A Texas university bucked the anti-Chick-fil-A trend on college campuses this month when its administration refused a student government request to remove the popular restaurant.

“We do not make vendor decisions based on their political or religious beliefs,” wrote Trinity University’s Tess Coody-Anders, vice president for strategic communications and marketing, in an email to students. 

Campus Reform’s Frances Floresca was the first to report on the email.

Coody-Anders added that the school considers “utilization, variety of options, vendor performance, and campus-wide feedback.”

“Based on these criteria, Chick-fil-A appears to be a preferred vendor by students and the broader Trinity community,” she wrote.

Chick-fil-A is on pace to become the third-largest restaurant chain in the U.S. based on sales.

The student government association had passed a resolution criticizing the company’s donations to the Paul Anderson Youth Home, the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. The resolution said the school’s “values of diversity and inclusion and Chick-fil-a’s values regarding the LGBT+ community are mutually exclusive.”

“The negative consequences of having Chick-fil-a on campus outweigh the desires of those who are in favor of keeping it on campus,” the resolution read. “… the Trinity University Student…

NEW DELHI, May 22, 2019 (Morning Star News) – Village leaders in eastern India prohibited five Christian families from working on their farms or walking on the main road before district authorities this month revoked the order, sources said.

Leaders of Banhardi village, in Jharkhand state’s Latehar District, told the five families in April to either convert back to their ancestral Sarna religion or face punishment, Christian leaders said. When the Christians refused to renounce their faith, the village on April 10 issued a decree instructing that their farmland be confiscated and prohibiting them from interacting with anyone, fetching water and buying or selling, they said.

Before district officials arrived on May 13 and annulled the April 10 decree, the Christians had to go outside the village to look for food and other items to meet daily needs and were on the verge of starvation, said Motilal Oraon, one of the persecuted Christians.

“We had to carry drinking water from some other village to our homes,” Oraon told Morning Star News. “They did not allow us to enter our own farmland or work in it. We went searching for work in somebody else’s farmland in a distant village, as we could not find work in our own village. Our families were starving.”

After District Collector Rajiv Kumar intervened and annulled the order, the villagers agreed to let the…

Alabama Public Television refused to air an episode of the children’s TV show, ‘Arthur’, because of a gay wedding scene.

The season premiere aired nationally on May 13. As Christian Headlines previously reported, in the episode, Arthur and his friends attend their teacher Mr. Ratburn’s wedding. They don’t know who he is marrying until they see him walking down the aisle with another man.

After the nuptials, Arthur recaps the events with his friends, one of whom says, “Yep, it’s a brand-new world.” People Magazine speculated this could have been a “nod to the changing times.”

“Parents have trusted Alabama Public Television for more than 50 years to provide children’s programs that entertain, educate and inspire,” Director of APT, Mike Mckenzie said, according to CBN News. “More importantly – although we strongly encourage parents to watch television with their children and talk about what they have learned afterwards – parents trust that their children can watch APT without their supervision. We also know that children who are younger than the ‘target’ audience for Arthur also watch the program.”

Responses to the episode were mixed.

According to AL, mom and substitute teacher Misty Souder, celebrated the inclusivity and complained to APT for taking the show off the air. “I just want [my daughter] to be aware,” Souder said….

A pastor, his daughter, and more than a dozen churchgoers were kidnapped in an attack by a team of gunmen in the Kaduna state of Nigeria on Sunday that left one person dead.

Rev. Zakariah Ido, 11 girls, and five men were among those kidnapped in the early morning hours on Sunday. Sources have indicated that 20 gunmen attacked.

According to an online Nigerian newspaper called TheCable, the gunmen surrounded the church while choir members were practicing. “It was at about 12:30 midnight. We had combined choir practice in the church with other neighboring communities. We normally hold the combined choir practice from 9:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.,” the witness said. “Everybody was terrified but there was no [way] we could run because they had already surrounded the church.”

The gunmen demanded everyone’s phones and asked where to find the pastor, according to Pastor Nath Waziri, the district church council secretary. Parishioners showed them the pastor’s home, where he, his daughter, and several others were abducted. During the attack, one of the church members was killed.

“We are helpless because there’s nothing we can do other than to report to the police when such incidents happen,” another eyewitness said. “We have no arms and we cannot stand them, we are just at their mercy because they are well armed and they always come in large…

Controversial Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has come under fire for declaring that all prayers — Muslim, Christian and Jewish — reach the same higher power.

Speaking at a Capitol Hill event held to mark the Islamic fasting season of Ramadan, the self-defined democratic socialist insisted that, as a Catholic, her prayers go to the same place as her Muslim and Jewish colleagues.

“When Ilhan prays, when I pray, when Rashida prays, when Ayanna [Pressley] prays, when Jan Schakowsky prays, I believe those prayers all go to the same place — up,” she said, according to the Washington Post.

Outspoken Representative Ilhan Omar from Minnesota and Representative Rashida Tlaib from Michigan were both present to talk about their Islamic faith and the spiritual significance of the season of Ramadan.

“It’s about developing understanding for the kind of struggles others go through when they go without,” Tlaib explained, according to Relevant. “It’s about having deeper empathy.”

The event was organized by Jewish Representative Jan Shakowsky, who insisted that interfaith dialogue was crucial to the successful shifting of public discourse to a more respectful and pragmatic place, particularly when it comes to the corrosive issue of anti-semitism — something both Omar and Tlaib have been widely accused…