Are Churches Essential Services?
- July/August 2020
- July 1, 2020
Responding 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 MORELast time I was in Venice the water stains in St. Mark’s Square were still visible, though months after the last flooding tide. Some of the steps onto the canal looked suspiciously slimy, but by and large it was easy to forget the predicted Atlantean future. The most unavoidable reminder was one grand and ancient
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 MORESunday 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 MOREFrank Schaeffer is the son of Francis and Edith Schaeffer, who founded the L’Abri community in Switzerland in 1955. L’Abri was a hippie, Evangelical commune through which many a young seeker passed and where young Frank was raised according to what he calls the doctrine of fundamentalist Christianity. Dad was an evangelical Christian theologian, philosopher,
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
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