Sterling Griggs

Two women in Sudan have recently been sentenced to death by stoning after they admitted to having adulterous affairs ( click here to read the story ). One woman, Saadiayh al-Fadel, who has an 18-month-old dauther, confessed that the child was conceived by another man after her husband deserted her. Both the woman and her child are now being held in a prison in the city of Wad Medani. I have been to Wad Medani and stayed there overnight with a family of Christians. In that city my visit was cut short because the "secret police" did not think it wise for me and my party to stay in the city any longer at the home of known Christians. The other woman in the story, Umounah Daldoum, also confessed to adultery and she too was convicted and sentenced to die by stoning. What about the men with whom these women commmited adultery with? The man who helped conceive al-Fadel's daughter was brought before the court but he "publicly dissociated himself from the act" and ...

I've been thinking about the concept of truth lately and whether or not we can truly know that there is such a thing as truth. A basic understanding of truth would be that there is a standard of right and wrong, of acceptable and unacceptable. And if we agree that the concept of truth is valid, can truth be relative or does it have to be absolute? In order to answer these questions, we first must think about where truth comes from: Does man determine truth? If so, then who was the man who set the standard? What if I don't agree with him, does that make me wrong or him? Is man qualified to set a standard for right and wrong? The answer to that is no. Does society/culture determine truth? In America we have ruled that smoking marijuana is illegal and immoral but what about in countries where it isn't illegal? Also, we have so many disagreements over what's acceptable/unacceptable in America that our culture(or any culture) can't be trusted to point us to a ...

A woman in Boston sought to have an abortion in April 2004 but the attempt was not done properly. In July of 2004 she went to another doctor who at the time couldn't detect that she was pregnant, even thought her fetus was now 20 weeks old. So, she carried on with her life on the assumption that she wasn't pregnant anymore. The only problem is that in September of that same year, when she went to the hospital with pelvic pain, she found out that she was still pregnant. In December of 2004 this woman had a baby girl. Now she is suing her doctors because she claimed that she wanted an abortion in the first place because she couldn't afford to raise a child. In her lawsuit, she is suing for damages as well as the costs of raising her child. This legal case will likely raise lots of eyebrows and so far all of the attention has been on the woman who wanted the abortion and the doctors who failed her. But maybe the attention should be on the fact that pregnancy, if left u...

After all of the hype surrounding James Cameron's "amazing" discovery of what he believed were the ossuaries (bone boxes) of Jesus and His family, I was anxiously waiting the special to air on Discovery Channel that would give us the full skinny on the truth. However when I watched it, the only thing I learned is that your personal biases can take you a long way. Two figures from the documentary stood out to me from the beginning. The first was Simcha Jacobovichi, a documentary film maker. He hovered all over the place, looking over the ossuaries as if he were an expert and giving his opinion about everything. The only problem is, he looked really silly doing so. The guy isn't an expert in these matters, yet he made sure that his face was seen over and over again. What finally did it for me was when Mr. Jacobovichi challenged an archeological expert to a sort of "duel" when it came to what names were or weren't accurate on ancient ossuaries. His t...