Liberal Baptist Oliver “Buzz” Thomas compares Christians who are pro-life with the Aztecs, who practiced human sacrifice. Albert Mohler responds.

Messianic Jews have apparently won a victory before the Supreme Court of Israel. And here. Problem is, both of those are Christian sites. I’d be interested in some links to Jewish/Israeli sources.

The New Statesman has a substantial interview with the Anglican Bishop of Durham. The Revealer snidely dismisses Wright as a “fundamentalist.”

Today is Palm Sunday for much of the Christian world today, and it was marked by fisticuffs at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Police were beaten with palm branches when they tried to intervene.

Christopher Hitchens demonstrates the validity of the theory that hell is a place you choose; it is self-exclusion from the presence of God. He hates the sound of heaven as a place of endless praise, where you can’t get away from Jesus (he throws in some obscenities to make his point). All religions are equally…

Every church has its fringe folks who advocate bizarre conspiracy theories. One I’ve recently been exposed to is Walter Veith, a South African zoologist who has a number of DVDs about creation and evolution. Those may be fine, as he is speaking about a subject in which he is well-educated. But he has other DVDs…

Jillian Fortin at the Adventist Youth Blog.

Paul McCain on the absence of preaching about Jesus.

LA Times article contrasts the actions of Texas against the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which was in the state for only a short time, with the century of apathy shown by Arizona and Utah. Utah and Arizona officials have long argued that polygamists are too entrenched in their states to simply…

New movie opening Friday.

In many areas of the countries, Catholic churches have eliminated bingo (or bean-o, as it is called in some places) as a major source of revenue. Many Catholic leaders see the incongruity of supporting the church through gambling, and seek to promote stewardship instead. Not in California, where the Catholic lobby has joined arms with…

Up in Canada, frequent litigant Richard Warman has sued five bloggers, including Kathy Shaidle, not just for posting what he claims are libelous remarks about him, but for letting others comment about him on their blogs, and for linking to other criticisms of him. Warman is a former employee of the Canadian Human Rights Commission,…

Banned in a growing number of British churches: Jerusalem, the William Blake hymn which inspired the title of the movie, “Chariots of Fire” (mp3).

From Against the Grain, a translation of a recent article by Cardinal Walter Kasper on relations between Jews and Christians, and the controversy over the recently revised Good Friday prayer for the 1962 Roman Missal. Kasper affirms that Christian teaching must confess Jesus as savior of all. He notes that the New Testament is clear…

Jill Carroll comments on the goings on involving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the century old Mormon offshoot that still adheres to early Mormon teaching on polygamy.

The scenes are being repeated in city after city as the Olympic torch makes its way to China–runners are protected by a phalanx of police in riot gear determined to protect China’s image and investment. The torch was once a symbol of international cooperation, of putting aside differences in the name of sport. Now it…

In Colorado, a third grader was suspended for three days (subsequently reduced to one) for the high crime of sniffing a place on his shirt where he had written with a Sharpie marker. A toxicologist says there’s no way anyone could get high off the non-toxic smell. That doesn’t faze the school, which has a…

Oh, it’s a great experience, C.P.E. is. Lots of seminarians of lots of denominations go through it. Some of us have good experiences. Mine, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, was mostly good, because I had a very good supervisor. But others suffer through it. It seems at times and at some centers that the…

A man known as “Curveball” was the source of the claims made by Colin Powell in 2003 before the UN. The only source. And the US never checked him out themselves–they just relied on raw information from Germany (who also didn’t check him out). Eighteen months after 9/11 US intelligence agencies were still acting like…

Remember Muammar Gaddafi? He’s turned into a Biblical scholar, it appears. He said: “The Bible we have now is not the one that was revealed to Issa [Jesus] and the Old Testament is not the one that was revealed to Musa [Moses]. Muhammad is mentioned in both (original versions), but the Tora and Bible we…

The Codex Judas Congress begins this afternoon at Rice University.

Please continue to keep Doug Kilcher and his family in your prayers. He’s our conference Secretary (equivalent to chancellor, for my Catholic friends), and has been battling multiple myeloma. I don’t recall having heard of the disease, a cancer of the blood, before Doug became ill. Yet Roy Scheider recently died from it; a little…

Houston Chronicle and Dallas Morning News reported yesterday on the debate at University of Dallas over the theft of a painting depicting the Virgin Mary as a stripper. I’m wondering why no one has published a picture of the artwork in question.

Pyromaniacs dissects Luke Timothy Johnson’s attempts to construct his own religion apart from the Bible.

History of war told through animated food.

“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians? Our instruction comes from ‘the porch of Solomon.’…. Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition!….With our faith, we desire no further belief.” Tertullian, De…

Gerd Luedemann, who recently took Pope Benedict XVI to task for taking Scripture seriously, responds to April DeConick’s call for posts about Athens and Jerusalem by acknowledging he has completely surrendered to Athens. His contribution is a repost of a piece he wrote a couple of years ago, “Why I’m a Secularist.” However it may…