The worst perpetrator of religious persecution is no longer North Korea or China. The most difficult and dangerous place to be a Christian is now Afghanistan, according to a recent report by Open Doors USA. Afghanistan takes the lead thanks to its recent seizure by the Islamic militant group, the Taliban, which violently enforces its peculiar brand of Muslim extremism.…
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Upon first glance, the new music video for Adele’s recent song “Oh My God” appears consistent with its name: irreverent or sacrilegious. What else could lyrics like “I am a grown woman and I do what I want to do” prescribe? A closer look, though, unearths themes and truths that are actually quite biblical and illustrate what happens in pursuit…
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The COVID era has been a period of shock, honesty, reflection, and reckoning for many families, and consequently a time for monumental changes. For me, one of the most significant developments concerned my faith. In 2021, I shelved the insipid Catholicism of my younger years in favor of the Latin Mass, and I haven’t looked back. I wasn’t always a…
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I get it — people are afraid. For the last two years, fear drove ratings, fear created clout, and fear was a supremely effective tool at gaining and maintaining control. Some got rich from pushing fear, some saw their social media followings swell, and at every turn fear took root in the psyche of America. Fear was the currency the…
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“Why are these Christmas songs so sad?” The question came from a little girl named Hazel. She’d been raised in a different Christian tradition, with drums, guitars, and applause. But that Sunday of Advent, she was sitting with her dad in a small Catholic church among the California redwoods outside Santa Cruz. O come, o come, Emanuel,And ransom captive Israel.…
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During the winter holidays, Jews celebrate a miraculous, unquenchable light and Christians celebrate the incarnation of God revealed by the light of a star. It’s fitting, therefore, that on December 22 NASA will launch a new satellite capable of seeing the first starlight from just after the Big Bang—a light, and an event, that tell us about the creation of…
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A student at the Catholic Loyola Marymount University was dismayed to find out her professor deducted points on her final paper because the student referred to God with the masculine pronoun “he.” The student, who decided to remain anonymous, was marked down by Professor Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu, a professor of theology and theological aesthetics. In a filled-out rubric, Gonzalez-Andrieu explained why…
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Hope is a centerpiece of Christian faith, and it’s beautifully on display in the Christmas season. But something is happening to the message Christians have heralded through the centuries. We have turned down the volume, to be sure. Even more, though, we are discarding the bedrock truths that make hope plausible when life turns impossibly hard. This is nowhere more…
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This week the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Carson v. Makin, in which Maine is being taken to task for refusing to cover tuition to religious schools as part of the private school tuition assistance it provides for rural families without access to public high schools. One organization that filed a brief with the Supreme Court in this case says these “opportunities…
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Although lip-syncing, synchronized dancing, and comedic skits tend to catch the most attention on TikTok, another form of art is gaining popularity: witchcraft. Last month, the Washington Post even ran a feature piece taking readers “inside the life of a teenage witch,” “from spellcasting to podcasting.” The Wiccan organization Covenant of the Goddess defines witchcraft as “a magical religion with…
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Across the United States, government officials are using God to sell the public on more COVID vaccinations. Nobody seems to mind, least of all the American Civil Liberties Union. The Washington state Department of Health produced an ad featuring Presbyterian minister Liz Kearney. Dressed in her clerical collar, Kearney offers a mini-sermon: “There’s actually very little in the Bible about…
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A Halloween-themed profile of a “teenage witch” in The Washington Post over the weekend reads surprisingly like a backhanded affirmation of the Bible and Christianity. It openly connects gender dysphoria with occult experimentation, and both with unsupervised young people going deep into social media rabbit warrens. I wrote in July about another profile exploring how TikTok promotes multiple personality disorders…
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Jonathan Franzen’s latest book Crossroads will make readers cry. This novel goes for the emotional jugular and never once lets go, making 2001’s The Corrections look tame in comparison. Published earlier this month, Crossroads is part of a trilogy called A Key to All Mythologies, with the remaining two titles still to come. Crossroads is already being hailed as Franzen’s…
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Blaming people for contracting a catchy virus has been one of many widely deployed COVID manipulation tactics. That has shifted into blaming people for dying of a catchy virus after they decided their risks from taking the vaccines outweighed their risks from catching the disease. Shaming people for dying by accident is a bit twisted, but it might make sense…
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Fad personality quizzes are a dime a dozen, usually harmless, and sometimes even helpful, but rarely do they find themselves so integrated into Christian circles as the enneagram has in recent years. For the uninitiated, the enneagram is one of those personality rubrics that categorizes people into nine different types, from the “reformer” type one to the “peacemaker” type nine.…
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Along with the rest of the country, American Christianity is in the middle of a cold war. As this war heats up, it will mean church splits, takeovers, fights over denominational resources, and other power struggles as the Donald Trump era has increasingly brought clarity and pushed people to choose sides on existential questions. The Southern Baptist Convention, the United…
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Christians in the United States and around the world are experiencing intensified challenges to the free exercise of our Christian faith. Communities of believers from Kentucky to Minnesota and Virginia to California have faced open and unapologetic hostility from state and local government leaders for the past year and a half. Radical anti-Christian, anti-family ideology is crammed down children’s throats…
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Complying with increased enforcement of COVID-19 restrictions in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, Archbishop Valery Vienneau has limited the celebration of Mass to those who have been vaccinated. Although “fewer than 50 people have died from COVID-19,” and imposing mass segregation clearly violates the rights to freedom and equality, both church and civil authorities thought it would be a…
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(Watch the video for a monologue on this article and an interview with The American Conservative’s Shaun Rieley on finding the path of good in a sometimes grey and painful world.) “Dear God, I ask you that you help me get out of here and that you take care of my mom.” That’s a prayer that the bishop of El…
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“Where was God on the morning of 9/11?” a CNN reporter asked Gen. Charlie Baldwin in his office not long after the terrorist attacks. “It wasn’t something I had to make up. It was obvious to me that he was present in the midst of the terror. He revealed himself through the angels of mercy who were present,” Baldwin recalled.…
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