Latest news with #AnnoDomini
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Texas Senate passes bill requiring public schools to use B.C./A.D. system in classrooms
The Brief The Senate passed a bill that would require school districts to use "Before Christ" and "Anno Domini" when referencing historical dates. Historians have used "Before Common Era" and "Common Era" as a more inclusive solution. The bill must still get through the Texas House. AUSTIN, Texas - A Texas Senate bill would force public schools to use materials that use the terms "Before Christ" and "Anno Domini" when referring to historical periods of time. Senate Bill 2617 passed the upper chamber 23-8 Monday and now heads to the House where it faces a short deadline with just two weeks left in the session. The bill requires school districts to create a policy that states teachers must use B.C. and A.D. during instruction. Additionally, districts cannot use or purchase materials that reference the other way historians reference time – "Before Common Era" and "Common Era." While both B.C. and A.D., and B.C.E. and C.E. refer to the same timeline. The use of B.C.E. and C.E. is considered more inclusive to all religions, while B.C. and A.D. are rooted in Christianity. Anno Domini means "in the year of our lord." The use of B.C. and A.D. is commonly used to track the years before and after Jesus Christ's birth. The timeframe was used as the basis for the Gregorian calendar, which is still in use today. Before Common Era and Common Era are also based on the dates established by the Gregorian calendar. The shift back to B.C. and A.D. isn't the only push to add more Christianity in schools. On Wednesday, the House is set to hear a bill that would require the Ten Commandments to be placed in schools and one that would carve out time for students to pray and read the Bible or other religious texts during the school day. The Source Information on Senate Bill 2617 comes from the Texas Legislature. Information on the history and differences between B.C. and B.C.E. comes from an article from Information on the Ten Commandments bill and the prayer in schools bill comes from previous FOX 7 reporting and the House calendar.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Texas Senate passes bill that would require public schools to use Christian B.C./A.D. system to track years
A bill greenlit by the Texas Senate on Monday would block school districts from purchasing instructional materials that do not use the terms 'Before Christ' (B.C.) and 'Anno Domini' (A.D.) when referring to historical time periods, marking the latest effort by lawmakers to emphasize Christianity in public schools. Senate Bill 2617 passed the chamber on a 22-9 vote, sending the proposal to the Texas House for further consideration just two weeks before the legislative session is set to end. In addition to preventing schools from purchasing certain materials, the bill would require districts to adopt policies mandating that teachers use B.C. and A.D. during classroom instruction, running contrary to the terms some academics prefer to use — 'Before Common Era' (B.C.E.) and 'Common Era' (C.E.). 'By putting this into law, the Senate bill protects Texas' long standing approach to teaching history clearly, consistently, without political distortion — giving parents, teachers and students confidence in a consistent foundation for learning,' said Sen. Brandon Creighton, the Republican bill author who chairs the education committee. The legislation passed without a debate on the Senate floor. 'Before Christ' and 'Anno Domini' (which means 'In the year of our Lord') are commonly used to keep track of years before and after Jesus Christ's birth, a precise date that is unknown. Historians also use 'Before Common Era' and 'Common Era' in an effort to ensure time-tracking is inclusive of different faiths and cultures other than Christianity. 'It pains me that we would not be teaching our students to understand the terminology that is widely used throughout the world,' said Paul Colbert, a former state legislator who was the only person to testify on the bill during a committee hearing last month. 'But it pains me even more that we would be denying them the opportunity to learn about the respect for others' religious backgrounds, others' cultural backgrounds, that were the reason for that shift over time.' The legislation is being proposed three years after the Texas State Board of Education considered moving away from using B.C. and A.D. in favor of the more religiously inclusive terms. The board ultimately did not adopt the policy — which members considered among broader revisions to the state's social studies standards — deciding instead to push back further discussion on history instruction to this year. The State Board of Education has shifted further to the political right since then. It seems unlikely that the 10 Republicans who currently make up the panel's majority would support the policy previously put forward. SB 2617's approval in the Senate comes as conservative Christians continue pushing to infuse more religion into public schools and life. Earlier this month, Texas became the latest state to allow families to use taxpayer dollars to fund their children's tuition at private and religious schools. The Senate has also advanced bills that would require public schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms and allow time for prayer. Meanwhile, the State Board of Education authorized an optional elementary school curriculum last year that includes heavy references to the Bible and Christianity while omitting context highlighting the role slavery and racism played in major historical events. First round of TribFest speakers announced! Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd; U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio; Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker; U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-California; and U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas are taking the stage Nov. 13–15 in Austin. Get your tickets today!
Fox News
31-03-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
DAVID MARCUS: Trump should bring back Anno Domini and make 'Common Era' a woke footnote
Even a casual reader of history will have noticed over the past many years that the antiseptic term Common Era (CE) has slowly but surely replaced the elegant Anno Domini (AD) as the marker of the time period that began 2,025 years ago in most historical works. Though at first glance this may appear to be a minor change, it most definitely is not, and given the Trump administration's brave and much-needed work to repair the damage done by wokeness, it's possible that the damage here could be reversed. Before getting to how an executive order bringing back AD would work, let's first take a look at why it is so necessary to restore it to our written works of history. Anno Domini is not only a description, it is an explanation. It is directly telling us that the reason we call this year 2025 is that Christ lived 2,025 years ago. It's not just some happy accident that Jesus lived at this time. His life is the entire basis of the chronological system. This keeps us in communion with over 1,000 years of our own history, from old books that used, "In the year of our Lord, …." to 20th Century classics of history that used the classic and traditional AD. Now, progressive historians, which accounts for all but about six of them, insist that all they are doing by using Common Era instead is separating religion from the "scientific" or at least empirical, study of history. But this is an easily disproven lie. The names of our months, for example, are taken from Roman gods, and yet nobody thinks we should change the name of March so it isn't derived from a Pagan god of war. The difference is that, like all things leftist, this is really about power. Months named after Roman gods do not bother progressives because they do not view ancient Roman Paganism as part of a dominant culture that has to have its power over society weakened by the enlightened. But this is exactly how they view Christianity. Put another way, Leftist historians are convinced that using AD imposes Christianity on non-Christians, and therefore a more neutral, or dare I say, common term should be used instead. This is nonsense. There was never any significant group of people living outside of ivy-covered walls and ivory towers who were even remotely bothered by the term AD before the historians started in with this silliness. You'd sooner find a bodega owner in the Bronx who wants to be called "Latinx." Moreover, this change from AD to CE is part of a much broader attempt to erase Christianity not just from public life, but from the history of the West as a whole, of which it is unquestionably the most important force. Christianity didn't grow up alongside Western civilization, it IS Western civilization, or at least was until about 10 minutes ago. Not only do progressives want Christian heritage and tradition removed from our society's present and future, they want to erase it from our past. As to the restoration of AD in our history books, there is a huge step that President Trump could take by executive order. With the swipe of a Sharpie, he could require that all books documents produced by the federal government or with federal funding use the more accurate and descriptive term Anno Domini. It really is not too late to make CE a quirky footnote, used during a brief tenure of academic madness in the early 21st Century. Given how much federal funding university book publishers receive, the change could come very quickly. Of course, such a move by Trump would occasion bloody howls of censorship and accusations of stomping out academic freedom. But American taxpayers, Christian or otherwise, should not be paying for the Left's mission to tear Christianity from the heart of our civilization. Sometimes it's the little things, the ones which don't seem to matter, that wind up mattering the most, because it starts with who cares if a man wants to wear a dress, and then its surgery on kids. It starts with leveling the playing field and winds up at "no white males need apply." The erasure of Anno Domini is one of these times, one of these canaries in a coalmine for our society, and the time is now to restore it to its rightful place.
