Though God originally intended that humankind experience goodness and abundance, forces that seek to counter the divine will of God continue to struggle. The divine will of God is for God’s children to prosper, live in peace, unity, and attain equity of God’s resources. God in infinite wisdom established a plan for reconciliation to the disruption in social order before the foundation of the earth.
In this way, God took a stand for what mattered: against the evil that coopted the human experience by way of sin; for God children’s to all have equal access to the graces and life available that came through acceptance, profession of faith, and obedience.
It is no secret that in today’s culture, there is an outcry that resembles the prophetic witness of taking a stand for what matters.
Nearly everyone I know believes that one or more of the presidential candidates is an exceptionally bad leader, and this leaves us to grapple with why so many of our fellow Americans support them. Personally, I reject public stupidity as an explanation for anything. Our people deserve a more generous attempt to understand them. So let us look deeper.
Zootopia is the story of a large, metropolitan city where everyone lives in peace and harmony. Tolerance and diversity are hallmarks of this great city. Hope abounds in this land of talking animals because it’s a place where, “You can be anything!” Zootopia is peaceful because after thousands of years of evolution, carnivores no longer eat other animals. Everyone lives in peace. The prophet Isaiah’s vision that “The wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the goat” seems to be fulfilled in Disney’s latest movie.
One of the most anticipated cases of this Supreme Court season revolves around nuns and birth control.
Zubik v. Burwell, which comes before the justices Wednesday, addresses one of the most contentious parts of the Affordable Care Act: the requirement that employers offer certain types of birth control to their employees — the so-called contraceptive mandate.
I drove by a church last week, a few days before Palm Sunday, and read their sign: CHRIST HAS RISEN!
Um, no. No he hasn’t. In the Christian calendar he hasn’t even died yet. But this is an all-too-common phenomenon in Christian Churches.
Why?
Pastor Ray says that the Good Samaritan story leads Christians to ask, Where is the church in the healing of these wounds?
“The healing of our wounds becomes the healing of your wounds as well,” he says.
Fewer men than women show up in U.S. churches, and women are markedly more likely to pray and to hold up religion as important. But in Muslim nations, it’s the women who are missing in action at the mosque — and yet they’re on par with men in upholding almost all the Muslim pillars of faith.
Sophie Kasiki, one of the few Western women to have seen the Islamic State group’s harsh “caliphate” in Syria and escaped, recounts her life in the jihadists’ stronghold Raqqa with detached calm and inner rage. Born to a Catholic family in Cameroon and living in Paris since the age of 9, she converted to Islam as an adult. She traveled with her 4-year-old son to Syria in February 2015, to join three friends who had left for jihad a few months before.
Belgian Muslim and Catholic organizations are condemning the terrorist bombings in Brussels. A statement issued by the Belgian Muslim Executive (EMB) committee, an umbrella group, said the organization “condemns with force and without reservation” what it called “acts of extreme cruelty against innocent civilians.”
The highest calling of our civil government is to enable people to flourish, secure in communities with liberty and justice for all. In pursuit of that goal, they must at times take appropriate action in pursuit of public safety. However, as the recent police shootings in Chicago and elsewhere have shown, civil servants can commit injustices in the pursuit of their goals. I fear that this happened last March when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested more than 2,000 “criminal aliens” in a sweep it called Operation Cross Check. I fear it is happening again in recent raids to deport Central American women and children seeking asylum and safety from violence.