Faith Digest: Clerics may cancel pageant

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Indonesian Muslim clerics want beauty pageant cancelled. Muslim clerics in Indonesia are asking the government to cancel this month’s Miss World pageant because Islam prohibits women from publicly “exposing their bodies in a contest.” The influential Indonesian Ulema Council held a top-level meeting in August to study the issue and decided the contest should not be held, even though pageant organizers agreed to allow contestants to wear wraparound sarongs instead of bikinis, said council Chairman Amidan Shaberah. The council is the country’s highest Islamic authority and includes major, politically active Muslim and Islamist religious organizations with millions of followers. The council’s decisions are not legally binding but do influence many people in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

Free campus could go to non-Christian group. Eager to give away a 217-acre campus that’s been earmarked for donation since 2009, the owners of a former prep school facility in Northfield, Mass., have broadened their criteria to include non-Christian applicants. patengale campus350Jerry Patengale, who was hired by the Green family to help find a new owner of a college campus in Northfield, Mass., points out the stone chapel that was once deemed unsafe but has been repaired. (RNS Photo)The National Christian Foundation, a donor-advised fund, has been seeking a new owner for a campus previously owned by Northfield Mount Hermon School. The site’s previous owners, Oklahoma’s billionaire Green family, who own the Hobby Lobby craft store chain, wanted it to go to a Christian institution. But to finish the deal, the foundation is entertaining less-than-ideal proposals from organizations that do good work but “without saying that they’re doing it in Christ’s name,” said Aimee Minnich, president of National Christian Foundation Heartland. The foundation received the property, including 500,000-square-feet of building space, in December 2012 from the Green family, who bought it in 2009 for $100,000. The Greens invested $5 million in renovations with a plan to give it to an orthodox Christian institution. But after deals with the C.S. Lewis Foundation and Grand Canyon University fell through, the family authorized the foundation to take hold of the property and find a suitable new owner.

No same-sex weddings for SBC chaplains. No Southern Baptist military chaplain will be allowed to perform, attend or support a same-sex wedding either on or off base. The Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board released guidelines Aug. 29 stating endorsed chaplains will not “offer any kind of relationship training or retreat, on or off of a military installation, that would give the appearance of accepting the homosexual lifestyle or sexual wrongdoing.” The updated guidelines were issued in response to the military’s repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and the Supreme Court’s decision this summer to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act. Southern Baptists have nearly 1,500 endorsed chaplains serving in the U.S. military, more than any other denomination or faith group.


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