Manitoba social workers want parents of an orthodox Mennonite community to promise they will only spank kids on their behinds and not use objects, such as belts, as punishment.
They also want assurances that children will not be injured or left with marks on their bodies.
All photos by Noah Friedman-Rudovsky. Noah Friedman-Rudovsky also contributed reporting to this article.
For a while, the residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town’s women. There was no other explanation. No way of explaining how a woman could wake up with blood and semen stains smeared across her sheets and no memory of the previous night. No way of explaining how another went to sleep clothed, only to wake up naked and covered by dirty fingerprints all over her body.
Nation to nation bike tour begins July 31.
This August, Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth will participate in a unique bike tour through southeastern Ontario to build bridges of understanding and respect based on a deepened understanding of their shared history.
Metaxas
Before evangelical leader Chuck Colson fell ill at a conference last year, crumbling at the podium and later dying at the hospital, it was Eric Metaxas who introduced him.
This is a typical scene Dyck encountered in the MDS clean-up. --MDS photo
Gerald Dyck talks with Darcie Janzen (MDS meal organizer for volunteers) in the MDS trailer.
Editor's Note: The response to the flood disaster in High River, Alta, has been overwhelming. Here Gerald and Lee Dyck, who spent a week there directing clean-up efforts, give a first-hand account of the their time there. Dyck is the MDS director for British Columbia.
A month after the nation’s leading Christian “ex-gay” group apologized and announced plans to close, a similar Jewish group is facing a first-of-its-kind lawsuit for consumer fraud.
On Friday (July 19) the New Jersey Superior Court will hear arguments in the lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center against the group Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing.
Hundreds of millions of dollars set aside to help the world’s poor went unspent in the last fiscal year, new figures from the parliamentary budget office show, prompting fresh concerns about the future of Canadian foreign aid.
Preaching on the Sunday morning after the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin verdict seemed daunting. It turned out not to be so.
The worship bulletin was already printed. Hymns had been chosen. So were the readings from the Revised Common Lectionary. It seemed perfectly served up for a guest preacher like me rewriting the sermon on the fly.
On the first anniversary of his inauguration as Egypt’s first ever elected president Mohamed Morsi found himself facing demonstrations, unprecedented in size, demanding his dismissal. At times it felt as if the entire population was on the streets, the vast majority asking Morsi to go.
The Archbishop of San Salvador is calling for international support in shutting down a Canadian-owned gold mine just across the border in Guatemala.
Sometimes a court opinion is more than just a court opinion.
Justice Anthony Kennedy’s 26-page decision Wednesday (June 26) striking down a federal ban on same-sex marriages offers a window into Americans’ rapidly shifting views of same-sex relationships — a shift that increasingly relies on matters of law and fairness, not moral or religious views.
The house on the bottom right corner belongs to Erinne Wolfe, a member of Trinity Mennonite Church. She is scheduled to leave for Europe on Thursday but can’t get into her house to retrieve her passport. They tried to get through yesterday but weren’t successful, according to Rita Janzen.
Editor's Note: With our Alberta correspondent, Donita Wiebe-Neufeld, on sabbatical, we asked Rita Janzen to give a first person account as an update to after-flood conditions in High River. This is her story.
A woman who has lived legally in this country (US) for more than 30 years was granted her request to become a naturalized United States citizen Thursday (June 20) after initially being refused conscientious objector status because she is not religious.
At 31, Ryan Anderson has become one of the leading millennials debating gay marriage. Photo by Benjamin Myers
Ryan Anderson has planted himself on arguably the most unpopular stance for his generation: opposing gay marriage.
Exodus International, a group that bills itself as “the oldest and largest Christian ministry dealing with faith and homosexuality,” announced late Wednesday (June 19) that it’s shutting its doors.
Exodus’s board unanimously agreed to close the ministry and begin a separate one, though details about a new ministry focused on gender and sexuality are still being worked out.
A new study by the Pew Research Center finds that the already high level of restrictions on religion in the Middle East and North Africa – whether resulting from government policies or from social hostilities – continued to increase in 2011, when most of the political uprisings known as the
Martin Luther, founder of Germany’s Protestant (Lutheran) Church, nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Religion News Service file photo
Lutherans and Catholics have pledged to celebrate together the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation in 2017, with both sides agreeing to set aside centuries of hostility and prejudice.
Will native son and national hero Nelson Mandela survive his latest bout with illness? That is the single question dominating headlines, speeches, Twitter and conversation throughout South Africa.
Quebec's decision to ban Sikh religious headgear on the soccer field is having national repercussions.
Cris Derksen and choir
Tim Corlis, back to viewer, Randy Wood on drum and James Meger on bass, with choir.
Russell Wallace and Hussein Janmohammed with choir
Kirsten Wood, singer, composer, program organizer with choir and Tim Corlis on right with hand drum.
East Vancouver is one of the city's most culturally diverse areas. Thus, it was entirely fitting that Tim Corlis brought his Vancouver Peace Choir there to give a very special concert.
Nearly 35 years after conservatives launched a takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, a new divide is emerging — this time over the teachings of 16th-century Reformer John Calvin — that threatens to upend the nation's largest Protestant denomination.
The online English-language al-Qaida magazine Inspire, which once printed instructions for building a pressure-cooker bomb, has published a special edition that attempts to take credit for motivating the Boston bombers and warns the West of more "Lone Wolf" terrorist attacks.
The Syrian civil war is increasingly drawing in nations across the Middle East, a regionwide conflict that threatens to pit world powers against each other and Muslim against Muslim.
Twenty-five top Christian leaders gathered in the U.S. city with perhaps the worst reputation for civil discourse Wednesday (May 15) and committed themselves to elevating the level of public conversation.
