Faith

Two Virginia bishops issued a letter through the Virginia Catholic Conference on Monday urging Catholics to oppose legislation in the Virginia General Assembly that would legalize physician assisted suicide within the commonwealth. The legislation passed a second committee vote on Thursday. Bishop Michael Burbridge of Arlington and Bishop Barry Knestout of Richmond warned in their letter that bills "to legalize physician assisted suicide" are "moving rapidly" through the General Assembly. The bishops wrote, "We are alarmed and deeply saddened by this development. Human life is sacred and must never be abandoned or discarded.

More than half a century ago, Time magazine famously asked, “Is God Dead?” The black and red cover, the magazine’s first to include only text, sparked countless angry sermons and thousands of letters from readers accusing Time of engaging in tasteless nihilism, Marxist pandering, and outright blasphemy. The question, which typified the counter-culture movement and the intellectual radicalism of the 1960s, was far off the mark both then and now. The United States has always been and remains a very religious nation despite steep declines in attendance at churches, synagogues, and mosques – trends that have captured far more headlines in recent years than the nation’s enduring faith. America is also a majority Christian nation, though other religious groups and affiliations and those identifying as non-believers are growing.

Pope Francis on Monday slammed surrogacy as a "deplorable" practice comparable to human trafficking, and he called for a global ban on it.

Bradlee Dean, founder of the nonprofit Christian organization You Can Run, But You Cannot Hide International (YCRBYCHI) and host of the radio show Sons of Liberty, spoke to the Grassroots Tea Party Activists of Arizona Thursday evening in the West Valley. Dean, an ordained minister and drummer for the Junkyard Prophet, a Christian rock band, founded YCRBYCHI in 1997, which gives presentations to students at school assemblies across the country.  The fiery, entertaining Dean started his radio show in 2002, which is now nationally syndicated. He produced a mini-series documentary in 2011 titled My War, where he “slings rocks at the political, social, and immoral giants of our time and confronts society’s ills.” He said his band has “purposely turned down 5 record deals in order to maintain control of their uncompromising message.” The Minnesota native wrote a regular column for WND until 2017.

The family of Jan. 6 protester Ashli Babbitt has filed a $30 million wrongful death lawsuit against the government, saying she posed no threat to anyone when she was killed. 

The window that opened in 2019 to allow United Methodist churches to depart their embattled denomination closes in a week or so, at the end of the year, and at this late hour, approximately one-fourth of the member churches that constitute Protestantism’s second-largest denomination have climbed through that window. In the largest U.S. church schism since Civil War times, nearly 7,700 churches of the roughly 30,000 in the United Methodist Church (UMC) have voted to take their property and go elsewhere.

The wife of a former Tennessee sheriff's deputy who was convicted for on charges related to January 6 told The Tennessee Star that families and friends of those defendants often experience survivor's guilt, especially as many of those accused of crimes spend their third Christmas in jails or prisons. Sarah McAbee, the executive director of Stand in the Gap and wife of January 6 prisoner Ronald McAbee, explained, "Wives are waking up without their husbands, children are waking up without their fathers. Even in the federal prison system, they only get a 15 minute phone call per day." She told The Star that January 6 have "have to decide, am I going to call my spouse? Am I going to call my parents? Am I going to call my child?"

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. John 3:16 (KJV) We thought about and were well on the way to drafting a much different column for this Christmas – Biden Outdoes The Grinch seemed apropos to this season of economic distress and discontent. But in looking through past Christmas columns we ran across one of our columns from 2019, entitled “The Gift of Christmas is Fulfilled at Easter” and we were brought back to the recognition that no Christian should be bitter on Christmas, because if there is one day of the year that is to be dedicated to hope it is Christmas and the anniversary of the birth of Our Savior.

Former President Trump released a statement on Thursday in remembrance of Dr. Clarence Sexton, who passed away on December 12.

When Bishop Karl-Heinz Wiesemann asked priests, deacons, and lay pastoral workers in the German Diocese of Speyer to offer blessings for same-sex unions and remarried couples early last month, his letter made international news — and it should have. That’s because the Catholic Church believes same-sex unions are sinful and contrary to both the law of God and the laws of nature. That teaching — that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is, in fact, a sin — has repeatedly put a Church hierarchy dedicated to “inclusion” and “solidarity” in a tight spot. Progressives both inside (men like Wiesemann and Fr. James Martin) and outside of the Church have repeatedly pressured Catholic leadership to offer some kind of legitimization to homosexual unions.

An official rule permitting congregations to part ways with the United Methodist Church (UMC) while retaining church property is about to expire, but the effects of the split are far from over. Churches in Alabama continue to face divisions even after failing to leave the denomination under the rule. Some congregants who were members of UMC churches left to form their own independent churches or joined other Methodist denominations like the Global Methodist Church (GMC).

If the Biden administration doesn't intend to punish medical professionals for refusing to participate in so-called gender affirming care, from using patients' preferred pronouns to referring them for castration, it's certainly not acting like it. That was the impression of at least two of three judges on a 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel hearing a pre-enforcement challenge to the feds' reinterpretation of the Affordable Care Act's prohibition on sex discrimination in Section 1557 as covering gender identity as well.

A Williamsburg music and arts festival is denying it ever scheduled a menorah lighting to celebrate Hanukkah after Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) condemned the group's purported decision to cancel it amid Israel's defensive war against Hamas. News broke on Sunday that the 2nd Sundays Art and Music Festival in Williamsburg canceled a menorah lighting scheduled for its December 10 event, with The Virginia Gazette reporting that festival founder Shirley Vermillion "said 2nd Sundays are inclusive to different religions and cultures," and reported that Vermillion stated the menorah lighting "seemed very inappropriate" due to what the outlet called "current events in Israel and Gaza."

Pope Francis is reportedly planning to remove an American conservative cardinal, who has been critical of the Vatican in the past, from his apartment over issues of “disunity,” according to ABC News. Cardinal Raymond Burke, 75, was removed by the pope as the Vatican’s high court justice in 2014 and has been openly critical of Francis’ statements on LGBTQ issues and reform of the Catholic Church. Francis allegedly held a meeting with other Vatican leaders on Nov. 20 to discuss his plan to remove Burke’s apartment and salary as a retired cardinal because he is a source of “disunity,” according to ABC News, which cited two anonymous sources.

In a show of solidarity for arguably the most antisemitic member of congress, the Middle Tennessee Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is rallying around U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI-12) after she was disciplined by her colleagues in a rare congressional censure. The local chapter’s X account reposted the national organization’s screed over the U.S. House of Representatives vote last week to punish Tlaib.