The two self-help experts then elaborated on their ideas, with Osteen urging “activating faith,” because “faith is what causes God to work.” Later, he even spoke of “speaking to the seeds of greatness that God’s placed in all of us.”

While some conservative organizations have raised alarm about (Alderman) Moreno's claims, others aren't panicked. Janice Crouse, director and senior fellow at Concerned Women for America's Beverly LaHaye Institute told WORLD in an email that her organization received verbal affirmation from brothers Dan and Donald "Bubba" Cathy that "the reports from Chicago are untrue."

Sometimes the Church can be so concerned with personal holiness that it breeds an oppressed community of terrified, isolated individuals who are made to feel like spiritual failures for saying, ‘I can’t do it on my own.’ Why wouldn’t people hide from that?

Embryo adoption would be problematic if the adoptions themselves became a further commodity in the buying and selling transactions of the reproductive technology business or if these adoptions were a widespread incentive for couples to justify the decision to “create” and freeze additional embryos

So I propose that wanting children, or wanting more children, is a legitimate reason to adopt. Christian couples might be God’s gift to orphans, sure, but these children are also certainly God’s gift to us. Let us give thanks

“True Christianity” is a centered set and not a bounded set. Neither I nor any other mere human has the authority to decide who is and who is not a true Christian—other than as a matter of personal opinion. There are times, however, when churches (denominations) find it necessary to decide who is not a true Christian

Are extremists hijacking the Arab Spring? They’re trying to, but this is just the opening chapter in a long drama. Some Eastern European countries, like Romania and Hungary, are still wobbly more than two decades after their democratic revolutions. Maybe the closest parallel to the Arab Spring is the 1998 revolution in Indonesia, where it took years for Islamic extremism to subside.

The analogy to “The Da Vinci Code” rankles academics, of course. “Dr. King said she wants nothing to do with the code or its author,” my colleague Laurie Goodstein notes in her story on the newly discovered text, and quotes King saying: “At least, don’t say this proves Dan Brown was right.” But if they don’t want people to make the analogy, they shouldn’t imitate his arguments.

What the Academy needs today is men who are fearless in proclaiming sin, righteousness, and the coming judgment in the context of the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ to desperate sinners like us. And these men should normally be those who are followers of Jesus Christ who work on campus; His slaves who can't help but be faithful in speaking of His holiness and mercy in their classrooms, faculty offices, faculty senate meetings, on the walkways from classroom building to classroom building, and so on.

Christian political theology has always denied the existence of absolute property rights, and indeed, has questioned whether property rights are grounded in natural law at all. The tradition is marked by a virtually unanimous consensus that individuals and social organizations are to use their excess possessions subject to the primary claim of the needy as a matter of justice.