Free Republic

This isn’t satire, but it sounds like it. The Vision Church in Atlanta, Georgia, has added a psychic medium to their church staff. The medium, Lakara Foster, claims to be able to communicate with the dead. The church licensed her to Gospel ministry and hired her as staff so that she can help parishioners communicate with their deceased relatives. File this under, “I kid you not.” Rolling Out first covered the story in a post entitled, Black Girl Medium, At a Church Near You. The church says that her ability to communicate with the dead is one of her “spiritual...

A Kentucky coal miner died after refusing treatment for a Sunday-morning snake bit. John David Brock, a member of the Holiness faith, was bitten by a rattlesnake and died four hours later, according to a CBS affiliate. Brock had other health problems, and the official cause of death will be determined from medical records. Snake-handling churches emerged in the early 20th century. It gained popularity in the last few years through the reality show Snake Salvation. The pastor in Snake Salvation, Jamie Coots, died of a snake bite in 2014. The CBS affiliate says Brock is the second person to...

Interesting op-Ed by the snake handler from Kentucky who was finally killed by a rattlesnake bite. It is about the constitution and freedom of religion. His name was Jamie Coots. I'd never heard of him before, but he was apparently on a National Geographic TV show for a while.

Two days ago, the Washington Post published a lengthy story on snake-handling pastor Mack Wolford, who died Sunday night from, well, a snakebite he got in church. Wolford cited Mark 16:17-18 as the source for his practice of handling rattlesnakes, water moccasins, copperheads and other venomous snakes. And Mark 16:18 does seem clear: "they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them." There's only one problem: Mark 16:18 is not in the Bible. The last 12 verses of Mark's gospel were added sometime after the original gospel began to...

German Cardinal Says Pope 'In a Very Bad Way' Tue September 30, 2003 08:23 AM ET BERLIN (Reuters) - Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the German head of the Vatican body which oversees doctrinal matters, was quoted on Tuesday as saying Pope John Paul was in very poor health and the faithful should pray for him. "He is in a very bad way," Ratzinger told Germany's Bunte magazine in an interview. "We should pray for the pope." Ratzinger, who heads the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, told the magazine that the 83-year-old pope had taken on too much, but...