Roundup: Asylum seekers, sexuality, Islam, Jesus’ wife

Smuggled by boat, banished by plane and the decision over your life a hot potato

Asylum seekers who make for Australia by boat are now to be sent to Nauru for processing. And how, exactly, is that going to work legally — or not?

Religion and sexuality

“Those in the churches who demand celibacy … should start thinking about the real moral questions in our society and in our world.”

Peace with ourselves, not offense at the other, must define Islam

Well-established and protected in their rich and comfortable societies, they pretend to celebrate critical intelligence and wit at the expense of a religion practised by much less fortunate people, many of who are struggling with numerous social frustrations and are barely surviving. But behind the celebration of freedom of speech hides the arrogance of ideologists and well-fed racists who feed off the multiform humiliation of Muslims and to demonstrate the clear “superiority” of their civilisation or the validity of their resistance to the “cancer” of retrograde Islam. In criticising this ideological stance there can be no compromise either.

Middle East riots fueled by competition between radicals, moderates

Anti-American riots that have spread to more than a dozen countries across the Middle East are a sign of fissures between radical and more moderate Islamists that are vying for power as their societies undergo change, Middle East experts say.

Doubts over Harvard claim of ‘Jesus’ Wife’ papyrus

“There’s something about this fragment in its appearance and also in the grammar of the Coptic that strikes me as being not completely convincing somehow.”