Tomorrow, President Bush meets at the White House with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, and Christian human rights activists have strongly urged the president to bring up Jordan’s recent expulsions of evangelical Christians. In a Web Extra just posted on our magazine site, Mindy Belz interviewed Christian Solidarity International representative Keith Roderick, who said:

“[President Bush should] highlight the issue of the deportations [with King Abdullah]. Since they are meeting and since it has become an international issue, we believe it should be discussed at this level. Many Jordanian evangelicals want to try to handle each case individually, but that does not mean we should ignore this opportunity. I think there is some education that needs to be going on with the king about how important it is to U.S. Christians. The fact of the matter is that in Jordan it is not illegal to proselytize or distribute Bibles.”

John Fea, a teacher of American history at Messiah College, writes about “Presbyterians in Love” in Commonplace. 

Can Presbyterians fall in love? Okay, everyone falls in love, but when people think of Presbyterians they normally conjure up images of stoic Protestants whose kids eat oatmeal and memorize the Westminster Confession of Faith. Reverend Maclean, the Montana minister and father figure played by Tom Skerritt in A River Runs Through It, comes to mind. Presbyterians don’t “fall” in love-they rationally, and with good sense, ease themselves into it.

It’s hard to tell if he’s talking about Presbyterians as some kind of extinct group of American dinosaurs, or living creatures.  I suppose, in many ways, his notion of Presbyterian romance could apply to both. 

This was my image of Presbyterians until I read the correspondence of Philip Vickers Fithian. Most early American historians know Philip Vickers Fithian. He was the uptight young Presbyterian who served a year (1773-1774) as a tutor at Nomini Hall, the Virginia plantation of Robert Carter, and wrote a magnificently detailed diary about his experience. For most of us, Fithian is valued for his skills as an observer. His journal offers one of our best glimpses into plantation life in the Old Dominion on the eve of the American Revolution.

Read the best parts here, and see transcripts from the journal of the sanguine heart of a Calvinist.

The Jerusalem Post reports that a group of Christian evangelists have been arrested for preaching the gospel in Jordan.

Jordanian security forces arrested eight people, mostly foreigners, after they were caught distributing missionary material to Bedouin families north and east of the Jordanian capital, Amman, the Saudi daily Al-Watan reported.

Can’t have that now, can we? And the Saudis can’t let a story on Christian evangelization pass without spreading some religious libel:

Sources said they were “enticing” impoverished youngsters by paying them money and calling on them to marry foreign girls.

And then there is this winner in the “Understatement of the Day” category:

Evangelism is a practice frowned upon in the Muslim world

The second Islamic caliph, Omar ibn El Khattab, expelled all Christians and Jews from the Arabian peninsula in the 7th Century, implementing a directive issued by Mohammad years earlier. Since then, the official presence of Christianity there has been practically nil and strictly confined to the expat workers who do most of the work in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Only in recent years has there been even a hint of toleration for Christianity. Thus, the announcement that the first Christian church is set to open in Qatar (home to the U.S. military’s CENTCOM) this Easter has provoked intense debate, Middle East Online reports.

Former Qatari justice minister Najib al-Nuaimi has objected to the church on “social and legal grounds” (read: shari’a), and columnist Lahdan bin Issa al-Muhanadi writing in the Doha daily Al-Arab exclaims, “The cross should not be raised in the sky of Qatar, nor should bells toll in Doha.” The new St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church will also house four other Christian denominations, but actual worship services will not be allowed by authorities. Only “collective prayer.”

In what is billed as a “moderate” Muslim country, Roman Catholic priest Pierre Wallez has been convicted in an Algerian court for leading a private prayer service in violation of that country’s new anti-proselytization (read: anti-Christian) law, Religious Intelligence reports.

Archbishop Henri Teissier of Algiers told Vatican Radio Fr Wallez led a prayer service in a private home on Dec 29, 2006, and had been jailed even though he had not celebrated the Eucharist.

On March 20, 2006 the Algerian Parliament passed Ordinance 06-03 which limited non-Muslim worship to specific buildings approved by the state, banning house churches and other non-registered religious gatherings.

The new law also banned proselytizing, instituting a sentence of up to five years and a fine of £7,500 for those found to have converted Muslims. The code also prescribes a five-year term of imprisonment for anyone who “incites, constrains, or utilizes means of seduction tending to convert a Muslim to another religion; or by using to this end establishments of teaching, education, health, social, culture, training… or any financial means.”

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to denounce Algeria’s action.

An act so despicable that it needs no further comment. From BosNewsLife:

Rahima Beoa, who was planning to be baptized tomorrow in Cinatuly village in Rangpur district, 248 kilometers (154 miles) northwest of the capital Dhaka, suffered burns on at least 70 percent of her body, local villagers said. Suspected Muslim extremists set her home, made from bamboo and wood, ablaze on January 7, while she and her 9-year-old grand child were sleeping, reported Compass Direct News, a Christian news agency.

The pastor of the local evangelical Isha-e-Jamat (Jesus’ Church) Bangladesh denomination, Abdul Mabud Chowdhury, reportedly said the mob was also upset that Beoa’s daughter and son-in-law, 40-year-old Ashraful Islam, converted to Christianity and about their involvement in evangelistic efforts.

Many American evangelicals and fundamentalists like Jews.  This is mostly for two reasons: the theology of dispensationalism and the legacy of the theology of dispensationalism, which is to say, some American Christians are very much dispensationalists, and others are just stuck in a Christian subculture that still has a lot of that theological residue on it, even if they don’t really believe in it.  This article is a good primer on dispensationalism and why it’s led many Christians to support Israel.  And why American Jews don’t really support those who support them.

Evangelical Christians have a high opinion not just of the Jewish state but of Jews as people. That Jewish voters are overwhelmingly liberal doesn’t seem to bother evangelicals, despite their own conservative politics. Yet Jews don’t return the favor: in one Pew survey, 42 percent of Jewish respondents expressed hostility to evangelicals and fundamentalists. As two scholars from Baruch College have shown, a much smaller fraction-about 16 percent-of the American public has similarly antagonistic feelings toward Christian fundamentalists.

According to City Journal, though, American Jews need to embrace their Christian supporters.  It’s worth reading.

Best selling author Robert Spencer’s new article, “Slavery, Christianity, and Islam“, at First Things is must reading. He revisits the singular role of Christian abolitionists throughout history in ending slavery and the slave trade, noting that it was the “imperialist” West during the 19th Century that was responsible for ending those practices in the Islamic world. Spencer writes:

Likewise unacknowledged has been the role that Christian principles played in the abolition of slavery in the West, which was an enterprise unprecedented in the annals of human history. The roots of abolitionism can be traced to the Church’s practice of baptizing slaves and treating them as human beings equal in dignity to all others. St. Isidore of Seville (560–636) declared that “God has made no difference between the soul of the slave and that of the freedman.” His statement was rooted in what St. Paul told the slaveowner Philemon about his runaway slave Onesimus: “Perhaps this was why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, as a beloved brother” (Phil. 15–16)… Once it was recognized that the slave had a soul just as did the master, it could not forever be justified that he be another person’s chattel.

The abolition of slavery in the Christian West long ago notwithstanding, it still survives today in Sudan, Mauritania and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Elizabeth Eldridge of the Washington Times reports today that Malaysian authorities have begun confiscating Christian children’s books under orders from the Internal Security Ministry headed by Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi because they contain images of Moses and Abraham, alledgedly in violation of shariah law. Christian leaders in the country, however, say that the move is part of a larger campaign by Muslims in the government to chip away further at the rights of all religious minorities there, which account for 40 percent of the population. Last month government officials there prohibited a Catholic newspaper from using the word “Allah”, the common word historically used for “God”, because officials ruled that only Muslims were permitted to do so.

No word whether the Malaysian government will in the future also prohibit Christians from using the capital letter “A” or begin seizing copies of the equally blasphemous new VeggieTales movie, The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything, because shariah courts have ruled that singing animated vegetables are prohibited from wearing pirate clothes.

Journal Chretien reported over the weekend that a Christian worker, Sajeed Williams, of the Shelter Now relief agency was murdered in Peshawar, Pakistan. According to the report:

Williams was married ; the couple has an 18-month old daughter. He was office manager for Shelter Now in Peshawar.

The organization runs two projects in the country - a fish farm and a building project for 105 schools, which were ruined during the earthquake that shook Pakistan in 2005. Shelter Now has been active in Pakistan for nearly 25 years. Since 1988 the Christian organization has also been involved in projects in neighboring Afghanistan.

Revelation 6:10