Christianity

Philip Luke Jeffery on how the murdered German theologian came to be a symbol in American politics.

Andrew Egger on the prickly street preacher who became the ‘father of Christian rock.’

Tim Markatos on the challenges of bringing Joan of Arc’s story to the screen.

John Wilson reviews 'Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear' by Matthew Kaemingk

Today’s church provides plenty of targets for the satirical publication.

Seeking redemption in subtle, everyday quiet.

The club’s transgression? The Crimson reports that the school’s Office of Student Life placed the group Harvard College Faith and Action on “administrative probation” because the group “pressured a female member . . . to resign in September following her decision to date a woman.”

Just a few days before America’s Pastor, Billy Graham, succumbed to Parkinson’s or cancer or pneumonia (when you’re 99-years-young, ailments tend to arrive in multiple-choice fashion), I was walking through Washington’s new Museum of the Bible with my family. As local museums go, the Bible museum…

At the height of his influence in the 1960s and ’70s, Billy Graham was a man about whom nearly every adult in America had an opinion. He was everywhere—his weeklong evangelistic “crusades” packed stadiums around the globe; innumerable books and articles carried his byline; his face appeared on the…

Just a few days before America’s Pastor, Billy Graham, succumbed to Parkinson’s or cancer or pneumonia (when you’re 99-years-young, ailments tend to arrive in multiple choice fashion), I was walking through Washington’s new Museum of the Bible with my family. As local museums go, the Bible museum…

In this latest micro episode, the Substandard reflects on the Lenten season. What are the theological implications for the hosts? JVL and Sonny "grill" Vic about his Lenten sacrifice.

The end of the Chief Wahoo era. Given my lifelong Cleveland Indians fandom, Chief Wahoo has long been part of my sports wardrobe. The New York Times reports that Wahoo's reign as team logo ends in 2019, the year Cleveland will again host the MLB All-Star Game. The trademarks will still be owned by…

It’s not every day that a quarrel breaks out among friends over something that happened in 1858. But so it was in the second week of January when First Things published online a review from its February issue of the memoirs of Edgardo Mortara, a man born into a Jewish family in Bologna in 1851 who…

Among the many reasons to give the book Scalia Speaks for Christmas are its collected speeches on religion. And of these speeches, my favorite is “Being Different,” which the justice gave in 1992 to the Judicial Prayer Breakfast Group, an informal gathering of judicial officers in the Washington,…

The moment its doors officially open, the new Museum of the Bible, with its prime real estate in the capital, will be the nation’s most prominent institution dedicated to educating the general public about Judeo-Christian ideas and history. But it is far from the first attraction built by…

On October 31, exactly 500 years will have passed since a German monk named Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. That’s at least the tradition, but certainly Luther circulated his collection of brief contentions. Mainly he intended to provoke a debate…

On October 31, exactly 500 years will have passed since a German monk named Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. That’s at least the tradition, but certainly Luther circulated his collection of brief contentions. Mainly he intended to provoke a debate…

Michael Cromartie, by his wits and his Christian faith, created something out of nothing, what investor Peter Thiel calls going from 0 to 1. And he became an important and influential figure in Washington, though that wasn’t his aim.

I’ll remember Mike Cromartie as a fellow Christian and my friend. I met Mike in the early 1980s. We were roughly the same age and had some of the same interests—at the top of the list, politics and religion. Mike became a master of evangelical Christianity and its involvements in politics in his…

President Trump has three rules for operating in the world of government and politics. Time learned of them from a White House official and describes them this way: "When you're right, you fight. Controversy elevates message. And never apologize."

From its inception, Christianity has been known as the religion of the cross. Among Christians, the cross is a symbol of Christ's passion and its part in the economy of salvation. To non-Christians, it is what St. Paul termed it: a scandal and a folly. How did a token of degradation inflicted…

From its inception, Christianity has been known as the religion of the cross. Among Christians, the cross is a symbol of Christ's passion and its part in the economy of salvation. To non-Christians, it is what St. Paul termed it: a scandal and a folly. How did a token of degradation inflicted…

President Trump has three rules for operating in the world of government and politics. Time learned of them from a White House official and describes them this way: "When you're right, you fight. Controversy elevates message. And never apologize."

Dante puts Pontius Pilate in the outermost circle of Hell, among the indolent—scant punishment, you might think, for the man who executed Jesus Christ. By letting Pilate off easy, Dante was situating himself firmly on one side of a centuries-old debate: Who was more responsible for killing Christ,…

Dante puts Pontius Pilate in the outermost circle of Hell, among the indolent—scant punishment, you might think, for the man who executed Jesus Christ. By letting Pilate off easy, Dante was situating himself firmly on one side of a centuries-old debate: Who was more responsible for killing Christ,…

Villanova University in Radnor Township, Pennsylvania, is a Roman Catholic institution. Not that there's anything wrong with that! But for some residents of Radnor, Villanova is kind of overdoing this whole Catholic thing.

According to Rod Dreher, Western culture is irretrievably lost. No amount of politicking or resistance-as-usual can turn back the tide of intellectual currents that began with the death of metaphysical realism in the 14th century, the idea that "the essence of a thing is built into its existence by…

According to Rod Dreher, Western culture is irretrievably lost. No amount of politicking or resistance-as-usual can turn back the tide of intellectual currents that began with the death of metaphysical realism in the 14th century, the idea that “the essence of a thing is built into its existence by…

Villanova University in Radnor Township, Pennsylvania, is a Roman Catholic institution. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But for some residents of Radnor, Villanova is kind of overdoing this whole Catholic thing.

Five hundred years ago, an obscure German churchman named Martin Luther issued a call for debate on an abstruse aspect of late medieval theology. From that mundane event followed a sequence of cascading consequences that would divide the Western Catholic tradition and leave a legacy, Protestantism,…

Now that a Republican is back in the presidency, the "theocracy" machine is cranking up again.

It's Christmastime at the Washington Post—and Christmastime at the Washington Post means it's time for another article bashing Christianity, the religion that invented Christmas.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

As a young boy in Canada in the 1970s I often accompanied my grandmother to her neighborhood United Church for Sunday service. The United Church is a Canadian invention. In the 1920s some of the largest and oldest Protestant churches in the country, including all the Methodists and the…

A literal reading of scripture and faith in an interventionist God strengthen church attendance. According to a new academic study of what drives a mainline Protestant church to die out or succeed, preaching these two theological precepts makes all the difference.

A Christian pro-Israel group flooded the United Nation's cultural arm with thousands of condemnatory emails Monday, after the body passed a draft resolution last week denying Jewish and Christian ties to holy sites in Jerusalem.

Back in May, when Trump won the Indiana primary, I felt like such a dope. I was actually waiting for someone to tell me what we were going to do. Just days earlier, we'd all stood on the platform together, refusing to get on the Trump Train.

Kenneth Woodward's new book Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama is out, winning a positive review from D.G. Hart in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal: "His subject is how Americans get religion, and the author's own formation as a Catholic both…

How did Donald Trump lose the Mormons? According to a recent Pew poll, only 48 percent of Mormons now describe themselves as Republicans, compared with 61 percent during the last election cycle. For decades, Mormons have been the most reliably Republican religious group in the country. What…

There were seventy reporters credentialed to the New York Mets instructional league in Port St Lucie, Florida, this week. The 29-year-old college-football broadcaster, Christian evangelist and former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow was taking his first swings and shagging his first flies as a…

Israeli law enforcement officials have charged Mohammed el-Halabi, an employee of World Vision, a child welfare organization supported by Christians throughout the world, of funneling millions of dollars to the anti-Semitic terror organization Hamas.

Per a settlement to a discrimination lawsuit approved by a California judge in late June, the dating website ChristianMingle.com is now adjusting its service to accommodate gay couples. The lawsuit claimed a violation of California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on…

Donald Trump suggested to a group of evangelical activists that America's leaders don't deserve prayer because they're "selling Christianity down the tubes." Trump also said it was more important that people pray "to get everybody out to vote" for him in the general election.

As Inside Higher Ed reports, Andover Newton Theological School, the nation’s oldest school of theology, plans to close its campus outside Boston in 2018. The Newton location has served as its home since the seminary's Calvinist founders fled Harvard in 1807.

Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged Thursday morning that ISIS has committed genocide against minority populations, including Christians, though his remarks have no legal consequence and did not indicate a shift in U.S. policy toward the terror group.

In a move that has sent shockwaves throughout Egypt, the Coptic Pope, Tawadros II, travelled to Jerusalem Thursday at the head of a distinguished delegation of bishops from the Coptic Church. The short flight from Cairo to Tel Aviv can be measured in minutes; the psychological distance stretches…

In remarks a few days ago in Turkey, President Obama said this:

Perhaps it has a low bar to clear, but The Scrapbook still believes that the Washington Post is one of the country’s better daily papers. However, the professionalism that once was a point of pride for high-profile news organizations is vanishing, and the Post is no exception. There were two…

Say this for President Obama: His troll game is strong. During his opening remarks welcoming Pope Francis, he abandoned his “freedom to worship” language and instead said: “People are only free when they can practice their faith freely.” And that, “We in the United States cherish our religious…

Back in 1999, The Weekly Standard ran one of my favorite cover lines ever: The New Europe: Menace or Farce? I often think of that question when I watch Pope Francis.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the controversial Muslim-turned-atheist, told a National Press Club audience last week some hard facts about Islam and its propensity toward violence. But her remarks about Christianity—about its capacity to soften sectarian hatreds—may prove an even tougher pill to swallow.

Secretary of State John Kerry has often spoken to the Muslim world during his tenure, particularly during the past year as negotiations with Iran have intensified and conflict with the Islamic State has escalated. But what Kerry has not said during the past twelve months is also significant. A…

In the context of the Washington Post asking possible Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker whether President Obama's a Christian, it's worth remembering when Hillary Clinton was asked if Obama was a Muslim. She "inject[ed] a note of ambivalence," as ABC wrote at the time.

President Obama has received a lot of well-deserved criticism for his recent remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. After condemning terrorists who “professed to stand up for Islam,” he told the largely Christian audience:

Westminster Abbey announced on Twitter that it's flying its flag at half staff after the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

As the theological undercurrents of the present Middle East turmoil roil ever closer to the surface, well-meaning observers in the West have increasingly looked toward a common biblical ancestor to heal conflict among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Bruce Feiler’s bestselling Abraham: A Journey to…

It is often claimed that conservative religious voters, especially white evangelicals, are going the way of the dinosaur, consigned to demographic irrelevance. But they were a key component of the Republicans’ 2014 midterm victories. According to exit polls, Conservative religious voters made up as…

Islamic State terrorists, formerly known as ISIS, have killed at least 500 members of Iraq’s Yezidi religious minority in and around the city of Sinjar and taken hundreds of women as slaves. Some of the victims were buried alive. Their only crime: not being Muslims.

During a talk to the U.S. embassy staff in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at the first stop on his trip to Africa, Secretary of State John Kerry remarked about what he called the "different cross-currents of modernity" and the challenges they present on the African continent. The comments contain a veiled…

Amid the usual news stories this Easter Sunday – accounts of the president’s family attending church and the pope addressing multitudes – there is this startling and vastly hopeful headline:

When Anders Breivik went on his shooting rampage in Norway in 2011, he left behind a curious and lengthy manifesto identifying himself as Christian with zionist sympathies. The media focused narrowly on his pro-Israel Christian views when discussing his motivation, even though the addled manifesto…

Jean Bethke Elshtain may have been the busiest woman many of us had ever met. Shuttling back and forth between her regular teaching appointment at the University of Chicago and her settled home in Tennessee, she wrote and wrote—and wrote and wrote. Essays, talks, books, memos to fellow directors on…

The anti-Christian violence in Egypt is "a modern pogrom," David Brog, the executive director of Christians United for Israel, says in a statement.

Reza Aslan's book on Jesus, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, has gotten tons of attention, and Aslan has gotten lots of sympathy, because of some of the questions he was asked on a Fox interview. We've already addressed some of the issues regarding Aslan, but now, over at the Jewish…

A band of Muslim raiders sacked Rome in 846 a.d., plundering the city’s churches and getting clean away with their loot. They had come from Palermo, in Sicily, which had been in Muslim hands for 15 years. Sicily was then on its way to becoming a predominantly Islamic and Arabic-speaking island, and…

Houston detective Roland March is in many ways a typical police procedural protagonist. 

The Scrapbook tends to avoid inductive reasoning—that is, drawing a general conclusion from specific examples—because any good polemicist can cherry-pick his anecdotes. But some recent tidings from Bratislava, in Slovakia, have tempted us to wander down Inductive Lane.

Even though it’s only April, the New York Times may already have run the most embarrassing correction that will appear in any major newspaper in 2013. In their story on Pope Francis’s first Easter message, no less than the Times’s Vatican reporter informed readers, “Easter is the celebration of the…

In an interview that aired this morning, President Obama was asked whether he'd have too much influence over an American pope. He didn't answer the question, but he did say he hopes the next pope carries the "central message of the Gospel":

The Vatican released this statement from Pope Benedict XVI announcing his plan to resign on February 28:

The day after Long Cai Bin was baptized, an earthquake destroyed his hometown. But it might have opened his country to his faith.

Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts has banned a Christian group from campus because the group requires student leaders to adhere to "basic biblical truths of Christianity." The decision to ban the group, called the Tufts Christian Fellowship, was made by officials from the university's…

For much of the last decade, international anti-Israel activists have targeted U.S. mainline Protestant denominations with pleas for divesting from firms doing business with Israel. There was reason: Official mainline Protestantism, pro-Israel during Israel's early decades, became sharply…

Just in time for the nearly 2 million member Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly this week, which will consider anti-Israel divestment, some prominent Christian activists have released a new anti-Israel salvo, called Kairos USA.

Last Sunday, CBS’s 60 Minutes broadcast “Christians of the Holy Land,” by Bob Simon, largely blaming Israel for an exodus of Christians from the Holy Land. The showing coincides with a growing international campaign to portray Israel as anti-Christian, showcasing Palestinian Christians as evidence.

Fyodor Dostoevsky once purportedly wrote that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.  As many in the mainstream media have reminded us since his April 21 death at age 80, Charles W. Colson first did so in 1973, as President Nixon’s “hatchet man” sent to…

Over a decade ago, Joe Loconte profiled Chuck Colson for THE WEEKLY STANDARD:

It’s widely reported that Charles Colson once said he'd walk over his grandmother to get Richard Nixon elected to a second term. In the Nixon White House he was considered smart, effective, and ruthless—Nixon's "hatchet man." Then came Watergate, a prison sentence, and a conversion nearly as…

Michelle Obama made a remarkable claim when talking up her husband, President Barack Obama, at a campaign event earlier today in Nashville, Tennessee.

In Nigeria, thousands of people have been killed in recent months, and tens of thousands in the last decade. It is a fissiparous country whose conflicts have been exacerbated by the increased influence of radical Islam​—​beginning with attempts to apply Islamic law, then the growth of militias, and…

Windham, N.H.

A movement is growing among atheists to demand honesty about their own intellectual convictions. Sooner or later, one by one, some face the fact that the deepest secular ideals are rooted in the soil of Jewish and Christian conceptions, nowhere else. Honesty commands some of them to state openly…

Good and Bad Ways to Think About Religion and Politics by Robert Benne Eerdmans, 128 pp., $14

As we look ahead to Easter—Christianity’s greatest feast day, and the celebration of Christ’s resurrection from the dead—there is much to pray for. We pray for those affected by economic strife, and those harmed by natural disasters and war. But let’s not forget the Christians suffering around the…

Cairo -- Polling places are packed today as Egyptians are casting their votes to ratify six amendments to the country’s constitution in what may be Egypt’s freest and fairest election ever. Because the military is running the show, penalties are stiff for voter fraud, and very few seem tempted to…

On October 31, Islamist extremists took hostage the congregation of Our Lady of Salvation Catholic Church in Baghdad and slaughtered 58 men, women and children, wounding 78 others. Most of the slain were worshipers, and two were priests. The tragedy generated a weak response from the Obama…

Over the last several years the old religious right reputedly has been melting down, with younger, more liberal evangelicals in the ascendency. But exit polling from the 2010 midterm election indicate no major political shift among evangelical or Protestant voters.

The Ten Commandments

Almost Christian

Absence of Mind

On June 5, 2009, The Washington Post posed the following question in a readers’ poll: “Do you think expressions of faith -- and not just satiric references to religion -- belong on the comics page?” Of the 257 participants, 70 percent answered “YES - the funnies are all about personal expression,”…

Perhaps the most basic measure of a country’s character is whether people, when given the chance, flood into the country or risk life and limb to escape from it. By this measure, Muslims are flourishing in America. Meanwhile, though Christianity predates Islam by centuries in the Middle East,…

For nearly 30 years Richard Cizik represented the National Association of Evangelicals in Washington, D.C. During the George W. Bush administration, he tilted increasingly left and embraced global warming as his iconic issue. A Vanity Fair magazine spread admiringly portrayed him walking on water,…