When Shrugging is Not an Option
- May/June 2025
- April 30, 2025
Sunday afternoon, March 7, 1965, Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama Twenty- five-year-old John Lewis, clad in a gray trench coat and wearing a shirt and tie, walked steadily toward Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. Behind him, some 600 nonviolent protesters marched solemnly, two to a row. The scuffling of their shoes on the pavement serving as
READ MOREBecause of the worldwide nature of COVID-19, religious practice everywhere has been affected. When a group of Greek Christians made the pilgrimage to Bethlehem and caught COVID-19, the Palestine Authority responded by declaring a “state of emergency,” closing all mosques and churches in the city of Christ’s birth. Israel, which, as of March, had had
READ MORELet us ask a serious question at a time of utmost seriousness: How could a mature and serious nation–notwithstanding the major issues of immigration, race, anger at the elites and corrupt establishment, fear of change, be reduced to electing leaders with a lack of, shall we say, social decorum, boorish attitude to other countries, and
READ MOREChristianity Today magazine did something last year that its founder, Billy Graham, would have never done. It called for the removal of an American president. In an editorial penned by editor in chief Mark Galli, the magazine said that President Donald Trump should be removed from office, either through the impeachment process or by popular
READ MOREResponding to reactions by some Christians to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and earthquake, the inimitable David Bentley Hart wrote about“the sadistic bellowing of a self-described‘fundamentalist’ preacher in Virginia, attributing the disaster to God’s wrath against the heathen and then exulting in the spectacle of God’s sublime cruelty; the cheerful morbidity of another preacher, airily
READ MOREThe nation has been in lockdown, sheltering in place; yet a small number of pastors appear defiant, insisting on their First Amendment rights to conduct religious services in person. A dozen or more states have included churches as essential services and actually permit churches to meet, while the remaining states forbid religious gatherings, even small-group
READ MOREThere is no religious freedom in the wider Middle East region. There is instead a tyranny of the majority over the minority in all walks of life, be it the religious, political, social, cultural, or economic sphere. It is claimed, however, that religion and belief in God are synonymous with morality and living the good
READ MOREBesides her brains, charisma, and speaking ability, one of the things that gave Anne Hutchinson such a faithful following in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston was her medical knowledge. At a time when the following remedy—“Take the milk of a nurse that gives suck to a male child and also take a he-cat and cut off one
READ MOREBack in early March I was still traveling far afield promoting religious liberty. One of my last trips before “social distancing” had me largely confined to home and walks in my neighborhood was to San Francisco, California. Already there was a sense of rising social panic. The airport was a little quieter than usual; many
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