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OKLAHOMA CITY — Taber Spani, one of the best high school girls basketball players in the nation, holds hands with two opponents as a coach reads a Bible verse. It is the way each game in the National Christian Homeschool Basketball Championships begins.This is more than a postseason tournament for the 300 boys and girls teams from 19 states that have competed here over the past six days. As the stands packed with parents and the baselines overrun by small children attest, this is also a jamboree to celebrate faith and family. Read more of this story.
A long-awaited draft statement by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America shies from taking a position on homosexuality, saying the church has yet to reach consensus on the matter.Current ELCA policies, which bar non-celibate homosexual clergy, are not discussed in the draft released Thursday, March 13.Read more of this story.
After 30 years of defining a subculture it helped create, CCM Magazine is facing its last press run. After April, it will appear online – period.For decades, CCM stood for "contemporary Christian music," while executives debated precisely what that meant. It helps to know that Nashville is a place where judgments about the state of an artist’s career can be based on theology as well as sales.Read more of this story.
Historians and foreign-policy experts have rightly chronicled the abuses of American evangelical overseas missions, especially in the era of colonialism. But Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger Sr. Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, takes a different tack. While acknowledging the darker threads of both American and Christian overseas engagement, he argues it is more necessary than ever that evangelicals play a role in American foreign affairs.Read more of this story.
Americans overwhelmingly believe in the concept of sin whether they are religiously involved or not, according to a new Ellison Research study released Tuesday.Read more of this story.
Evangelicals observing Lent? Fasting, and giving up chocolate and favorite pastimes like watching TV during the 40 days before Easter are practices many evangelical Protestants have long rejected as too Catholic and unbiblical. But Lent — a time of inner cleansing and reflection upon Jesus Christ’s sufferings before his resurrection — is one of many ancient church practices being embraced by an increasing number of evangelicals, sometimes with a modern twist.Read more of this story.
Spend a day with Cardinal George and you’ll see him smile a lot. That’s not the cardinal the wider public generally sees. At news conferences, George has a no-nonsense, professorial demeanor. Perhaps that’s why, after more than a decade of watching him, Chicagoans still don’t know the prelate well.Read more of this story.
It looks like another phone booth, graffiti-smeared and slightly grimy, that has been abandoned during these cellular times. But the blue-and-white sign above it says not "Phone" but "Prayer." And there’s no way to call anyone — on Earth, at least — because there isn’t a pay phone inside, but instead a fold-down kneeler like you’d find in a church.Read more of this story.
MADISON — A downtown church has lost its access to free parking because the businessman who owns the parking ramp doesn’t want the church sheltering the homeless. First United Methodist Church in Madison serves as an overflow shelter for the homeless, housing about 20 men per night during the winter.Read more >>
Palm Sunday is going "green."This year, more than 2,130 congregations across the USA, including Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists and Presbyterians, will use "eco-palms" that are harvested in a more environmentally friendly way, says Dean Current, program director at the Center for Integrated Natural Resources and Agricultural Management at the University of Minnesota.Read more of this story.