Free Republic

We’ve all heard of people doing something secular in a “religious” way, and one area of life to which that applies is sports and physical fitness.Now, some are suggesting that the culture surrounding training gyms may very well fall under the umbrella of religion.The New York Times noted recently that in a society that is increasingly secular, many people are applying their religious sensibility to athletic activity. Many of the parallels with religion can be found, the newspaper noted, in a Crossfit gym: adherents getting out of bed at an ungodly hour in order to spend a significant amount of time in...

Today is the first day of Advent, which marks the start of the pre-Christmas season. It is observed by many, if not most, of the Catholic faithful. And it is in popularity among Protestants, particularly those of us who count ourselves evangelical Christians. Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas and ends on Christmas Eve. During that four-week period, the Christian faithful prepare for the commemoration of the birth of Christ. Satan hates Advent. That’s because he wants to take the “Christ” out of Christmas. He doesn’t want Christmas to be a Godly “holy-day.” Rather, his aim is to reduce the...

The fact that more than sixty percent of the Irish electorate supported an amendment to the nation's constitution recognizing same-sex "marriage" caught many people by surprise last spring. They may have been clinging to an outdated image of Ireland as a bastion of devout Catholicism. Unfortunately there are further disturbing changes that are being advanced. One is more symbolic. Many, including a former news director of the national radio and television station, are asking that the broadcasting of the Angelus be dropped. It is viewed as an anachronism in an Ireland that has "an increasingly multi-ethnic, multi-faith population," and is...

The death of Europe is in sight. Still hazy and not yet inevitable, but nevertheless visible and drawing nearer—like a distant planet in the lens of an approaching satellite. Europe is reaching its end not because of its sclerotic economy, or stagnant demography, or the dysfunctions of the superstate. Nor is the real cause the massive influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants. Those desperate people are just the latest stiff breeze against the timber of a desiccated civilization. Europe is dying because it has become morally incompetent. It isn’t that Europe stands for nothing. It’s that it stands for...

A remarkable turn for a school named for a minister, via The Washington Post:    A Harvard Crimson poll of the university’s class of 2019 provides a glimpse into the beliefs and practices of incoming freshman, including sex, politics and drug use. Some of the interesting findings included the religious breakdown, especially when compared to other millennials in the U.S.Harvard’s combined number of atheists and agnostics among its incoming class exceeds the number of Catholics and Protestants, as Pew Research Center’s Conrad Hackett noted. The number appears to be a striking contrast with the rest of the U.S. millennial population, those from ages 18 to 34.Pew’s...

If there is one thing consistent about the tides of the culture wars, it is that whenever one side is emboldened, it inevitably leads to overreach. The secular Left is proving this point with gusto in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to nationalize gay marriage, calling for the removal of tax exemptions for churches and religious non-profits who continue to hold the tired old definition of marriage that existed all the way up until yesterday. This step, which would crush the budgets of many churches and non-profits, reveals an amusing hypocrisy of the modern Left’s turn against civil...

        Lyrics: The economy is shrinkingOur money is a jokeWe should go back to trading seashellsAnd just admit that we're brokeAnd our food supply is shrinking(yeah, yeah)But we continue happily(yeah, yeah)Building condos on farm land(yeah, yeah)And dumping sewage in the sea(yeah, yeah) Someone's talking 'bout a big ideaSomeone's talking 'bout a higher visionEverybody's on the runLookin' out for number oneAnd your big ideas don't fit Big ideas in the shrinking worldBig ideas in the shrinking worldBig ideas in the shrinking worldWell you make us real nervous with your big ideas Our water is shrinkingAll the pipes...

Some readers may remember the post about Ulf Ekman, a prominent Evangelical pastor who stunned the world when he announced last year he was becoming Catholic.Now, an update, The National Catholic Register: On March 9, 2014, Ulf Ekman, founder and pastor of Word of Life church in Uppsala, Sweden, shocked his congregation with the announcement that he and his wife, Birgitta, were leaving Word of Life to join the Catholic Church. The Ekmans’ decision created a commotion, not only among the Protestant faithful, but even throughout decidedly secular Sweden.The Ekmans will present their story at the “Defending the Faith Conference” July 24-26 at...

NBC has canceled A.D. The Bible Continues after just one season, Deadline reports. The miniseries, created by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, was a follow-up to their record-breaking miniseries The Bible, and chronicled the early days of modern Christianity. A.D., which premiered on Easter, was positioned as an event series at NBC, but Downey, Burnett and the network had indicated that subsequent seasons were part of the plan. It's possible that the show will continue on another platform

If you doubt that Christians are fair game for ridicule by the cultural left, take a look at the hit piece on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by Jeffrey Tayler for Salon. I can't decide which is worse, the title or the subtitle. The title: "Antonin Scalia is unfit to serve: A justice who rejects science and the law for religion is of unsound mind." The subtitle: "The justice claims to be an originalist, but his real loyalty is to religion and a phony man in the sky." The writer is trying to be cute, but don't conclude that any...

A conversation with Peter SeewaldIn his futuristic novel Brave New World, the British author Aldous Huxley had predicted in 1932 that falsification would be the decisive element of modernity. In a false reality with its false truth – or the absence of truth altogether – nothing, in the final analysis, is important any more.There is no truth, there is no standpoint. Today, in fact, truth is regarded as far too subjective a concept for us to find therein a universally valid standard. The distinction between genuine and fake seems to have been abolished. Everything is to some extent negotiable. Is...

What is Sloth? It is More Subtle and Devilish Than Mere Laziness By: Msgr. Charles PopeOne of the more misunderstood of the cardinal sins is sloth. This is because most see it merely as laziness. But there is more to sloth than that. Let’s take a moment and consider some aspects of the cardinal sin we call sloth.The Greek word we translate as sloth is ἀκηδία akedia (a = absence + kedos = care), meaning indifference or negligence. St. Thomas speaks of sloth as sorrow for spiritual good. By it, we shun spiritual good as too toilsome (cf ST...

Almost 20 years ago, the journal First Things published an article by a famous German theologian named Wolfhart Pannenberg titled “How to Think About Secularism.” In the article, Pannenberg outlined the nature of secularism and how it threatened the church, also explaining how the church should not respond to the challenge. Looking back, it’s clear that many of our pastors and leaders have done the opposite of what he counseled, and we are paying the price for it today. Pannenberg himself was orthodox in some of his beliefs and unorthodox in others, but I’m focusing here on his observations about...

Geneva, March 3, Interfax - Aggressive secularism is picking up pace in the West, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. "I can't leave out problems which Christians have been experiencing in many counties, where it is deemed politically incorrect to speak about one's Christian identity and where Christian values, the nucleus of European civilization, are being shunned," he said at a high-level conference on the defense of Christians in Geneva. "Aggressive secularism is picking up pace, and the notions of moral decency and traditional ethnic, cultural and religious identity are being eroded," the Russian foreign minister said. "Vandalism and the...

A couple of years ago, a former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, warned Christians that the faith is in danger. Here is the article: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Christianity-Anglican-Extinct-Carey/2013/11/25/id/538425/ According to the article, only 800,000 people are church-goers in Britain. Britain had a total population of 64 million in 2013. This means that only 1.25 percent of the British population are church-going Christians. The future of America seems to be going in Britain's direction. I wanted to add an update to Lord Carey's observations. A lot of people think the Third World is the future of Christianity. But Brazil, the largest Latin American country,...

It's a common, but misconceived, idea that Western people have grown disillusioned with religion because of religious wars in the distant or - in the almost unique case of Northern Ireland - recent past. People on the Left have taken this view with a bit more consistency than those on the Right. Think of John Lennon's song Imagine. He saw world peace and unification in the abolition of what he considered as all causes of division and conflict: religion, class, nation. Lennon was, to put it in euphemistically-correct language, "cognitively challenged", but at least one can't deny his consistency...

For believing Christians, the identity of Jesus was announced at the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451): Jesus was always divine and human simultaneously. How did this work? Very simply, “it’s a mystery.” But a fuller explanation of how a peasant became God is the subject of Bart Ehrman’s latest book, “How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee,” and the subject of contentious debate among scholars. Several colleagues published a response titled “How God Became Jesus.” Mr. Ehrman, a professor at the University of North Carolina, is a popular speaker on the evolution of Christian theology...

In the past, this season was marked by a greater interest in divinity, the family hearth and the joy of children. Increasingly our society has been turning away from such simple human pleasures, replacing them with those of technology. Despite the annual holiday pageantry, in the West religion is on the decline, along with our society’s emphasis on human relationships. Atheism seems to be getting stronger, estimated at around 13 percent worldwide but much higher in such countries as Japan, Germany and China. “The world is going secular,” claims author Nigel Barber. “Nothing short of an ice age can stop...

In the latest attack on home education, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper has proclaimed that only public schools can educate children to be productive members of society — implying that parents are incapable of educating kids. "Government should do what people individually can't do, or can't do well themselves," the Democrat said in a speech at a luncheon last week. "You know, educating our young people, making sure our roads are designed and built properly, making sure our communities are safe." Most are adamant that by his comment, the governor made it very clear that he believes parents are not capable...

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (December 22, 2014) -- An orangutan that has lived 20 years at the Buenos Aires zoo is entitled to some legal rights enjoyed by humans, an Argentine court has ruled, a decision the ape's attorney called unprecedented and a ticket to greater freedom. The ruling comes a month after a local animal rights group filed a habeas corpus writ in favor of Sandra, who was born in Germany but has lived in captivity in Buenos Aires most of her life. "Following a dynamic ... judicial interpretation, it is necessary to recognize that the animal is subject to...