Chicago Cubs Ben Zobrist Shares Christian Faith; The Bible Is the Bedrock of Civilized Society...more links

Chicago Cubs Ben Zobrist Shares Christian Faith: ‘We All Need Christ’  Chicago Cubs player Ben Zobrist uses his platform to share his Christian faith and says that “We all need Christ.”

Zobrist has been given some incredible opportunities in his baseball career. Last year, he won a World Series title with the Kansas City Royals, and this year he has the opportunity to win another World Series with the Cubs who are looking to win the World Series for the first time since 1908.

“We know that as a Christian athlete, people are watching, and so we want to be the best example we can be and show that we are different – that Christ has changed our lives," Zobrist said in 2013. "But at the same time, I want people to know that grace is for everyone. We all need grace. We all need Christ...

The Bible Is the Bedrock of Civilized Society
...Holland appears to identify as a cultural Christian rather than a born-again evangelical, but this is still a significant shift because he had previously accepted an interpretation of history that came from Enlightenment writers who claimed that Christianity had ushered in an “age of superstition and credulity”.

But, eventually, that understanding was shattered:

“The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics, and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen³ by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that I came to find shocking, but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak might have any intrinsic value. As such, the founding conviction of the Enlightenment—that it owed nothing to the faith into which most of its greatest figures had been born—increasingly came to seem to me unsustainable.”

Even atheist Richard Dawkins has voiced concern about the decline of Christianity:

“There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.”

Evangelical Pastor Wins Election, Becomes Mayor of Rio  An evangelical Christian pastor has been elected as mayor of Rio de Janeiro, a city that is known for it’s liberal, left-leaning culture.

CBN News reports that Marcelo Crivella won the election with 59 percent of the vote.

Crivella has a long history of living out his faith. He was a missionary in Africa and is currently a gospel singer and a bishop at the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God...

Iraqi Church Rescued From ISIS Holds First Service In Two Years  ...The Syriac Catholic church, located in the city of Qaraqosh, held the service just days after Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) retook the city last week. Archbishop Butrus Moshe led the mass undeterred by charred walls and a nearly destroyed altar....

Complaints of syringes and feces rise dramatically in SF   More and more, it seems, San Franciscans need to watch where they step. And they’re not imagining things: There’s been an explosion in complaints about needles and feces on the streets and sidewalks.

Reports of improperly discarded syringes have jumped 41 percent since last fiscal year, according to a recent city controller’s report. Complaints about feces have increased by 39 percent, with every district seeing a rise in the calls.

And, in a trend that must be disturbing to residents who don’t live near the Tenderloin or SoMa, long perceived as epicenters of filth, there were big increases in complaints about the outlying neighborhoods to the city’s 311 service portal for fiscal year 2015-16...

San Francisco: Priest Walks Streets, Praying Where Homicides Occurred