PUBLIC MARKS from jasontromm with tag church

What would you do if armed terrorists broke into your church and starting attacking your friends with automatic weapons in the middle of a worship service? Would you be prepared to defend yourself and other innocents? Would you be justified in doing so? Is it time for Americans to consider such once-unthinkable possibilities? There is one man in the world who can address these questions with first-hand experience. His name is Charl van Wyck – a South African who was faced with just such a shocking scenario.

I'm starting to think that if Jesus Himself came back to earth, there'd be no shortage of people around who would criticize his every move. I guess that's just the way we've become. When I managed to convince the hateful, horrible members of the Westboro Baptist Church to call off their planned "protests" outside the funerals of the little Amish girls in Pennsylvania, I didn't expect to get a ticker tape parade or anything. In fact, I wasn't looking to do anything at all except figure out how to use my radio show to thwart these people from hurting the Amish mourners any further.

The Church and the Culture Wars There they go again. The liberal media, it seems, likes nothing better than to play up what they see (or create) as divisions in the evangelical ranks. This Sunday’s New York Times featured a front-page story about Gregory Boyd, an evangelical pastor in Minnesota who is highly critical of the religious right and refuses to talk about abortion or other cultural war issues from his pulpit.

For far too long, evangelical Christians have lacked the energy and passion of reformation and awakening that so transformed the world in the Word. This deadness in the church has not only accompanied the earthquakes of civilization that have occurred in the past couple of centuries, it has in many cases precipitated those sweeping cultural and intellectual changes. But a reaction is in the offing – a reaction to postmodernism, secularism, sin and to the deadness of churches and the comatose state of hearts. According to Robert Webber, our generation appears "to be the first generation of people coming out on the other side of the crisis." Young Christians, both in America and around the globe, are being prepared by the hand of Providence for a 21st century great awakening.

A federal court denied San Diego's request to dismiss a lawsuit by a church accusing the city of discrimination for charging churches higher rental fees than similar community groups. Canyon Ridge Baptist Church, represented by attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund, rents a city-owned facility, the Kearny Mesa Recreation Center, for its Sunday worship services. "A landlord – especially when it's the government – shouldn't treat Christian tenants any differently than other tenants," said ADF attorney Tim Chandler.

For Mormons, the lack of discernible Hebrew blood in Native Americans is no minor collision between faith and science. It burrows into the historical foundations of the Book of Mormon, a 175-year-old transcription that the church regards as literal and without error.

I recently exchanged e-mails with a person who disagreed somewhat strongly with some of my public policy positions. This disagreement was neither unusual nor note-worthy, in and of itself. But it became especially irksome to me when the discussion turned to the liberals' standard fallback position: an outraged accusation of my alleged violation of the Constitution's ironclad requirement for the "Separation of Church and State."