Broken & Mended Provides A Lifeline For People Who Hurt — All The Time

Young and old, male and female, around one-fifth of U.S. adults deal with chronic pain. But at a monthly meeting in this Oklahoma town, fellow sufferers — some gathered in person, others connecting from afar via Zoom — find support through a ministry called Broken & Mended.

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Wisconsin Court Shouldn’t Confine Religion Within Church Walls

(OPINION) Later this year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will take up the issue of whether a Catholic charity is “religious” enough to qualify for the legal benefits that apply to religious organizations. The major question that the justices will consider is whether the organizations are more “charitable” than “religious.”

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‘Somebody Has To Die For Me To Live’: The Faith Story Of A 330-Day COVID Patient

Faith helped a COVID-19 patient and his family survive life support, a double lung transplant and 330 days in the hospital. Nearly a year after going home, Danny Mills has some normalcy back in his life, but he still lives with constant reminders of what he went through.

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Behind the Duggar Smile: Family’s Troubling Connection to Bill Gothard’s IBLP Uncovered

(REVIEW) “Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets” is the latest docuseries from Amazon Prime that focuses on the family and their connections to the nonprofit organization Institute in Basic Life Principles, created by an unordained teacher named Bill Gothard, who was based in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, Ill.

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Southern Baptists Put On A Show, But Emerge Remarkably Unified

(ANALYSIS) It’s worth pausing to note a couple of “behind the headlines” moments from the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting. If you think there is deep division in the Southern Baptist Convention, you have to ignore a lot of hard data that suggest a strong consensus — on abuse reform, on women pastors, and on cleaning up decades of financial profligacy.

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Top Clergy Condemn ADF After Massacre Of 42 High School Students

Religious leaders in Uganda have condemned the Allied Democratic Forces rebels June 16 attack and massacre of 42 students in a secondary school in southwestern Uganda.

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What Has Changed In The DNA Of The Southern Baptist Convention?

(OPINION) The issue isn’t who is a Baptist and who is not. Church historians struggle to count the number of organized Baptist groups, and thousands of Baptist churches are totally independent. The question is whether the SBC’s DNA has changed in ways that will affect local churches, as well as agencies, boards and seminaries at the state and national levels.

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Why Christians In The Anglican Church Of Uganda Are Challenging New Bishops

In recent years, bishops in the Anglican Church of Uganda commanded a lot of respect. Lately, however, the flock has been challenging the election processes of the new bishops in tribunals and courts of law. In the last 10 years, the Anglican Church of Uganda has been rocked by a number of grinding legal battles pitting the flock against newly consecrated bishops and archbishops.

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Antisemitism Is Alive and (Un)well All Over the Internet Today

(OPINION) Today, “the longest and deepest hatred of human history” shows no signs of abating. This is especially true online, where the worst aspects of humanity get free expression, where conspiracy theories of the ugliest kind abound, and where the most uncredentialed, unqualified person can gain a following. This is fertile ground for antisemitism.

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How Prison Made Me A Better Bible Teacher

(OPINION) When I taught in prison, the students expressed more gratitude than I ever knew in any other setting. Any notion of the utilitarian foundation of education was reduced to ashes. These men were not coming to learn so they could get jobs or pad their resumes; they were coming for edification. They were coming to learn, to grow, to love.

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'Vatican Girl' Disappearance Continues To Baffle 40 Years Later

The disappearance of the 15-year-old Italian, who lived at the Vatican, has sparked a series of investigations and unanswered questions that continue to baffle investigators and the public alike. Indeed, 40 years later, the Orlandi case remains perplexing and accusations that high-ranking members of the church know what happened to her.

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200-Plus North American Muslim Authorities Join The Sexuality Culture Wars

(OPINION) North America’s Christian and Jewish leaders have long been active, politically and legally, in taking differing sides on same-sex and transgender issues. Authorities in Islam are comparatively disengaged. That changes in dramatic fashion with a new declaration of alarm from a broad group of 59 authorities, quickly joined by 150 further endorsers from Muslim organizations and local mosques.

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Los Angeles Dodgers Play A Zero-Nun Game At Annual Pride Night

(ANALYSIS) The Dodgers have held Pride Night for 10 years. This year’s edition became ensnared in controversy. Following criticism from Catholic groups, the team rescinded an invitation to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to be honored at Pride Night. They were later reinvited. Unless you attended the game and got there an hour before it started — that’s when the group was honored — you don’t really know what happened.

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Muslim ‘Mother Theresa’ Receives Rare Honor: A Templeton Prize

Edna Adan Ismail sold her car and poured her life savings into turning a former landfill into one of the better hospitals in Somalia that has a fraction of the mortality rates elsewhere in the country. Her Templeton Prize is the latest chapter for one of the most remarkable women on the planet.

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Prison Fellowship Has Provided More Than A Million Bibles Since 2019

Anyone working in prison ministry has heard the testimonies of men and women who came to faith in Christ while reading Scripture alone in their cells. Prison Fellowship has been hearing many more of these testimonies since it launched a program to distribute more Bibles, books and other resources.

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⛪︎ 5 Key Takeaways From The Southern Baptist Convention's Annual Meeting In New Orleans 🔌

This week’s Weekend Plug-in provides five takeaways from the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in New Orleans. Plus, as always, catch up on all the best reads and top headlines in the world of faith.

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Facebook Parent Company Meta Uses Bible Translations To Train AI Speech Recognition

The artificial intelligence arm of Facebook parent company Meta has turned to widely translated religious texts like the Bible to provide data for its Massively Multilingual Speech project, which aims to expand text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology to underserved languages.

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You Need To Know These 10 Things Before Meeting A Yazidi

The ongoing conflict in Syria and Iraq has had a devastating impact on Yazidis. The Islamic State group has specifically targeted Yazidis, resulting in mass killings, sexual slavery and forced displacement. The conflict has created a humanitarian crisis for the community, with more than 250,000 Yazidis living in refugee camps and struggling to rebuild their lives.

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‘Between Mercy And Me’ Models Truth And Grace For Resolving Racial Conflict

(REVIEW) The film “Between Mercy and Me” centers on Hugo and Mercy, a Black man and White women who bond over their love for music, but find themselves drawn into conflict over the racial division in their city that threatens to divide them as well.

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