here’s part two.  Which type of blog reader are you?
  
• A 5-page CT special report looks at mission in light of technology, with an interview with Al Erisman.
• Bonus link to Ethix: Business|Technology|Ethics – the online magazine (now in its 70th issue) which Erisman co-founded and edits.
• New Blog of the Week:  As you know I admire transparency, and here is a blog proudly authored by someone dealing with clinical depression.  Check out ThePrayGround.
• You’ll have to bookmark this one and return on Friday (25th) but this week’s Drew Marshall Show (19th) was quite a mix with folksinger Dan Hill, Fred Phelps estranged son Nate Phelps (discussed on this blog here and mentioned here) and Hoops for Hope’s teenage founder Austin Gutwein (discussed at my industry blog a few weeks ago.)  So once again you want this link starting mid-day Friday.  (Some people in other parts of the world get up at something like 3 AM Sunday to catch the live stream of the show at 1 PM EST Saturday in North America.)
• How does a person convicted on child pornography charges, and not permitted to be anywhere there are children, exercise their right to go to church?  Apparently with some help from an unlikely source: the state’s Civil Liberties Union.
  
• Macleans Magazine (Canada’s equivalent to Newsweek or Time) interviews Dr. Leonard Sax on the “empty world of teenage girls.”
  
• Our cartoonist this week is fellow-Alltop-member Mark Anderson at andertoons.com.  He does a number of family-oriented items; here’s one that hopefully doesn’t take you too long…

• Okay, Mark’s too good for just a single panel.   Here’s another one I really liked:

Switzerland Votes to Prohibit Minarets

I never knew when I wrote my original post on this subject on September 18th, that when the vote took place two months later, it would generate so many new visits here.

According to traffic on this blog on the days leading up to and after the Swiss voted on the weekend to prohibit Muslim mosques from constructing minarets (the spire shaped towers) that are used to call the faithful to prayer, this is an issue for which there is intense interest, most probably because it  has a bearing on religious freedom not only in Switzerland, but also where you live, and around the world.

To see a short 2-minute report on the issue as it made news in Canada, you can watch this one at CBC News.  Although the post is quite sweeping in its coverage of the vote, the title — not fully explored — is intriguing, “Could a Minaret Ban Happen Here:  An Examination of What Might Happen if Canadian Tolerance Weakens.”   Did Swiss tolerance weaken?  Or was it never truly there in the first place?

Here’s a commentary at Beliefnet that also summarizes what happened if you’re coming to this for the first time:

All Muslims are Taliban, Islamophobia is the new anti-Semitism, and Shari’a is the new Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That’s the operational reality that Muslims in Europe must acknowledge, in the wake of a referendum to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland:

In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam and undermined the country’s reputation for religious tolerance, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, in a referendum drawn up by the far right and opposed by the government.

The referendum, which passed with a clear majority of 57.5 percent of the voters and in 22 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, was a victory for the right. The vote against was 42.5 percent. Because the ban gained a majority of votes and passed in a majority of the cantons, it will be added to the Constitution.

The Swiss Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but the rightist Swiss People’s Party, or S.V.P., and a small religious party had proposed inserting a single sentence banning the construction of minarets, leading to the referendum.

Civil Libertarians were quick to decry the results.  Even The Vatican condemned the loss of freedom of religion.   One political writer and talk-radio host suggested that the vote will have both a cause and effect influence on Switzerland’s future immigration dynamics.   Another writer suggests that the vote now introduces a whole new set of problems.

The Muslim blog, Islam in Europe, notes reactions from several different countries.    A gay Canadian blogger suggests that Islamophobic and Homophobic groups share a common strategy.

As you can see, there is no end of coverage on this over the last few hours.   So I contacted our anonymous correspondent in Switzerland from the September blog post for a grassroots reaction, which gets the last word:

It seems that the result of the referendum came as a surprise to everyone.  I think even people that voted in support of the ban were surprised that it went through.

The media here has gone crazy of course, saying it shows that the Swiss are afraid of Muslims, that the vote was decided by fear.  I personally don’t think that’s true.  It’s not like the Swiss are going to tear down the minarets that are already built, mosques have not been forbidden and the Muslims are not being expelled from the country.  They have the right to meet, to practice their religion and to have their mosques.  It’s been said in the media that a lot of them meet in old warehouses or industrial buildings, but so do most evangelical Christians.  (The only Protestant churches here are state owned and run.)  And it’s not like Christians are allowed to go into a Muslim country to build a cathedral.  I feel like that’s more the point.  It’s not a vote of fear, but of fairness.  If people want to move to another country and integrate into that country, there needs to be a bit of give and take.  Like I said before, they are still allowed to practice Islam, still allowed to build mosques.  Religion is not a building.  A church is more than four walls and a spire with a cross on the top.  It’s not a vote banning Islam, it’s a vote banning towers.

The other interesting thing is that, in our canton (province) only 52% of eligible voters actually voted.  It would be interesting to know what everyone else thinks…

And in the wake of all this, people are not talking about the fact that the Swiss also voted to keep exporting arms to other countries.  Why is everyone so concerned that we can’t build a tower, and not concerned about people killing each other with Swiss army material?  Sometimes I wonder about the media’s priorities…