Viewing articles tagged 'religion'

Frequently asked The questions we are actually asked, including the hostile ones, which we would rather answer than leave to be answered for us. FAQ 92 views Read More The church they closed Most of us are Christians, and the state has decided that one form of our Christianity is not a religion at all but a political conspiracy in religious dress. That decision, written into a prime minister’s instruction in February 2005, is the legal hinge on which most of the last twenty-five years of persecution in the highlands turns. This page... Explainer 155 views Read More The Law on Belief and Religion (2018) Vietnam’s Law on Belief and Religion came into force on January 1, 2018. It makes worship lawful only through a registered, state-approved organization. For Dega house churches, which have never been allowed to register as themselves, it turned an old practice into statute. The UN Human Rights Committee has found that it “unduly restricts” freed... Reference 70 views Read More Yang: the spirits and the old religion Everything written down about the old religion of our country was written by somebody else. French missionaries, French administrators, an American army analyst working from their books, and lately a team of researchers who state in print that they are not indigenous. We have looked for one published account by a Dega person describing a yang, o... Explainer 83 views Read More Ha Mon: the Catholic movement the state calls an “evil way” In a village on the Krong Poko, in the last years before the water came, a Bahnar woman named Y Gyin said that the Mother of God had appeared to her and had told her people to gather, to pray, and not to let themselves be moved. Within four years the reservoir was over the ground she named. Within eleven the state had run public denunciation mee... Explainer 72 views Read More The Evangelical Church and registration Most of our Protestants belong to congregations the state does not recognize. The largest state-recognized Protestant body is the Evangelical Church of Vietnam (South), and the choice put to highland house churches for twenty-five years has been the same: join it, or be named Dega Protestants, a label the state treats as separatism. This page is... Explainer 80 views Read More The highland Catholic Church under the Socialist Republic On March 27, 1975, in a town that had fallen eleven days earlier, the French bishop of Kon Tum consecrated a Vietnamese successor so that the diocese would not be left headless when he was expelled. Within eighteen months the minor seminary, the major seminary and the school that had trained highland catechists since 1908 were all shut, and the... Explainer 88 views Read More