Author: Gordon Govier

He walked to the microphone during the question & answer session and raised his head up so that his mouth could project into the speaker. “Did you ever hear your father speak?” he asked. Yolanda flashed a comforting smile and said, “Of course honey, I was there! But I didn’t really remember anything. I had to learn about the things he said after I grew up! I was only 12 when he was killed.” She paused ever so slightly and then asked, “How old are you?” The boy at the microphone said, “Twelve.”

WASHINGTON (BP)–Southern Baptist ethicist Richard Land, joining a diverse group of evangelicals in a teleconference on the bloodshed in Darfur, noted that “would-be perpetrators of genocide in other capitals around the world are watching closely to see if we are going to allow the gangsters in Khartoum [Sudan’s capital] to get away with it.”The Evangelicals for Darfur coalition (EvangelicalsforDarfur.org) ran full-page advertisements Oct. 18 in The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today, among other papers, calling on President Bush to jumpstart the process of dispatching United Nations peacekeepers to the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan.Read more.

Listen to many critics of higher education, and you would think that faith had been long ago banished from the quad — or at least all those quads not at places like Notre Dame or Liberty or Yeshiva.It turns out though, that there are plenty of believers on college faculties. Professors may be more skeptical of God and religion than Americans on average, but academic views and practices on religion are diverse, believers outnumber atheists and agnostics, and plenty of professors can be found regularly attending religious services. Read more.

One of Madison’s original evangelical churches is celebrating a centennial of Christian ministry this weekend. Bethany Evangelical Free Church, at 301 Riverside Drive, is the mothership of the evangelical church in Madison. It parented two of the city’s largest congregations. Few other evangelical churches have been a part of the city’s history for such a long period.

Vatican observers in Rome, priests in New York and the head of a national priests organization in Chicago are citing Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan as a potential candidate to succeed Cardinal Edward M. Egan after the New York prelate reaches the retirement age of 75 on April 2. Read more.

Some might call it a miracle.After years of ignoring — or even mocking — religion, Hollywood is re-examining faith in a more balanced light.The box-office success of such varied films as "The Passion of the Christ," "Bruce Almighty" and "The Da Vinci Code" has several major studios funding religious-themed movies and new distributors making inroads with niche audiences across the spectrum of belief.Read more.

Ray Bakke – the founder and academic dean of Bakke Graduate University of Ministry – revealed his vision to have Madison, Wisconsin become a laboratory for urban ministry at a reception for Madison’s faith community at Fountain of Life Family Worship Center church on Sunday afternoon, October 15th.

The Rev. Jim Anderson had hit the wall. The 30-year-old Evangelical Free Church pastor had been working day and night as a "church planter" in Iowa, starting congregations and serving them before moving on to start from scratch all over again. It was good work, and work he loved. But it was also endless.Read more.

COMMENTARYIn 2004, Swedish Pentecostal pastor Åke Green preached a sermon in which he denounced homosexuality as a "cancerous tumor" on society. A Swedish court subsequently sentenced him to one month in prison for hate speech (a charge that was eventually dismissed). Americans were shocked by the incident, but not alarmed. After all, those poor Swedes have no First Amendment protection of even the most eccentric religious beliefs, a protection Americans have as a matter of course.Or do we?Read more.

ST LOUIS, MO (ANS) — Attendance at American churches is less than half of what we have believed in the past, according to Dave Olson, director of church planting for the Evangelical Covenant Church, and director of the American Church Research Project. According to a news release from Mission America Coalition, Olson addressed the Mission America Coalition annual conference on its closing day with groundbreaking new research about the state of the American church. Instead of relying on limited survey data which is then extrapolated to the entire population, Olson has worked for years to build a database of actual…