Two pieces of good news this week:
Egyptian blogger and dissident Alaa is being freed, finally. A worldwide blogger campaign probably had something to do with it.
The Presbyterian campaign to divest from Israel has been defeated. If you haven't been following this saga of the past three years, Solomonia wrote many posts on it as it developed. Kesher Talk was also tracking this campaign (among others) here.
Speaking of Presbyterians, David Paulin has done some research on how Presbyterian seminaries have influenced the attitudes of this generation of clergy toward Jews and Muslims, here and here. (Unfortunately, a similar in-depth study needs to be made of Jewish seminaries.)
UPDATE: The release of Alaa was a real cliffhanger. They transferred him to a really shitty jail for his last night, and finally released him after a crowd of bloggers began to descend on the police station.
UPDATE: Solomonia has more on the PC (USA) General Assembly meeting where the divestment initiative was voted down. For good measure, a resolution was passed condemning suicide bombing as a crime against humanity. Note this Orwellian detail:
. . . this resolution passed against the desire of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP) and the Advocacy Committee for Racial Ethnic Concerns (ACREC) who both advised against this condemnation. My correspondent notes:(More on Ateek and his organization Sabeel.)The ACSWP's objections included assertions that it was one-sided and that the General Assembly had alread condemned violence in any form and that "The biblical witness on suicide and war is complex. It includes Saul's suicide and Samson's pulling down a Philistine temple on himself and others." -- This last argument is straight from Naim Ateek's essay on suicide bombing, by the way.