Free Republic

The Episcopal Church in Connecticut (ECCT) has sold its property at 35 Harris Road, Avon, former home to Christ Episcopal Church, to the Farmington Valley American Muslim Center, Inc. (FVAMC). The sale, for $1.1 million, was completed on Oct. 21. The building was vacated after the congregation voted in 2012 to dissolve as a parish and close by the end of that year. The following spring, Bishop Ian T. Douglas and other ECCT staff hosted a meeting of community leaders and interested residents to discern how the property could best be used “as an asset to God’s mission of restoration...

The Lutheran church in the territory of park on Blyukher Street will start being built probably this year. About it the E1.RU portal was told by representatives of a Lutheran community in Yekaterinburg. Documents on granting the territory according to the lease contract are already agreed with MUGISO and underwent all necessary procedures, including public hearings. Now parishioners expect the construction license which will allow to achieve, at last, long dream – to return to residents of Yekaterinburg the Lutheran temple. The area of building – about 400 square meters. - We awaited five years for this decision, - the...

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho – Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a federal lawsuit and a motion for a temporary restraining order Friday to stop officials in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, from forcing two ordained Christian ministers to perform wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples. City officials told Donald Knapp that he and his wife Evelyn, both ordained ministers who run Hitching Post Wedding Chapel, are required to perform such ceremonies or face months in jail and/or thousands of dollars in fines. The city claims its “non-discrimination” ordinance requires the Knapps to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies now that the courts have overridden Idaho’s voter-approved...

[This is part of Catholic Analysis' special series on Pope Alexander VI. This part, the fourth, details Alexander's election and coronation. Read the third part.] The conclave of 1492 was an awesome, if typical, affair. After the death of Pope Innocent VIII, the primary contenders to succeed him quickly became obvious: Rodrigo Borgia, Ascanio Sforza, and Giuliano della Rovere (who later became Pope Julius II). [1] Rodrigo was the obvious choice, a man of high honors and popularity. However, that he was Spanish, and therefore seen as an outsider, was likely a point of considerable contention. Ascanio, the Italian and...

Last Thursday evening I had my pastor over to Casa de Giles to enjoy one of my fine cigars with the family and me. During the course of catching up, I found out that several new families from a local South Florida mega-church had left that zoo and had joined our church. The reason why they said they absconded had me gobsmacked – and I’m a hard critter to shock. Having been in the ministry for twenty-five years, I’ve pretty much heard it all and have seen it all, but I wasn’t ready for this curve ball. This time it...

Throughout our nation’s history, the Church has been a force for good in America and abroad. But over the last 50 years, government has systematically eroded our free speech and religious expression. The Bible and the Gospel have been banished from our public schools and our public squares. With more than 75% of Americans calling themselves Christians, it’s time for the Church to rise up and take action to turn the tide in our nation! We have the numbers and we have a voice. If we are silent, we have no one to blame but ourselves for a Godless America.

An Armenian Apostolic church constructed in memory of the victims of the 20th century Armenian genocide was “rigged and dynamited” on Sunday by forces loyal to the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS), according to reports from Syria’s government news agency. The Armenian Holy Martyrs Church in Der Zor, located in the Syrian desert 280 miles northeast of Damascus, was constructed in memory of the victims of the 1916 Armenian genocide and consecrated in 1991. The site was chosen because Der Zor is believed to have housed death camps in which an estimated 150,000 to 400,000 Armenians were...

Church-sign war!  h/t Kirby

I have argued before that, in their fullest, libertarianism and Catholicism are incompatible -- but to what degree are they so? Leaders of the libertarian movement have certainly said silly, anti-Catholic things. Ludwig von Mises, for example, compared Christ to the Bolshevists and also said, "..[I]t is the resistance which the Church has offered to the spread of liberal ideas which has prepared the soil for the destructive resentment of modern socialist thought" (Socialism, Chapter 29). Translation: opposition to liberalism of one stripe must be blamed for inspiring liberalism of another. Huh? Much of the conflict between libertarians and the...

Nathaniel Morales, who was recently convicted of sexually abusing boys he met in a Gaithersburg church decades ago, was sentenced to 40 years in prison Thursday. In two trials in May, jurors found Morales guilty of a series of counts of sex abuse and sex offense. Victims gave powerful testimonies of what Morales did to them and the lasting effect it had.

I am new to this journey. My daughter Faith is only 5 years old. She is mentally and physically disabled, still small enough to carry, quiet . . . mostly, and has not developed the larger, louder, and strange movements and sounds that many older people who are mentally and physically disabled seem to develop as they try to express themselves – yet. We have taken our daughter to concerts, plays, movie theatres, political speeches, pro-life fundraisers and community events, and spend a lot of time in hallways and lobbies when she does get loud. However, we’ve found that the...

“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.” – 2 Timothy 4:3 Dear false prophets, false teachers and Christian apostates of every stripe: We’ve all heard this phrase: “You know who you are!” It’s an expression typically levied in the context of some corrective admonition, intended for some person or persons, busy about some misbehavior. While sent via certified mail, this is one of those rare open letters to whom the preponderance of intended recipients have, somehow, managed to convince themselves,...

By now, we’ve all heard the refrain that U.S. churches need liberalize their teachings on sexuality and homosexuality or rapidly decline. The logic behind the argument is simple: more and more Americans are embracing homosexuality and same-sex marriage, including growing numbers of religious Millennials. So long as churches remain the face of opposition to gay marriage, those churches will shrink into irrelevancy when gay marriage (inevitably, we are told) becomes a settled political issue. These arguments often see church acceptance of homosexuality as a carrot as well as a stick. It isn’t so much that denouncing homosexuality will drive people...

A restaurant owner who is under fire for offering a faith-based discount to customers says he doesn’t plan to discontinue it, despite receiving a complaint from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a secular activist group. Steven Rose, owner of Bailey’s Pizza in Searcy, Arkansas, told TheBlaze Wednesday that he posted a 10 percent discount on his restaurant’s Facebook page on July 19 for anyone who brought in a church bulletin. Not long after, he received a comment from a user named “Bong Hits for Jesus” that read, “Good luck on your discrimination lawsuit.” “I didn’t give much credence to it,”...

He was once a terrified 11-year-old filled with guilt and shame at being molested by his St. Paul parish priest. As an adult serving six years aboard Navy submarines, he felt safer next to a nuclear warhead in the middle of the Pacific Ocean than he had at church. Now, he said, he's not terrified anymore. And he wants the world to know his name. "My name is Jon Jaker," said the 54-year-old resident of Orange, Calif., who won a settlement Wednesday morning in his lawsuit against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Jaker claimed he was sexually abused...

The family of the black teenager shot dead by a policeman in St Louis are haunted by the image of him holding his hands up at the moment he was killed, a family member claimed today. Ty Pruitt said that the mental picture of Michael Brown surrendering was stuck in his relatives’ minds as it showed he was ‘killed like an animal’. Pruitt spoke out at an emotional Sunday church service during which Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden sobbed and wiped the tears away from her eyes with a tissue. His father Michael Brown Sr stood grim faced whilst wearing a...

A half-dozen strippers paraded topless outside a rural Ohio church as its parishioners entered and exited this Sunday as a counterprotest to the church's efforts to close their business. A total of 30 dancers, friends, fellow employees, and strip industry executives gathered outside New Beginnings Ministries in Warsaw, Ohio, on Sunday, the second week the sex workers protested the evangelical church's strong moral stance. The church, which has about 125 members in a city of 700, has protested the Foxhole North, located just nine miles down the road from its sanctuary, for years. Thomas George who owns that location and...

Is the Internal Revenue Service a threat to religious liberty? As the IRS continues to come under well-aimed fire for harassing conservative groups, on Friday it secured a final court order formalizing what amounts to a secret agreement to monitor the pulpits of ill-favored churches. The serious danger, as former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams told Fox News, is that the IRS will start treating “theology as politics,” and regulate it accordingly. Lovers of liberty should be very concerned. According to a June 27 IRS letter to the Justice Department, 99 churches merit “high priority examination” for allegedly illegal...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)On Thursday’s “Outnumbered” on the Fox News Channel, panelists Tucker Carlson and Kirsten Powers had a heated exchange over the ongoing border crisis and whether or not it was this country’s so-called Christian duty to grant those unaccompanied minors entering the United States asylum. Carlson questioned Powers’ suggestion as it being the Christian obligation of the country to accept these minors into the United States. He argued that it wasn’t “Christian” to shirk those cost onto the American people through the use of their tax dollars and called out church groups encouraging those fleeing Central American countries to seek government...

LITTLE ROCK, AR - According to the Little Rock Police Department, Jacob J. Taylor was arrested for parole violations. Additional investigations have been started. We will bring you updates as they become available to us. video on link