News

(RNS) — This week, the most high-profile graduate of the LIFE program at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tenn. — offered behind the locked steel doors and razor-wire perimeter of the Tennessee Prison for Women — made national headlines when Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam granted her full clemency.

To be honest, exercising more and eating better sounds great and is easily achievable — all I would need to do is complete one workout per year and stop eating endless amounts of clearance candy that I habitually purchase the day after a food-themed holiday (a.k.a. nearly all American holidays) and I would be doing more than I currently am.

The number of people in the U.S. experiencing homelessness increased for the second year in a row, according to an annual U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) report released in mid-December 2018.

BRUNSWICK, Ga. (BP) -- Jimmy Allen, the last moderate Southern Baptist Convention president and entity leader known for his gregarious personality and engagement with cultural issues, died Jan. 8 in Brunswick, Ga.

A slim majority (51 percent) of U.S. adults said religion is very important in their lives, according to a Gallup report published Dec. 24. With a plus-or-minus 4 percent sampling error, that number could be as high as 55 percent or as low as 47 percent.

Twenty-five years after the True Love Waits movement was launched, an early leader in the purity movement says he does not "second-guess the rightness of the original message." Meanwhile, the latest critics of the TLW claim abstinence emphases by evangelical churches wrongly shame girls and cause them to view their bodies as threats.

There are a growing chorus of voices rethinking the purity movement and its lasting spiritual and psychological effects on a generation of believers. Among them is Joshua Harris, author of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye: A New Attitude Toward Romance and Relationships,” the 1997 book that became the de facto bible of the purity movement.

MOGADISHU, Somalia (RNS) — In a small single-room house in the Banaadir district of Somalia, dozens of Christians worship in secret out of fear of persecution in a country where no official churches exist.

CLEMSON, S.C. (BP) -- Despite being a big-time college football player headed to the NFL, Miguel Chavis was on a path to destruction. Self-centered and vile. Hedonistic and drunk. A tough brute who partied hard and pursued every fleeting pleasure he could think of.

PHILADELPHIA (RNS) — the crowd at the Philadelphia Center for Architecture was packed in, clergy shoulder to shoulder with architects, ordinary citizens with community organizers. They gathered to see the results of Infill Philadelphia, a design competition hosted in the city to improve community spaces.