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Do not fall for secularism disguised as a kind of Great Commission. This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter . Subscribe here . Just as some North Americans are explicitly claiming the label of “Christian nationalism,” the ideology is advancing around the world. The ongoing near merger of the Russian Orthodox Church with Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian government made headlines when the church’s patriarch declared that dying in Ukraine as part of Putin’s invading army “washes away all sins.” At the same time, yet another populist leader employing Christian nationalist rhetoric won an electoral victory in Italy. With these in mind, perhaps the world’s evangelical Christians should remind ourselves that Christian nationalism can’t—and won’t—save the world. Analyzing Giorgia Meloni’s win, commentator Damon Linker noted that her Brothers of Italiy party—with roots in the World War II remnants of the fascist strongman Benito Mussolini’s political movement—has significan...

Some women who travel out of state for the procedure still rely on local pro-life pregnancy centers for support in the aftermath. A young woman, pregnant and scared, entered the Women’s Resource Center in Mobile, Alabama, on a Tuesday. The pro-life clinic confirmed her pregnancy, diagnosed her with a sexually transmitted infection (STI) and scheduled her for an ultrasound. But by Thursday she was in Atlanta for a chemical abortion. (Abortion is banned in Alabama except when the life or health of the mother is endangered.) By the following Monday, however, she was back in Mobile, bleeding from her abortion and asking the Women’s Resource Center for help. She said an Atlanta abortionist had told her the STI didn’t matter; she just needed to make sure the abortion medication worked. The situation filled Women’s Resource Center clinic director Deanna Montieth with both anger and compassion: “I just want the absolute best care and for these girls to make an informed decision—their own ...

Leaders gathered at Middle East evangelical meeting recall his conversations and books that shaped their ministries. When “God’s smuggler” came to the Middle East, he went through the front door. Once known for hiding Bibles in the back of his Volkswagen when crossing behind the Iron Curtain, Brother Andrew instead simply handed them to terrorists. Coupled with his devotion to the Palestinian church, the founder of Open Doors shook the Western Christian status quo. Arab evangelicals loved him for it. “He had a soft heart for those in pain, the persecuted, and those usually considered on the other side, the enemy,” said Jack Sara, general coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Evangelical Alliance. “He was willing to step into a difficult place and talk with difficult people, but never compromise the message of the gospel.” The news of Anne van der Bijl’s death Tuesday at age 94 shook participants during the second general assembly of the World Evangelical Alliance’s (WE...

He believed “Christians should set an example of the utmost integrity.” Dan Busby fixed his father’s tax returns when he was a junior in college. In the process of correcting some mistakes and figuring out the proper deductions for the Wesleyan pastor and evangelist, he discovered his life’s calling. “The Lord planted a seed in my heart,” Busby said in a 2018 interview, “that someday I should help fill the void.” Busby, a certified public accountant who helped professionalize the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), died Wednesday at age 81. Busby served as senior vice president of the accreditation agency from 1999 to 2008 and as president from 2008 to 2020. During his presidency, the number of ministries maintaining a membership with the EFCA nearly doubled, reaching a total of more than 2,400, including 50 of the 100 largest churches in the United States. The NonProfit Times named Busby one of the top 50 nonprofit leaders six times between 2010 and 2015...

Caring for people in pain requires a rich theology of suffering. According to the World Health Organization , 703,000 people commit suicide each year. In 2020 , “suicide was the twelfth leading cause of death overall in the United States. … [In addition, suicide] was the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 10–14 and 25–34, … and the fourth leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 35 and 44.” Although churches are becoming more sensitive to suicide issues, the topic has at times been limited to concerns over salvation and damnation. If a person takes his or her own life, will that person go to heaven? We’re not equipped to fully answer that question, of course. Jesus is the only one who has the power of divine judgment. And more importantly, debating someone’s eternal fate misses a larger opportunity. Suicide is the heartbreaking cry of “My Father, why have you forsaken me?” As believers, we have a chance to meet those who feel f...

Founder of Open Doors said he wasn’t an “evangelical stuntman” but a faithful Christian following the leading of the Spirit. Anne van der Bijl, a Dutch evangelical known to Christians worldwide as Brother Andrew, the man who smuggled Bibles into closed Communist countries, has died at the age of 94. Van der Bijl became famous as “God’s smuggler” when the first-person account of his missionary adventures—slipping past border guards with Bibles hidden in his blue Volkswagen Beetle for underground churches in Communist countries—was published in 1967. God’s Smuggler was written with evangelical journalists John and Elizabeth Sherrill and published under his code name “Brother Andrew.” It sold more than 10 million copies and was translated into 35 languages. The book inspired numerous other missionary smugglers, provided funding to van der Bilj’s ministry Open Doors, and drew evangelical attention to the plight of believers in countries where Christian belief and practice were crimin...

New research shows a marked shift in attitudes about refugees and immigration reform compared to 2015, and experts have a few ideas why. Carla Flores was nervous to stand in front of a suburban evangelical congregation and share her experience as the child of undocumented immigrants. Born in Mexico and raised since she was a toddler in Kansas City, Kansas, the 26-year-old children’s ministry leader is one of over 3 million “Dreamers” in the US, meaning her status is legal but uncertain. During her recent presentation at this church on the other side of town from her own, some churchgoers drilled her for details about her life, while others responded warmly and volunteered for ministry in her immigrant community. Flores’s experience reflects a bigger shift in US evangelical views on immigration. Some polls in the past have shown white evangelicals in particular were opposed to pathways to citizenship and accepting refugees. But the latest survey from Lifeway Research—coming as an...

Pastors respond. One ongoing impact of the pandemic is that, today, pastors find themselves shepherding congregations that are more divided and more relationally distant. How can ministers cultivate deep, authentic fellowship in congregations struggling with superficial or polarized relationships? Pastors are trying out both new and time-tested ways to rebuild authentic community in their churches. Here, pastors from across North America share what’s actually working in their congregations. Mix Things Up I transitioned to a new church during the pandemic and quickly observed three groups of people: those who were already in a deep community (with no room for others to join), those who attended church but were not part of a community, and those who were church-shopping and looking for a community. A word God gave me was gather , so we started an event called Gather Together where we created space for people from these three different groups to build community organically over a shar...

The successor to Paige Patterson cites “reputational, legal, and financial realities” as he moves on to an IMB role. Adam Greenway has resigned as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary three and a half years after he succeeded fired president Paige Patterson. Greenway stepped down during a trustee meeting on Thursday and will take a role at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)’s International Mission Board, according to a statement from the seminary. O. S. Hawkins, retired president of the SBC financial services entity Guidestone, will lead the school as acting president the interim. Greenway said in a statement: These days are incredibly challenging in the life of our denomination. They are also challenging times for academic institutions, particularly theological seminaries. In February 2019, Carla and I accepted the call to come back “home” to Southwestern Seminary with an understanding of these challenges, but also with the strong desire to be part of the ...

Twenty-four pastors and one imam lose argument that the rules designating worship “high risk” violated their religious rights. New Zealand’s High Court has ruled that government officials were not acting unlawfully when they restricted and regulated religious services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The court acknowledged that rules curtailed the protected right to “manifest religious beliefs” but deemed that allowable in a health emergency. Starting in December 2021, the New Zealand government limited religious gatherings to 100 vaccinated people or 25 unvaccinated people. Face masks were also required if the house of worship shared the site with any other groups. The government’s director-general of health, Ashley Bloomfield, deemed religious gatherings “high risk” because of the presence of elderly and immune-compromised people. Some religious leaders complained the restrictions were reminiscent of Nazi Germany, and one was briefly jailed for refusing to comply. Twenty-four Chri...

First NFL player to kneel and thank Jesus in the end zone said caring for souls and helping people in poverty were more meaningful than fame. Herb Lusk II went down in history on a Friday night in August 1977. The tailback for the Philadelphia Eagles caught an easy toss from the quarterback, tucked the football into the crook of his arm, slipped between a knot of players on his left, and sprinted 70 yards down the field to score a fourth-quarter touchdown. Then, in the end zone, in front of 48,000 yelling fans, he got down on one knee and prayed. According to the official record keepers, he was the first to do that in the National Football League. He bowed his head, said, “Thank you, Jesus,” and that was history. But Lusk, who died on Monday at age 69, insisted to the end of his life that that wasn’t the most important day of his professional football career. The most important was the second day of training in 1979, when he woke up in his dorm room and said, “I can’t play footb...

Married parents and their kids have a calling that needs to be expanded, not obliterated. In pockets of Western Protestant culture, the image of a happy, put-together family unit has become an idol. Many of our church programming budgets are directed toward attracting young families, and those members who aren’t inside a traditional family unit are keenly aware of their status. Singles become a problem to fix or fix up. Lone parents are pitied, and older unmarried adults get relegated to seniors’ clubs, widow support groups, or some other socially palliative program. Christian authors are taking notice and rightly challenging how we think about marriage, family, and singleness in the church. For example, an excerpt from author Sam Allberry’s book 7 Myths about Singleness recently appeared in Plough magazine, detailing how singles and families with children benefit when they integrate their lives. Allberry argues that nuclear families are too privatized and insulated from those ...

Black denominational leaders have formally asked for a national monument to the 1908 Springfield race riot, and a new national survey reveals more public lands Black clergy want memorialized. In Lower Manhattan, people in suits pass by a green space with a modest stone monument on their way to the city’s big courthouses. They rarely stop to notice the African Burial Ground National Monument, marking the historic site where more than 15,000 Africans were buried when the city banned slave burials in church cemeteries. The burial ground was discovered during a construction project in 1991 and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1993. Yet it took more than a decade of political pushing and preservation work before the National Park Service (NPS) opened the site as a national monument. Now Black church leaders are pressing the federal agency to develop more memorials like this one. They want to mark Black history on public land, and they have specific spots in mind like the sit...

Five Christian leaders weigh the factors they hope are guiding the church as it prepares for the October presidential election. Since the start of Brazil’s 2022 presidential election, national and international electoral news has focused on the role that faith will play in next month’s race—and for good reason: Religious concerns have dominated the talking points of both Jair Bolsonaro’s and Luiz Inácio (“Lula”) da Silva’s campaigns. Whether it’s discussing COVID-19 church closures or the spiritual fight between good and evil, the candidates have seemingly preferred to prioritize these issues at the expense of others such as unemployment, inflation, climate change, or foreign policy. According to political analysts, the candidates are betting, especially Bolsonaro, that the most-responsive electorate are evangelicals. The data backs him up. Nearly half of evangelicals (48%) say they’ll vote for Bolsonaro, compared to only a quarter (26%) for Lula, according to a late-August poll fr...

Black denominational leaders have formally asked for a national monument to the 1908 Springfield race riot, and a new national survey reveals more public lands Black clergy want memorialized. In Lower Manhattan, people in suits pass by a green space with a modest stone monument on their way to the city’s big courthouses. They rarely stop to notice the African Burial Ground National Monument, marking the historic site where more than 15,000 Africans were buried when the city banned slave funerals and burials from church cemeteries. The burial ground was discovered during a construction project in 1991 and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1993. Yet it took more than a decade of political pushing and preservation work before the National Park Service (NPS) opened the site as a national monument. Now Black church leaders are pressing the federal agency to develop more memorials like this one. They want to mark Black history on public land, and they have specific spots in mi...

Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims—all from different ethnic backgrounds—are coming together to resist the violent military junta. For the first time since anyone can remember, members of Myanmar’s majority Bamar people are seeking long-term solidarity with the country’s ethnic minorities. Since a coup in February 2021 stunned the world, the military, known as the Tatmadaw, has violently cracked down on both the Bamar and ethnic minority citizens protesting its takeover. Its tactics have included burning down entire villages and firing heavy artillery against its own people. So far, more than 2,000 people have been killed in its countrywide civil war with the poorly armed People’s Defense Force (PDF). Christian NGO Free Burma Rangers (FBR), which has trained 6,000 ethnic minorities as first responders in the past two decades, has observed this growing unity up close. Increasingly, young Bamar people from cities like Yangon and Mandalay have left their college studies and careers t...

Randall Balmer seeks the religious roots of America’s passion for sports. I n the early 1990s Randall Balmer ascended to rarified air: He became an academic whose name resonated beyond the ivory tower. The impetus was Balmer’s 1989 book Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory , perfectly summarized by its subtitle as “a journey into the evangelical subculture in America.” The power of Balmer’s book (and subsequent PBS series) came from the strength and clarity of his writing along with his willingness to dwell in paradox. He was both an insider (at least in his past) and an outsider, an academic expert and a curious journalist, an empathetic listener and a critical interpreter. He was willing to bring himself into the project, to identify with the people and the cultural spaces he visited and studied even as he kept himself at a scholarly distance. Balmer’s book won the respect of academics and intellectuals as well as some evangelical insiders. “He has us pegged pretty well,” a reviewer i...

The latest ruling looks like bad news for evangelical higher education, but it’s not. The United States Supreme Court’s decision in Yeshiva University v. YU Pride Alliance may seem like it spells trouble for Christian colleges that hold conservative positions on sexuality and gender identity. After all, the court held that the orthodox Jewish university must formally recognize an LGBT student group. But a more complete reading of the decision forebodes a favorable outcome for Christian higher education in the future. The case was decided on what observers refer to as the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” where the justices make substantive rulings without oral arguments and competing legal briefs. Here, the justices ruled that Yeshiva University did not actually qualify for the court’s review, denying the university’s claim that a trial court order to recognize the student group violated its religious mission. It would be easy to read this decision as a blow to the religious free...

It’s 2022, but Arianism and Pelagianism are steadily making a comeback, according to the State of Theology report. American evangelicals’ grasp on theology is slipping, and more than half affirmed heretical views of God in this year’s State of Theology survey, released Monday by Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research. The report references Ligonier founder R. C. Sproul’s teaching that everyone’s a theologian. “However, Dr. Sproul would be quick to add that not everyone is a good theologian,” it read. That caveat applies to Americans in general and evangelicals too. Overall, adults in the US are moving away from orthodox understandings of God and his Word year after year. More than half of the country (53%) now believes Scripture “is not literally true,” up from 41 percent when the biannual survey began in 2014. Researchers called the rejection of the divine authorship of the Bible the “clearest and most consistent trend” over the eight years of data. “This view makes it easy ...

A new position at Holy Trinity Brompton reflects growing concern about climate change among some Christians. The job ad was a little different than the ones normally posted by London’s largest churches. It wasn’t for a pastor, priest, choir director, or organist. Instead, the large evangelical Anglican congregation wanted an environmental project manager. Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), perhaps best known as the birthplace of the evangelistic Alpha course, has advertised a position for someone who will help “oversee the strategy, planning and execution of HTB’s approach to Creation Care.” The individual will work closely with other lead team members to put an “environmental response at the heart of church life.” Jobs like this at places like HTB are notable, said Jo Chamberlain, national environment policy officer for the Church of England. Such roles, she said, signal a sea change. Evangelical churches in the UK—and perhaps elsewhere—are embracing the critical importance of creation ...

What’s the best way to oppose abortion? Some pursue a national ban while others object that “plays into liberals’ hands.” What comes next? The pro-life movement has focused on the fight in the Supreme Court for so long that when the Dobbs v. Jackson decision finally came—overturning Roe v. Wade and ruling that abortion can be regulated—it wasn’t clear what the plan was after that. The hoped-for, prayed-for, and worked-for victory didn’t end abortion, after all. Ending Roe was just one political battle in the process, even if took 50 years. “When the decision first came out and shortly after that, there was a lot of jubilation in the pro-life community,” Timothy Head, executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, told CT. “But there wasn’t a second clause to that sentence, ‘ Roe has been overturned, ______.’” After a bit of a scramble over the summer, the largest pro-life groups have emerged to embrace a national plan, calling for a federal ban on abortion. They don’t ...

The “arty pilgrimage” through Leicestershire has given her a chance to share and deepen her faith. As England loses a number of its churches and rethinks the role of church buildings, one artist is finding a new appreciation for the over 300 churches in her hometown by drawing each and every one. Art teacher Hayley Fern pulled out a new sketchbook during a visit to Leicester Cathedral and drew the 900-year-old Gothic-style church, with its pointed arch windows and 220-foot spire. She enjoyed it so much that she decided to draw the church she attends, St. John the Baptist Church, and then the church she was christened at. “Somebody actually said, ‘Oh, are you doing all Leicestershire churches?’” Fern said. “I said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea. I might just do that.’” And that’s how her “arty pilgrimage” began. In her county in central England, there are over 300 Anglican churches, quite a lot but still an obtainable goal, she decided. With each church she adds to her sketchbook—and ...

The humanitarian aid organization works on the frontlines around the world and ranks among the largest charities in the US. Each week, in a hulking warehouse in this small, western mountain town, Samaritan’s Purse employees load semi trailers full of supplies for the people of Ukraine: medicines, food, tarps, blankets, hygiene kits and school bags for kids. The trucks are then driven 80 miles east to the Piedmont Triad International Airport where they are loaded onto the nonprofit’s DC-8 aircraft specially configured to carry up to 84,000 pounds of cargo. From there the goods are airlifted to Poland and then trucked across the border into Ukraine. This week, Samaritan’s Purse, headed by evangelical leader Franklin Graham, made its 30th airlift since Russia began its offensive against Ukraine in February. The Christian relief organization estimates it has helped 5.5 million Ukrainians with medicine, food and water. Earlier in the conflict, it also operated an emergency field hospi...

Pentecostals targeted for Bible studies, baptisms, and outdoor worship amid increasing efforts to “repress civil society.” Six months after a Pentecostal pastor won a religious liberty case before the United Nations, Belarusian politicians are trying to strip citizens of the right to appeal to the intergovernmental organization. Human rights organizations warn the legislation under consideration this fall “will close one of the last remaining opportunities to seek justice for human rights violations” in the Eastern European country, according to Forum 18, which tracks human rights violations in the region. The UN was the last court of appeal for Valentine Borovik. Police raided the Pentecostal pastor’s Bible study in the western town of Mosty in June 2008 and charged him with illegally starting a religious organization. Prosecutors argued that the group did not meet the requirements to register as a church, since there were only 13 adults. But the Christians also could not meet w...

We should continue to let ourselves be amazed by God’s good work whenever and wherever we find it. This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter . Subscribe here . The concept of “quiet quitting” —refusing to do anything but the minimal effort—is all over media these days. Commentators are debating whether or not today’s workers, most notably Gen Z employees, are quiet quitting their jobs. Count me among the skeptical. Some of the quiet-quitting talk is just another generational caricature (one I’ve not seen any evidence for). And it may well be that workers are getting just as much or more done but are putting healthy boundaries between themselves and their jobs. Perhaps quiet quitting is happening in some workplaces, although I suspect it’s no more than always. Yet even if mythical, the idea points to something real in many people’s lives: a sense that what they do will make no difference, that things will never change. I’ve found this mentality to be a genuine temptat...

Abortion seemed like the obvious answer—until I met the Lord of life. I was born in 1989 into a dysfunctional home in Glendale, Arizona. Alcohol and drug abuse had plagued our family for generations. My late father’s addictions earned him a revolving door in and out of prison. My mother got pregnant at 19 after running away from her own father’s abusive behavior. She raised me as a single parent, alongside live-in boyfriends. We moved frequently. Having witnessed the horrors of drug and alcohol abuse firsthand, I entered junior high school vowing never to take drugs—at least until a fellow eighth-grader kept badgering me to try a marijuana joint at the school bus stop. I gave in, enjoying the thrill. But I told myself I would just smoke pot. Nothing else. Whispering abortion Desperate for love, I became sexually active at 13 and contracted a nasty STD two years later. I got hooked on alcohol from one drink at a high school party. Doing cocaine and methamphetamines followed. By ag...

Brent Leatherwood stays on to lead the Southern Baptist entity after the “Dobbs” ruling and a major denominational abuse report. The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission’s interim leader, Brent Leatherwood, will become its next president. Leatherwood spent the past year as acting president, leading the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm during a historic span that included the reversal of Roe v. Wade and landmark denominational moves on abuse reform. The ERLC board of trustees unanimously approved his appointment on Tuesday. A five-year staff member at the ERLC, Leatherwood was chief of staff under the previous interim leader, Daniel Patterson, and vice president of external affairs under former president Russell Moore, who left his position and the SBC in 2021. (Moore is now editor in chief of CT.) Like during Moore’s leadership, the ERLC has continued to be a topic of debate in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), whose 48,000 churches operate independently ...

Houston’s College of Biblical Studies, where three-quarters of students are Black or Hispanic, finds ministry partners in DTS and Tony Evans. In an era when conservative evangelicalism and multiethnic urban ministry increasingly find themselves in tension, the College of Biblical Studies (CBS) is combining them. The school averages 500 undergraduate students per semester online and across three campuses: Houston, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne, Indiana. As its bylaws require, the student body is strikingly diverse. In Houston—a majority-minority city—about half of the students are Black, a quarter Hispanic, and a quarter other ethnicities. The Indianapolis campus also has 50 percent Black students and 25 percent of other ethnicities, but the remaining quarter of its students are Burmese. The church is “not one single group of people,” said Chanelle Coleman, a 2021 CBS graduate and current student resource advocate at the college. CBS “does a great job of embodying what the kingdom o...

New study projects that the religious identity in the US will drop below 50 percent by 2070. Pew Research Center isn’t ruling out a future religious revival in America. But given the country’s steady trends away from faith affiliation, experts don’t know what it would look like to see a return. Analyzing surveys about religious identity and religious “switching” going back to 1972, and trying to project the American religious landscape out to the year 2070, they can’t say what demographic signs might indicate a coming swell of conversions. “We’ve never seen it, and we don’t have the data to model a religious reversal,” Pew senior researcher Stephanie Kramer told CT. “There are some who say that revival never happens in an advanced economy. After secularization, you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. But we don’t know that. We just don’t have the data.” The data they do have, from 50 years of research by the General Social Survey and Pew’s own survey of 15,000 adults in 2019, ...

The seminary’s sixth leader, David Emmanuel Goatley is an academic, pastor, and missions agency leader rooted in the Black church. Fuller Theological Seminary, the largest Protestant interdenominational seminary in the country, named Black church theologian and missions leader David Emmanuel Goatley its next president. Goatley, who leaves a post at Duke Divinity School to begin in January, says he wants to counter the “partisan poison” he sees in American evangelicalism, and turn students’ eyes to the testimonies of the global church. And like presidents in higher education everywhere, he also faces the problem of declining enrollment. He will be the first Black president at the 75-year-old institution. Outgoing president Mark Labberton said when he announced his departure last year that he hoped his replacement would be a woman or person of color. Goatley has a Baptist background but centered in the Black church. Ordained in the National Baptist Convention-USA, he pastored a Bla...

Sheila Gregoire’s research has Christians across the spectrum correcting harmful assumptions and bringing new attention to women’s pleasure in marriage. When it was published last year, Sheila Gregoire’s marriage book, The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended , came as a stark contrast to what many Christians learned from the church about sex and marriage. Drawing from her own research, including a survey of 22,000 Christian women, the Canadian author affirms that sexual pleasure is for women too—and chronicles the damage done to women, men, and their relationships when people operate on distorted views of sex in marriage. Gregoire’s critique of earlier iterations of Christian resources has put some on the defensive, but for many, it’s a refreshing change in approach. Women from Reformed believers to progressive stalwarts have found solace and healing in her teachings—and some pastors, professors, and counselors are also beginning to sh...

Katelyn Beaty’s critique of evangelical fame-worship is wise but overly tame. T here’s a scene in The Fellowship of the Ring in which Bilbo Baggins, the hero of the earlier book The Hobbit , has just received a small bit of counsel from his friend Gandalf the wizard. Gandalf tells Bilbo he needn’t attempt a task that would be challenging and quite likely deadly. And it makes Bilbo suspicious: “I have never known you to give me pleasant advice before,” he says. “As all your unpleasant advice has been good, I wonder if this advice is not bad.” Though Bilbo turned out to be mistaken in this case, there is still a lesson in his words: There is such a thing as making a problem too easy. And there are times where that error can yield devastating consequences. This thought came to mind while reading Katelyn Beaty’s book Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church . The book has much to admire. Beaty, a writer and former CT editor, is a keen observe...

Special Scripture passages revealed 1. Psalm 91:11-12  The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil; he shall keep thy soul. The Lord shall bless thee out of Zion: and thou shalt see the good of Jerusalem, the holy mount.  2. Matthew 6:33  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.  3. John 14:13  Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.  4. Romans 8:28  And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.  5. 1 Corinthians 2:9-10  But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. ...

Q&A with Jewish scholar Steven Fine on the history of a biblical minority. The Good Samaritan shows up in the Gospels as an apparent exception to his people, since he’s the “good” one. Then he exits the stage, presumably to go back to life with the rest of the Samaritans, with little explanation of what a “Samaritan” is or why that might have mattered to Jesus and his first followers. A new exhibit at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, opening on September 15, promises to expand our understanding of these biblical people. CT spoke to Steven Fine, a Jewish scholar at Yeshiva University, about the history of the Samaritans, their relationship to Jews and Christians, and how they can help us better understand the Bible. If a regular churchgoer knows one thing about Samaritans, they know there was one good one. When Jesus tells that story, why does it matter that the Samaritan is a Samaritan? W hat Jesus does in the story is miscast the part. The Samaritan should have be...

Our historic, global faith tradition connects sanctity of life with social justice. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when opposition to abortion united evangelical Christians across the political spectrum. Along with political conservatives, left-leaning advocates for the poor like Ron Sider spoke out against abortion. In 1987, he published Completely Pro-Life as an explanation for why Christians should support a consistent life ethic. Sojourners magazine, the leading periodical of the evangelical Left, published several pieces against abortion in the 1980s. But that moment is gone. This summer, when the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade ignited a political firestorm, the abortion debate became even more partisan than it already was, and some progressive evangelicals found it difficult to harmonize their social justice commitments and defense of women’s rights with antiabortion advocacy. Though still claiming to be “consistently pro-life,” Sojourners...