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| The head of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has doubled down on earlier comments suggesting the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories was comparable to American slavery. PC(USA) Stated Clerk Rev. J. Herbert Nelson II garnered outrage from Jewish groups when he made the comments as part of a released statement in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. After Jewish advocacy groups accused Nelson of antisemitism for his remarks, he defended his stance, saying the Palestinians suffer injustices "under Israeli domination." |
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| Pope Francis installed female catechists and lectors on Sunday for the first time since adapting the laws of the Roman Catholic Church to expand the formal roles of women in the church. In a statement last week, the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization said that although such roles were previously reserved for men, the Church has a "well-established practice" of entrusting suitable males and females "according to what is already implicitly indicated by canon 230 of the Code of Canon Law, which the Pope has modified for the occasion.” |
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| In this video interview with The Christian Post, worship leader Christine D'Clario gets candid about her mental health struggles. In discussing the stigma surrounding conversations about mental health, D'Clario cautions against judging people enduring struggles such as suicidal thoughts and depression, explaining, "Sometimes, as Christians, we take really, really good care of the things of the spirit, but we also neglect the things of the body and the things of the soul and the things of the heart." Click to watch the full interview. |
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| Some conservative groups are raising the alarm over the Biden administration's reported tracking of federal employees who've requested religious exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccinations. In a report released last week, The Heritage Foundation revealed that at least 19 federal agencies have created or proposed a list tracking system for religious objectors to the vaccine. Sarah Parshall Perry and GianCarlo Canaparo, legal fellows at Heritage’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, wrote in the report that at least five of the 19-plus agencies are cabinet-level agencies. |
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| Brady "Phanatik" Goodwin, founding member of Grammy-nominated Christian hip-hop group The Cross Movement recently took to Facebook to denounce his Christian faith after more than 30 years as a believer. Pointing to his time at Westminster Theological Seminary, Goodwin said that scholarly attempts at translation and interpretation result in Christian theology looking like a Rubik's cube where looking from different angles could lead to someone having a different understanding. In this op-ed, Michael Brown addresses Goodwin's statements, asserting, "Just because there are different opinions as to how to translate a biblical verse doesn’t mean that the original author was ambiguous in his writing, even if we debate the meaning today." Click to keep reading. |
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| 28-year-old youth pastor William Stefan Wahl, who worked at the River Church in Kimball, Mich., has been charged with two counts of second-degree criminal sexual conduct of a person younger than 13 and two counts of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct of a person ages 13 to 16, per court records. Wahl was also charged with aggravated indecent exposure, distributing obscene matter to children, and using computers to commit a crime. |
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