Here are 10 things to know on this Wednesday:
The United States will send a team to Nigeria to aid in the effort to find and free the Nigerian girls who have been kidnapped. The kidnapping generated the campaign #BringBackOurGirls. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)
1. The United States will send a team to Nigeria to aid in the effort to find and free the Nigerian girls who have been kidnapped (the kidnapping generated the campaign #BringBackOurGirls). For a good backgrounder on the kidnapping, read this New Yorker piece on the Christian and Muslim girls. A second kidnapping of the girls is putting pressure on the Nigerian government.
2. Monica Lewinsky is back, and Republicans, including social conservatives, are torn over what to do about it.
3. In yesterday’s primaries, the Tea Party candidate lost to the Republican establishment in a key race in North Carolina. In Indiana, social conservatives ousted two incumbents over same-sex marriage votes.
4. The Vatican said it has defrocked 848 priests who raped or molested children and sanctioned another 2,572 with lesser penalties in more than 3,400 cases of abuse reported since 2004. The church has paid $2.5 billion in compensation to victims of clerical abuse in the U.S. alone.
5. 150 American Christian leaders are calling for the appointment of a “high-level Special Envoy on Middle East Religious Minorities.”
6. A Catholic nun continues to draw widespread attention for appearing on an Italian version of “The Voice.” “To some observers, the success of Sister Cristina is another byproduct of the new tone established during the first year of the papacy of Pope Francis,” the New York Times writes on its front page. Meanwhile, the “Halleluljah” singing priest has been offered two record deals.
7. Student dissent is heating up in a controversy over beliefs about Adam and Eve at Bryan College, a Tennessee college named for one of creationism’s most famous defenders. A report suggests 20 percent of faculty have left.
8. China is offering up to $8,000 for beard informants who can earn up to $8,000 for reporting neighbors who wear beards, seen as a sign of Islam.
9. A group of Muslim women in India believe the path to gender equality lies in the very thing that has been used to oppress them: Shariah law.
10. Cardinal Kasper, the ‘pope’s theologian,’ downplayed the Vatican’s blast at U.S. nuns.