At the five-year anniversary of COVID-19, our columnist reflects on his brother-in-law’s near-death battle with the contagious virus.
Read More(REVIEW) The film’s best elements still chaff under faith-based genre tropes. The genre that Kingdom Story Company has conquered so successfully is built on an audience that highly prizes good messages and family friendliness. Both of these are good things. But that has often rewarded tropes that work against the genre being both truthful or beautiful. These have often become more noticeable as the quality of the movies have otherwise improved.
Read Moreis the Wheaton war about Donald Trump? Yes — and no. Accurate reporting requires information noting that campus conflicts of this kind have been raging — yes, often behind the scenes and out of the headlines — for decades. The conflicts are doctrinal, cultural and sometimes political. But doctrine is the most crucial reality in these voluntary, private, academic communities.
Read More(ANALYSIS) In international law, territorial integrity would mean a country’s right to “sovereignty” over its entire territory, prohibiting external interference or attempts to alter its borders. In Manipur, the term refers to preserving the territory of the state as it existed at the end of the British Raj in 1947. Protecting a state’s “territorial integrity” is largely a political concern with little constitutional basis.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Many of the ad's photographs are easy to interpret, such as a man removing “GO BACK” graffiti from a home, a woman helping a weeping man in a grocery store, a firefighter hard at work and a young football player comforting a defeated opponent. But the John 3:16 hat raised the theological stakes in the pride photograph.
Read MoreThe North Carolina Supreme Court’s decision means that cases filled by other child sexual abuse survivors, like Stuart Griffin’s case involving Christ Covenant Presbyterian Church and Charlotte Christian School, during the look back window will continue.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Freedom of religion means that religious beliefs, or irreligious ones, can be criticized, even mocked, as happens frequently in Sweden to, for example, Christian sentiments. In an open society, people of different faiths — Christians, Muslims, Jews, agnostics and secular humanists — must be able to live side by side in freedom and security. But they may be critically scrutinized, even ridiculed.
Read More(ANALYSIS) James Mangold’s film “A Complete Unknown,” nominated for eight Oscars, captures the elusive, enigmatic quality of Bob Dylan in the early 1960s: The years he emerged as a major musical and cultural phenomenon. A scant few years after he came to New York from Minnesota, and legally changed his name from Robert Allen Zimmerman, Dylan transformed American music. Especially “unknown” and baffling is Dylan’s religious and spiritual identity.
Read More(REVIEW) Author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” author Katherine Stewart picks up where that 2020 book left off in her new work “Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy.” In it, she surveys a horizon that has only grown darker. It is a landscape overshadowed by a well-organized, well-funded consortium of oligarchs and billionaires and others.
Read More(REVIEW) The film follows Roya Mahboob, an Afghan woman whose passion in life is giving young girls a chance at a better life by teaching them computer programming. She decides that the only way to gain popular support for her endeavors in a patriarchal society is to start a women’s robotics team and win global competitions. But this will be harder and more dangerous than she suspects. It may go without saying, but the movie has a worthy message based on inspiring real-life people.
Read MoreLast year, a handful of Salesian nuns worked to keep a small school and religious center in Khartoum open. As siege-like conditions worsened, they coordinated with Sudanese officials for an escape. An investigation by Religion Unplugged has revealed new details about the operation that were previously undisclosed.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Both prophets and conspiracy theorists fulfill a human need to find order in chaos. This overlap raises intriguing questions: Are religious belief and conspiratorial thinking positively linked, as both require imaginative leaps? Or do religious frameworks provide all the mental scaffolding needed, leaving no room for conspiracy theories?
Read MoreI’m not suggesting that the New York Times team that produced this recent feature — “Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley” — needed to dig into the works of this Orthodox monk. This business-desk feature was the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast.
Read MoreOur columnist witnesses a whole lot of despair, but he always looks for a measure of hope. He explains why — and how — as he reports from the scene of Southern California’s deadly wildfires.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Freedom of worship is tenuous around the globe. The Pew Research Center’s latest annual report found “high” or “very high” levels of government constraints on religion in 59 of the 198 countries and territories it analyzed – a new record. When Pew began releasing reports on the issue in 2007, just 40 countries’ restrictions on religion were classified that way.
Read MorePresident Donald Trump is calling for federal prosecutors to push for the death penalty in capital cases involving undocumented people. The move was one of dozens of executive orders the president signed on day one of his second term. The order encourages the Justice Department to pursue the death penalty and prioritizes two sets of cases: Those involving the murder of a law enforcement officer and those for crimes for which the death penalty is an option and the defendant is undocumented.
Read More(ANALYSIS) On Feb. 4, the Core Group on the Establishment of a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (the Core Group) laid down the legal foundations for the establishment of a special tribunal for the crime of aggression, taking a major step towards holding Russia accountable for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Moments after the Philadelphia Eagles won Super Bowl LIX, quarterback Jalen Hurts offered a familiar word of testimony: “God is good. He is greater than all of the highs and lows.” If those words sounded familiar, it's because Hurts — the MVP — shared them earlier on press day, along with several other times when he was in the spotlight: “My faith has always been a part of me.”
Read More(ANALYSIS) Love is one of the richest and most diverse human emotions. There are many ways to experience love — so this holiday, as a scholar of mindfulness and communication, I encourage you to try out a practice of “metta,” or loving-kindness.
Read More(ANALYSIS) The Super Bowl, in which the Eagles routed the Chiefs, was more than a showdown between a franchise with two wins under its belt — and the support of the president — and a scrappy underdog from Philadelphia. It was a bellwether for the state of America and its approach to looming fascism in our society writ large. It was a mix of faith and politics that saw two hip-hop artists going very different directions, with Ye selling swastika shirts while Lamar parodied patriotism.
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