Free Republic

Melanie, Sue and Chris recount ordeals they say have left them traumatised Melanie Melanie was experiencing difficulties in her personal life – an abusive husband, a daughter diagnosed as autistic – when her vicar and others in the leadership of her Anglican church suggested she needed deliverance. “They said that things that were going wrong in my life might be because of a demon, and if we got the demon out, things would get better.” In 2015, Melanie fainted during a choir rehearsal. “As I was regaining consciousness, they said that I looked at them with an inhuman face and...

Frank S. Page has resigned as president and chief executive officer of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee (EC), effective today, over what is described as “a morally inappropriate relationship in the recent past.” - snip - Last evening, the officers of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee met via phone conference with Dr. Frank Page during which he announced his plans for retirement. Today, I spoke with Dr. Page and learned that his retirement announcement was precipitated by a morally inappropriate relationship in the recent past. - snip - Page released a statement as well Tuesday afternoon: It is...

We're opening our weekend movie a little early this week, in time for Good Friday. On Saturday night we'll have another seasonal entertainment for you, but this is Mel Gibson's big blockbuster from fourteen Easters ago. Mel has spent the last decade getting a little crazier with every year that passes, and, surprisingly, there have been no attempts to follow the success of this film. But back in 2004 it was impressive not just cinematically but as an interesting business model for bypassing Hollywood: The headline on the Washington Post review summed it up: "'Passion' Is A Gory Take On...

If the Russian Communists were to succeed in establish­ing a perfect society on earth, they needed to eradicate a faith that believed this to be impossible. Christianity teaches that God alone is free from imperfection and that the redemption and perfection of the world is to be realized only in the Resurrection. To eliminate such a compromis­ing element in society, the Soviet government organized attacks that infiltrated every layer of religious life. Christianity in the Soviet Union was forced to endure under the hostile and often deadly condi­tions of the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn, himself a prisoner in the Gulag, ob­served that:...

The Nazis developed an elaborate system of rituals and ceremonies. Their most powerful competitor in this regard was the Church, which the Nazi Party fought hard to displace. One way to do that was to take over Church festivals, giving them new content. This is an example of a speech to be given by party leaders at Easter ceremonies in 1944. As the introduction puts it: “We Germans celebrate Easter as a festival of spring, which has been passed down to us for millennia from the mists of German time.” There is no mention of Christianity. Life can never perish...

A Muslim beauty queen is set to become the first Miss England contestant to compete wearing a hijab. Maria Mahmood, 20, came runner-up in the Miss Birmingham heat and has made it through to the semi-finals of the national competition. If she is successful, Maria will then take part in the Miss England finals, with the winner going on to represent the nation in Miss World.

Thousands of revellers made the most of the four day Easter Bank Holiday weekend as they celebrated into the early hours of this morning. Party-goers took to Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle city centres as they descended on pubs and clubs to celebrate, with many looking a little worse for wear as the night wore on. With Good Friday and Easter Monday providing extra days off over the weekend, they saw it as chance to let their hair down, but some clearly took it a bit too far.

I know this might turn into an uncomfortable thread. First off, i'm in my mid-40's. I don't even really know why i'm posting this. However, i have this "pull" to construct my final resting accommodations. OK, let me flash forward a little bit... I loved my grandfather dearly. He was a man of very few words, and a lot of hard work; he was a sharecropper. I was always in awe of him. When i was a very young man, 7-ish, he started to teach me woodworking. He taught me; he made things with his hands with me. He showed...

The Vatican sealed off part of St Peter's Basilica after chunks of plaster rained down on worshippers at the height of the Easter holiday season. No one was injured by the falling plaster, which fell near Michelangelo's famed Pieta statue, near the main entrance.

The vice president of the Family Research Council, Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin (ret.), a former leader of Delta Force and commander of Army Special Forces, said the endless attacks by the left on President Donald Trump are "diabolical" and that the left is in "disarray" because they do not understand that "God's imprint" is evident in the election of Trump in 2016. “They are coming up with these absolutely absurd, off-the-wall things trying to justify and rationalize why they lost this election to a guy like Donald Trump," said Boykin on the Mar. 27 edition of The Jim...

Since our government is concentrating on economics first, let us help the President and his Attorney General by doing what we can do to eliminate this horrible blight of pedophilia in on our nation. Noon, Wednesday, March 28, 2018 End Pedophilia in the World Since the United States Government refuses to go after and arrest and convict pedophiles currently and formerly in high government office, it is up to Christian men to end this scourge on the children, toddlers and infants of our country. Christ tells us directly in both Matthew 18:6, Mark 9:2, and in Luke 17:2 that it...

The theology program at the Jesuit-run College of the Holy Cross has taken on a new tone ever since the school appointed a gender-obsessed Chair of New Testament Studies who claims Jesus was a “drag king,” a new article contends. Writing for The Fenwick Review, Elinor Reilly of the Holy Cross class of 2018 argues in a March 26 article that Professor Tat-Siong Benny Liew’s “unconventional readings of Scripture” have brought “a new theological perspective to Holy Cross.”

Malaysia’s government proposed new legislation Monday to outlaw fake news and punish offenders with a 10-year jail sentence, a move slammed by critics as a bid to crack down on dissent ahead of a general election. Prime Minister Najib Razak has been dogged by a multibillion-dollar corruption scandal involving an indebted state fund, and rights activists fear the new law could be used to criminalize news reports and critical opinions on government misconduct. A general election must be held by August but is widely expected in the next few weeks. The anti-fake news bill, which must be approved by parliament,...

France has produced a second martyr — the first was Father Jacques Hamel, slain at the altar while saying mass — in the contemporary battle against radical Islam. From Familie Chretienne, this news about Arnaud Beltrame, the French gendarme who willingly exchanged places with a hostage held by an ISIS militant. (Translated by Google.)

Three ministers from the Norwegian government presented on Friday a proposal to ban face-covering garments at schools, daycares and other educational institutions. The proposal was presented by ministers from each of the three parties in the coalition government — Finance Minister Siv Jensen (Progress), Minister of Education and Integration Jan Tore Sanner (Conservative) and Minister of Education Iselin Nybø (Liberal). “Even though few people wear the burqa and niqab today, there are instances of it. A national ban will make things clearer for everyone,” Sanner said to NRK. The ban will ensure good communication in educational contexts, the minister added....

Nearly three-quarters of young Brits identify as having no religion, a report suggests. Researchers asked the religious views of people aged 16 to 29 across Europe. They found young people in the Czech Republic are the least religious - with 91% of that age group saying they have no faith at all. The most religious country in Europe was Poland, where just 17% of young adults define themselves as non-religious. The figures were published in a report called Europe's Young Adults and Religion - which was a collaboration between St Mary's University in London and the Catholic University of Paris....

Football and baseball star Tim Tebow did not attend a single day in public school until his first day at the University of Florida, a school with nearly 50,000 students. Tebow, 30, instead spent his early education years working on his family’s farm and attending classes taught by his parents together with his siblings. "They wanted us to learn reading, writing and arithmetic, but it wasn't No. 1. It wasn't the most important thing," Tebow said. "They wanted to instill love in our hearts, love for God, love for one another. They wanted us to be able to learn a...

As history demonstrates, in France as elsewhere, the Church is always rising from the dead because the gates of Hell cannot prevail against her... It’s not that secularism is dead...It isn’t (like the poor it is always with us). It is simply that it does not have the power to defeat the forces of Christendom... “A few years ago,” Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, “I started to realize something. Whenever I was less than five minutes early for Mass, I had to go to the overflow room, and I would typically have to step over people sitting on the floor to get there....

The shocking footage, shared on Twitter by one of the priests witnessing the act, shows the moment when local Communist Party chiefs use a crane to remove the last cross standing on top of the Shangqiu Catholic Church South Cathedral in the country's Henan Province. An unidentified group are said to have burst into the church without any official documentation or notice and occupied it by securing the doors and shutting down electrical power. Priest and nuns reported the intruders to the police in vain, as the authorities once arrived confiscated their phone and quarantined them, barring anyone from entering...

All the authorities can do is ban anyone who wants to speak about this. The British police are a disgrace. Reportedly close to a million non-Muslim girls have been gang raped and trafficked in the UK. The authorities did not pursue these crimes for years, for fear of being accused of islamophobia and racism (Islam is not a race). And still the child rape rages on. Politicians can keep turning a blind eye, law enforcement ignore it, so this pox on our communities continues get worse. It’s because rape jihad is sanctioned under Islam. Sex slavery is sanctioned under Islam....