Free Republic

The Evangelical Free Church of America is the orthodox version of the credobaptist tradition stemming from Swede immigrants to the United States whereas the Evangelical Covenant Church has embraced liberalism. However the powers that be at the top echelons of the organization are extremely liberal and vindictive. After defrocking Pastor Jeff Kliewer, the pastor of Cornerstone Church in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, they have their sights on a new target: Pastor David Whitney. His crimes stem from his refusal to shut down his church during lockdowns. In the small town of Taneytown, MD, a Republican organization, the Tri-District Republican Club...

First major survey of Dutch painter in three decades to debut at London's National Gallery will include reunited panels and monumental paintings The painting The Laughing Cavalier (1624) is perhaps better known in the UK than its creator, the Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals. After it was exhibited at the Bethnal Green Museum (now the Young V&A) in London towards the end of the 19th century, its popularity with the public led it to be reproduced on a mass scale and christened with its current title. It has resided at the Wallace Collection in London for the past 120...

A single thief allegedly maneuvered the 250-pound sculpture, dating from Japan’s Edo Period, out of the Barakat Gallery’s backyard and into a rental truckA bronze Buddha statue valued at $1.5m was stolen early Monday morning (18 September) from the Los Angeles location of the Barakat Gallery. The stolen sculpture was believed to have been originally commissioned as the centrepiece of a temple and dates back to Japan's Edo Period (1603-1867), an especially prosperous time for the nation and its arts. Paul Henderson, director of Barakat’s Los Angeles location (the ancient art gallery also has spaces in London and Seoul), estimated...

Plus, Michelangelo at the Albertina in Vienna and Julianknxx at the Barbican in LondonA Unesco conference and archeological summit in Saudi Arabia are the latest examples of the country’s increasing focus on culture as part of the so-called Vision 2030 programme. We look at Saudi Arabia’s unprecedented and lavishly funded focus on contemporary and ancient culture and how that relates to ongoing concerns about artistic freedom and human rights abuses in the kingdom. Alia Al-Senussi, a cultural strategist, and senior advisor at Art Basel and to the Saudi ministry of culture, joins host Ben Luke to discuss the contemporary art...

India has stopped issuing visas to Canadian citizens amid an escalating row over the killing of a Sikh separatist on Canadian soil. India said the temporary move was due to "security threats" disrupting work at its missions in Canada. Tensions flared this week after Prime Minister said India may have been behind the 18 June killing. But Mr Trudeau said on Thursday he was not looking to provoke India with the allegation. India has angrily rejected the allegation, calling it "absurd". Speaking to reporters in New York, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Mr Trudeau said: "There is...

Explanation: The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's arm reached out and touched asteroid 101955 Bennu on October 20, 2020, after a careful approach to the small, near-Earth asteroid's boulder-strewn surface. Dubbed a Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event, the 30 centimeter wide sampling head (TAGSAM) appears to crush some of the rocks in this close-up recorded by the spacecraft's SamCam. The image was snapped just after surface contact some 321 million kilometers from planet Earth. One second later, the spacecraft fired nitrogen gas from a bottle intended to blow a substantial amount of Bennu's regolith into the sampling head, collecting the loose surface material. And...

(RNS) — The ongoing legal battle between Liberty University and Jerry Falwell Jr. has taken yet another twist, with the disgraced former president of the school alleging misconduct by its board of directors and attempting to ban the university from using images of his late father. In an amended complaint filed in federal court last week, Falwell Jr., who resigned from his post in August 2020 in the wake of multiple scandals, alleged that several board members, including former interim Liberty President Jerry Prevo and former Southern Baptist Convention President Jerry Vines, diverted university funds to their private causes. “During...

[H/T Red Badger]If that one death per 800 doses was replicated in the US, around 860,000 Americans have been killed by C19 injectionsPeter HalliganSep 20, 2023 Cross-post from Peter’s NewsletterToday has been a tidal wave of irrefutable evidence that C19 mRNA injections directly cause disease, disabilities & death. The question is, "With all of this evidence, how are any US and global civilians and politicians still deceived that the C19 mRNA injections are available for any other reason other than to cause injury and death?" Are we being called at this time to make amends with those who are still...

On Sunday afternoon, it was announced an F-35 fighter jet valued at an estimated $100 million was missing. The US Marine Corps announced that the pilot of the F-35 had safely ejected from the jet but asked for the public’s help in locating the missing $100 million aircraft. Collin Rugg of Trending Politics shared a video showing the location of the crash. Along with the video, he wrote: “The debris field of the F-35 jet has been released after it was located in a field in Williamsburg County, South Carolina. The crash site was about 80 miles from Joint Base...

According to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, the four prosecutions bedeviling former President Donald Trump are deemed illegitimate by a plurality of the country. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is heading towards an impeachment inquiry targeting President Joe Biden — which will likely be deemed equally suspect by a separate plurality of the nation. Trump’s and Biden’s legal challenges, symptoms of the country’s broader struggle with extreme partisanship, are mirror images in that each candidate’s supporters embrace the rule of law in one case while railing against its misuse in the other. It all has the feel of a...

A failure to address the basics in Chicago didn’t stop the mayor from proposing a new plan to put taxpayers on the hook for government grocery stores. Since Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) took the reins of the Windy City from his predecessor Lori Lightfoot in May, incidents of major crimes had increased across the board and locals were contending with the uptick in illegal aliens. With the addition of a massive budget shortfall, the mayor appeared to disregard sources of problems in Chicago to explore a new government program through a municipally owned grocery store in Chicago in neighborhoods that...

The Southern Baptist Convention has disfellowshipped a church that has been in good in the denomination for 140 years after the pastor wore blackface at a church event and dressed up as a Native American woman for another. The Executive committee voted on Tuesday to kick out Matoaka Baptist Church of Ochelata, marking them as deemed not in friendly cooperation with the convention” after it came to light that pastor Sherman Jaquess dressed up as Ray Charles for a 2017 church Valentine’s Day event, singing a duet, which saw the crowd clap, laugh and loudly cheer. The Executive Committee has...

President Biden showed his age at a campaign reception in Manhattan Wednesday — repeating statements about the 2017 Charlottesville riot and his decision to run for president in 2020 minutes apart and nearly word-for-word. *** “You remember those folks walking out of the fields literally carrying torches, with Nazi swastikas, holding them forward, singing the same vicious, antisemitic bile — the same exact bile — bile that was sung in — in Germany in the early ‘30s. And a young woman was killed. A young woman was killed.” ***“the former guy [then-President Donald Trump] was asked, ‘What do you think...

The sacking of a top diplomat and the mysterious disappearance of a defence minister have raised fresh questions around President Xi Jinping's increasingly opaque decision-making, experts say. US officials believe defence minister Li Shangfu is under investigation and has been relieved of his duties just six months after his appointment, the Financial Times reported last week. In July, foreign minister Qin Gang - long seen as a close ally of Xi's - was removed from office without explanation. Later that month China announced that former navy commander Wang Houbin would take over as the new head of the Chinese military's...

The United States had 3.5 million residents who identify as Middle Eastern or North African, Venezuelans were the fastest-growing Hispanic group last decade and Chinese and Asian Indians were the two largest Asian groups, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The most detailed race and ethnicity data to date from the 2020 census was released Thursday more than three years after the once-a-decade head count, which determines political power, the distribution of $2.8 trillion in annual federal funding and holds up a mirror to how the U.S. has changed in a decade. The delay was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic...

bram X. Kendi, ne Ibram Henry Rogers, is this generation’s Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton on steroids: race hustling shakedowns perfected. His target has been universities, which have been content to shower him with money, the most recent being Boston University, which lured him and his Center for Antiracist Research away from American University several years ago. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey gave Kendi a $10 million unrestricted grant, among other foolish donors who shoveled money at Kendi, when they aren’t paying him up to $40,000 for a half-hour “antiracist training” seminar on Zoom.Someone noticed a few weeks ago that Kendi...

New mask mandates have been imposed in health care facilities and other places in at least three states in recent days. COVID-19 hospitalizations have been rising since late summer, as new variants circulate. According to the latest data from the the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were 20,538 hospital admissions in the week ending September 9, up 7.7 percent from the previous week. In an effort to help avert another "tripledemic" like last year when hospitals were overwhelmed with flu, RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) and coronavirus cases, the U.S. this month approved updated COVID-19 vaccines. The...

Closed-door meeting with Kyriakos Mitsotakis part of Erdogan’s bilateral engagements on margins of UN General AssemblyTurkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan received Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in New York on Wednesday at the Turkish House. Erdogan, who is in New York to attend the 78th UN General Assembly, held the closed-door meeting with Mitsotakis as part of his bilateral engagements on the margins of the General Assembly. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan met his Greek counterpart, George Gerapetritis, on Tuesday to discuss the meeting between the Turkish and Greek leaders. Türkiye and Greece, two neighboring countries, have had a...

‘The Chosen’ Director Dallas Jenkins doesn’t understand the gospel or Christianity, and this is no more apparent than his continued efforts to insist Mormons are Christians who love Jesus. We’ve written about Jenkins in the past, with our post ‘Dallas Jenkins Says Mormons are Saved: ‘I’m Going to Die on That Hill,’ the time Dallas Jenkins Doubles Down on Controversial Mormon Comments, Straight up Lies the Dallas Jenkins Affirms Mormons are Christians in ‘Definitive, Final’ Video‘ and ‘The Chosen’ Director Says Jesus Transfiguration Not Important: ‘What Purpose Would it Serve our Story?‘ Case in point, in a recent Facebook post,...

We’ve periodically debunked the way the climatistas jump on every notable weather event as proof of the imminence of the climate apocalypse, but our friends at Kite & Key Media have put together this nice seven-minute summary of what’s wrong with these claims. Among other things, the video cites Steven Koonin, whose book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters is the best overall treatment of climate change for the layperson yet published (though I do hope to get Judith Curry on a podcast for her terrific new book Climate Uncertainty and Risk after...