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Churches have received subpoenas issued by the city of Houston demanding copies of sermons. Houston is probing opposition to a ballot referendum pertaining to an ordinance proposing a local discrimination law affecting gays. (Bryan Preston posted this summary of the lawlessness taking place in Houston.) Over 50,000 petition signatures were gathered opposing the ordinance. Now the city, run by the first openly gay mayor, Annise Parker, is retaliating and demanding that churches turn over sermons. You read that correctly. This is the sort of government behavior that used to be confined to two-bit third-world regimes. The gay rights movement was...

Some time ago, as part of the media buzz surrounding the purchase of the Crystal Cathedral, the Catholic Diocese of Orange opened the floor to online suggestions as to what the new church should be named. I offered that it should be titled the Cathedral of the Transfiguration; after all, the feast of the Transfiguration is traditionally the patronal festival for churches dedicated to Our Lord, and its suggestions of illumination, splendor, and above all, a glimpse of Heaven afforded through physical change, seemed perfectly suited to the project, even not without a bit of reverent wit. The name chosen,...

Whenever prophetic voices rise to explain world events from a non-secular perspective, those voices are minimized as “fringe” and “lunatic.” But that is simply an occupational hazard of offering a prophetic voice. They will be beaten to a pulp by competing godless voices until they give in or give up. For example, consider today’s voices in the wilderness that connect this country’s moral collapse to the twin scourges of terrorism and financial indebtedness. Anyone that connects our current struggles to our own spiritual and moral vacuum will be labeled a “nut.” I mean, who wants to hear about such things,...

The American tax authority, the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), will monitor churches for electioneering in a settlement reached on 18 July with an atheist group, the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF). In 2012 the FFRF filed a lawsuit alleging that "the IRS routinely ignored complaints by the FFRF and others about churches promoting political candidates, issues, or proposed legislation. As part of their tax-exempt status, churches and other religious groups are prohibited from engaging in partisan political activity." Monitoring what is said in houses of worship is a clear violation of the First Amendment, since no law can be...

In Iraq, ISIS is bulldozing churches and turned the Cathedral of Mosul into a mosque. Meanwhile, many thousands of miles away…… in the National Post: What’s happening to Montreal’s churches? Quebec finding new ways to preserve its heritage in a secular ageMONTREAL — Weight machines fill the space where once there were pews, and visitors sip nutritional green smoothies, not communion wine. But despite its dramatic transformation into a private gym and spa, the onetime Dominican St. Jude’s Shrine on Montreal’s St. Denis Street remains a temple of sorts.“It becomes almost a religion for some people,” Sonya Audrey Bonin, general...

The Internal Revenue Service said it will monitor churches and other houses of worship for electioneering in a settlement reached with an atheist group. The settlement was reached Friday (July 18) in federal court in Madison, Wis., where the initial lawsuit was filed in 2012 by the Freedom from Religion Foundation, a Wisconsin-based atheist advocacy group that claims 20,000 members nationwide. The suit alleged the IRS routinely ignored complaints by the FFRF and others about churches promoting political candidates, issues or proposed legislation. As part of their tax-exempt status, churches and other religious groups are prohibited from engaging in partisan...

Most houses of worship have been granted a full exemption from Obamacare's regulation mandating coverage of contraception and abortifacients, but Ed Whelan points out that new legislation unveiled by Senate Democrats yesterday could put that religious protection in jeopardy. Although "bill itself wouldn’t abolish the exemption," Whelan writes, it "would allow the Obama administration (or its successors) to abolish the exemption and the accommodation in their entirety. (If the bill were instead intended to preserve the exemption and the accommodation against regulatory abolition, it would be a fairly simple matter to say so clearly.)"

ISIS is leaving a path of destroyed churches, shrines and mosques in its wake as it storms across Syria and Iraq, and has even set its sights on Mecca -- Islam's holiest site. The nihilistic jihadis, led by self-proclaimed descendant of Prophet Muhammad Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, have already bulldozed or blown up some of the most sacred places in Iraq, and seem bent on killing and destroying anyone or anything that does not measure up to their twisted vision of Islam. Experts say the group, which originally stood for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, but now simply calls itself "Islamic...

Muslims in Nineveh, Iraq, have ordered Christians to keep their churches closed, and told them that if they open their churches, that they will burn them down.According to a native Iraqi pastor, named Majeed, described this destruction of Christian liberty: That they are not allowed to open their churches. And even if they open them they will burn the churches… And also the Christians have been requested — been asked to pay the tax [dhimmi, the tax for non-Muslims under Islamic rule]. …If not, they can leave Nineveh… And if they don’t leave and don’t pay the tax, they should...

Praying to Mary, celebrating the Mass, venerating the Pope—you won’t find those doctrines in the Bible. And yet more than one billion Roman Catholics throughout the world follow such practices in line with the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. With that many Catholics around the globe, it’s likely you know some of them as relatives, friends, neighbors, or co-workers. Find out what they don’t know—the origin and error of Catholic doctrine—so you can help the Catholics you know out of the darkness and into the light.

It is well and good for the preacher to base his sermon on the Bible, but he better get to something relevant pretty quickly, or we start mentally to check out.” That stunningly clear sentence reflects one of the most amazing, tragic, and lamentable characteristics of contemporary Christianity: an impatience with the Word of God. The sentence above comes from Mark Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today in an essay entitled, “Yawning at the Word.” In just a few hundred words, he captures the tragedy of a church increasingly impatient with and resistant to the reading and preaching of...

On New Year’s Day, 48-year-old Frank Turner and his son, Anthony, 21, were shot and killed on a street in Southwest Baltimore. The murders struck at the heart of Sharon Rock, a parishioner of St. Bernardine in West Baltimore. The victims were her relatives. “I just pray every day that things and times will change,” said Rock, 55, who suspects that the Turners were murdered as retaliation over an alleged physical altercation. Nineteen days after her family members died, Rock turned her pain into action and attended a prayer walk at St. Bernardine Church. Prayer walks, which are held across...

Islamic extremists abducted about 100 female students from a school in northeast Nigeria before dawn Tuesday, but some of the teens managed to escape from the back of an open truck, ... Islamic extremists have been abducting girls to use as cooks and sex slaves. Insurgents from the Boko Haram terrorist network are blamed for attacks that have killed more than 1,500 people this year alone. The group — whose name means "Western education is forbidden" — has targeted schools, mosques, churches, villages and agricultural centers in increasingly indiscriminate attacks. They have also made daring raids on military barracks and...

The Harvest Church of St. Petersburg, Russia was closed by the Russian government without warning. Government officials reported that the church was conducting unregistered educational activities, namely holding Sunday school classes during the week without explicit permission. Wade Kusack is the Project Manager for Russian Ministries; his specialty is religious issues in Russia. Krusack explained, “In Russia, the church is supposed to have registration. Without registration, no one has the right to practice their religion. The church was stripped of its legal registration.” Since the Harvest Church did not acquire the proper documentation necessary to hold the weekday Christian education...

First published on New English Review. By Enza Ferreri The similarity between Muslims on one hand and feminist and homosexual activists on the other may superficially seem shocking, but in fact it is normal, indeed predictable. Their enemy is the same: the decency and morality deriving from Christian civilisation. Muslim mobs desecrate and burn churches, they break crosses. And so do feminists, with their LGBT allies. Last 23-25 November a horde of 7,000 lesbians and pro-abortion feminists tried to storm the Cathedral of San Juan Bautista (John the Baptist) in Argentina, to desecrate and ransack it. Since the church was...

"Playing off the idea of using social media to summon crowds for parties, Catholics have been attending some of the city's often sparsely attended churches."

It is a common notion that the number of priests has plummeted in this country. Many speak of the halcyon days when there were four and five priests per parish, and the seminaries were packed. And while some of these memories are accurate, they are drawn from a time in this country that was very brief.The fact is, the number of priests per parish spiked sharply after 1950 and has now leveled back to the levels of 1950 and before.Note the graph at the upper right from the Center for Research in the Apostolate (CARA). It depicts the number of...

LONDON (CNN) - The Sunday Assembly was riding high. The world’s most voguish - though not its only - atheist church opened last year in London, to global attention and abundant acclaim. So popular was the premise, so bright the promise, that soon the Sunday Assembly was ready to franchise, branching out into cities such as New York, Dublin and Melbourne. “It’s a way to scale goodness,” declared Sanderson Jones, a standup comic and co-founder of The Sunday Assembly, which calls itself a “godless congregation.” But nearly as quickly as the Assembly spread, it split, with New York City emerging...

Sen. Mike Lee says a bill he introduced would prevent the Internal Revenue Service from denying tax-exempt status to any person or group that refuses to perform gay marriages. "What we're talking about here is the freedom of religious belief, the freedom of a church, for example, to adhere to its own religious doctrine so that it cannot be discriminated against by the government," the Utah Republican said in an interview with Newsmax. Lee said the federal government's failure to protect religious liberty — citing Obamacare mandates for contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs — was a key motivation for him to...

As to "in church" I mean that not so much broadly as to the Church (body of Christ), but as to which styles are Biblically permitted in individual churches. 1.) At what point (scripturally) does a church worship team (for instance) go too far when plucking the bass guitar or electric guitar, or beat the drums too loudly? At what point is the "riff" (or beat) becoming too "wordly." Define "wordly" music as opposed to non-wordly music if/when discussing this. I ask this of those who lean more towards the Michael W. Smith type worship services or to those who...