Murderous Regimes and the Churches; Muslim herdsmen kill 100 Christians in Nigeria; Walking the Labyrinth at Duke Chapel?...more

The Hidden Costs of Surrogacy
...How then are the children from such arrangements faring? Sally claims they’re beautiful, healthy, and happy. And I sincerely hope that they are. But a major study released in June 2013 in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry that examined 30 surrogacy families evidences that surrogate children, while not suffering from psychological disorders, show elevated levels of adjustment difficulties. Moreover, the lack of a “gestational connection” to their biological mother or father may place children at increased psychological risk...

Assistant Professor of Philosophy Wants to Jail Global Warming Skeptics
...We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus...

Why don't people go to church?
The church has been such a central part of my life and my family. I can’t image life without church. I came to faith in Christ through the church. I was discipled through the church. I met my husband in church. My husband and I were married in church. Both my daughters came to faith in Christ through the church and were discipled through the church and married young men in the church. Did I mention, I love the church? (Okay, to be honest, there have been a few seasons when it was hard to go.)

But many people don’t love the church. Some because they don’t know Christ, some because they have been hurt by the church, and others simply don’t find it necessary for their lives. Research has been collected and books have been written on why people don’t go to church. I did a little research on my own and asked my twitter followers to help me answer the question, “Why don’t people go to church?” Here are a few of their answers...     image

Feminist Studies Professor Who Accosted Pro-Life Students Charged With Assault
...As seen in a video at the YouTube site of the Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust (warning: profanity), a UCSB assistant professor took a sign away from a participant in a campus pro-life outreach effort. Flanked by two students, she took the sign back to her office and destroyed it.

Now feminist studies Associate Professor Mireille Miller-Young “is facing vandalism, battery, and robbery charges.”...

Murderous Regimes and the Churches
This stunning recent graphic  offers victim numbers on modern history’s greatest mass murderers. Each blood drop represents one million killed. China’s Mao Zedong ranks “first” with 78 million, followed by the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin with 23 million and Nazi Adolf Hitler 17 million.

“These cold-blooded dictators do not care for the value of life as much as they do achieving their selfish motives of domination, power, and immortality,” the grim graphic aptly summarizes.

Interestingly, Belgium’s notorious King Leopold is fourth with 15 million who died in the Belgian Congo under his brutal colonial exploitation. Then there’s Japanese World War II militarist Tojo with 5 million, and Turkey’s WWI chief Enver Pasha with 2.5 million and Cambodia’s Communist despot Pol Pot with 1.7 million. North Korea’s founding tyrant Kim Il Sung is next with 1.6 million, then Ethiopia’s Mengistu with 1.5 million. Nigerian dictator Yakobo Bowon (1966-1975) is the final listed villain with 1.1 million...

Muslim herdsmen kill 100 Christians in Nigeria
Muslim Fulani herdsmen killed more than 100 Christians and destroyed homes in Kaduna state in North-Western Nigeria Friday (March 14), Morning Star News reported.

Scores of the herdsmen simultaneously attacked the Christian villages of Ugwar Sankwai, Ungwar Gata and Chenshyi for about four hours. Yakubu Gandu Nkut, chairman of the Zankan area chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria, said a pastor's wife and her three children were among the dead, according to Morning Star News...

Actor Who Called His Own TV Show ‘Filth’ Explains Why He Abandoned Hollywood for His Christian Faith
...Jones, who played the character Jake Harper in the sitcom, was still an active “Two and a Half Men” cast member when he called the program “filth” and announced that he no longer wanted to be a part of it. He ended up apologizing over his comments, though he later left the cast in 2013.

One year after exiting, Jones is going to school in Colorado and speaking to church audiences about his experience getting closer to God and leaving Hollywood....

Walking the Labyrinth at Duke Chapel?
...The website calls walking the 40-foot circle with a winding path an “ancient spiritual practice of meditation and self-centering found in religious traditions from around the world.” This claim is at least laudably vague. More commonly labyrinth church enthusiasts claim it’s an ancient Christian practice or at least dates to the Middle Ages.

Except there’s no evidence Christians walked labyrinths before 1990, starting primarily at San Francisco’s ultra liberal Grace Episcopal Cathedral, whose canon, Lauren Artress, also a psychotherapist, popularized labyrinths with her 1990s book: Walking a Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Practice. The book speculates but admits there’s no evidence that medieval Christians as a spiritual practice walked labyrinths embedded on the floors of some medieval cathedrals, as at Chartres.

In 1996 Artress, who espouses a sort of New Age mysticism, launched her World-Wide Labyrinth Project to “pepper the planet with labyrinths,” which has been hugely successful, although I think the movement peaked some years ago. On her website she credits as architects of the modern labyrinth movement three practitioners of geomancy, a sort of Western form of Feng Shui that, ironically, the medieval church condemned as pagan...