Spiritual disciplines are always timeless, but they also can be powerfully timely in our personal and public lives. Many of us would say that the 2020 presidential election may be the most important in any of our lifetimes for the future of the country, and a sign of whether genuine and inclusive democracy in the United States even has a future. At the same time, calls for prayer, fasting, and repentance are centuries old — they continually demand that Christians go deeper in preparation to worship a risen Christ.
For health journalist Colleen Shaddox, capitalism is incompatible with loving your neighbor.
Just a few years ago, Shannon Watts stepped back from her role as a communications executive to be a stay-at-home mother of five. Today, she is one of the most prominent activists in the world. Shannon is the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, the leading force for gun violence prevention, with chapters in all 50 states and a powerful grassroots network that has affected change at local, state, and national levels.
“If you stand up to sexual abuse, you must remain standing,” Susan Codone recently told me. She’d said the same thing on Twitter in response to news that Paige Patterson, former president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, was slated to preach at the “Great Commission Weekend” at a church in Immokalee, Fla. Patterson was fired from SWBTS in 2018 after trustees learned that he planned to meet privately with a rape survivor because, “I have to break her down and I may need no official types there.”
The Supreme Court gave the go-ahead on Monday for one of President Donald Trump's hardline immigration policies, allowing his administration to implement a rule denying legal permanent residency to certain immigrants deemed likely to require government assistance in the future.
I interviewed Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) by phone on the same day he voted in favor of the resolution. He spoke about how his faith, "Gandhian Hinduism," informed his anti-war views. I was struck during our interview about the diversity of religious views that informed anti-war activism. I asked Khanna's staff to recommend other members of Congress to interview. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who is Catholic, and Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.), who is Jewish, both shared their own thoughts in written responses to the same questions.
With the campaign of Donald Trump, the movement I once devoted my life to was swallowed up by a political leviathan. In Trump’s craven pursuit of power, prestige, and the adulation of the crowds, the once poster boy for a lifestyle of pleasure-seeking and self-absorption that required legalized abortion for its own preservation, offered a deal to pro-lifers: Sell out to me and I’ll sell out to you. You’ll get everything you want if you give me everything I want.
Orthodox in doctrine and Catholic as a matter of universality, the Church has outlived a half dozen empires and several continental wars in little over a millennium. From 1946 to 1989, the church was outlawed in the Soviet Union, which had annexed Lviv and the surrounding area after winning WWII. The Soviets brought with them state atheism, driving most Christians (though not all) underground.