Russell Moore thinks the persecution of Christians around the world might bring American Christianity back to life. Tagline to his post: “Christianity in this country is big, powerful, and familiar. We need it to become strange again.” (more…)
Russell Moore thinks the persecution of Christians around the world might bring American Christianity back to life. Tagline to his post: “Christianity in this country is big, powerful, and familiar. We need it to become strange again.” (more…)
Globally, we are back to the early Church.
A court in Sudan has sentenced a pregnant woman to death by hanging for refusing to renounce her Christian faith.
Twenty-seven-year-old Mariam Yahya Ibrahim, who is already the mother of a 20-month-old son, was convicted of apostasy on Sunday and given four days to abandon her faith.
On Thursday, Judge Abbas al-Khalifa handed down the death sentence in Khartoum after Ibrahim told the court, “I am a Christian.” (more…)
Religion journalist John Allen has written a book entitled The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution
The latest thing in contemporary Christianity is “radical Christianity.” From the Christian bestseller lists to programs in megachurches, Christians are being told that Jesus was “radical” and that they should give up their “middle class” “mediocrity” and start helping the poor. But how is this different from just liberal mainline Protestantism? And isn’t just another form of works-righteousness? For all the talk of the “demands of the Gospel” (doesn’t that turn the Gospel into Law?), I don’t hear anything about the Gospel. That is, Christ on the Cross atoning for sinners. Some of these teachers are making valid criticisms of typical evangelicalism, it seems to me, but they are slipping into some of the same mistakes, just in a different key. And it also reaches for the spectacular, minimizing ordinary life, a serious “theology of glory” rejection of vocation. (After the jump, read an account from Christianity Today and give me your take on this.) (more…)
David Forsmark makes a point made by our own loyal reader, author, and Nordic expert Lars Walker, speaking of the Norse deities. Forsmark writes:
Americans have a naïve view of religion. The religious freedom that is so ingrained in our tradition — and our Constitution — has morphed beyond tolerance to a sort of anthropomorphic acceptance of pretty much anything.
In other words, in order to prove how tolerant we are, we take our basically Judeo-Christian view of what religion and God should be, and assume all other religions share the same goals, have the same values, and are just differing manifestation of the same loving and just God.
Nothing could be further from the truth. (more…)
A new study, entitled The Global Religious Landscape, from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, has found, among other interesting facts, that Christianity has become fairly evenly distributed around the world. The Asia and Pacific regions contain most of the other world religions, as well as most of the religiously unaffiliated.
Christians are the world’s largest religious group and are nearly evenly dispersed globally, according to a new Pew study on the size, geographic distribution and median ages of the world’s major religious groups.
Of the world’s 6.9 billion people, 2.2 billion or 32 percent are Christians, Pew reported Dec. 18. While only 12 percent of Christians live in North America, the vast majority of Christians, 99 percent, live outside the Middle East-North Africa region where Christianity began.
Apart from North America, Christians are geographically dispersed, with 26 percent in Europe, 24 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, 24 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and 13 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, the study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found, based on 2010 data.
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