Free Republic

The decidedly secularist Sports Illustrated – evidenced by the busty swimsuit models it teasingly features on the home page of its web site (alongside the latest sports news, which is what “SI” is supposed to be about) – thought the occasion of the Super Bowl would be the perfect time to weigh in on the subject of Christianity and football. The cover of its February 4 issue, still available on newsstands, has a picture of Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis, under the headline: “Does God Care Who Wins the Super Bowl?” In the cover shot, Lewis is up to his...

Caleb Moore, the Winter X Games snowmobiler, went to be with Lord yesterday. He was 25 years old. The young man crash landed a week ago – much to the entertainment of millions watching on ESPN – attempting a back flip during the snowmobile freestyle finals. Initially knocked unconscious, the X game athlete awakened, woozily, was diagnosed with a concussion and, eventually, whisked to the hospital. While hospitalized, Caleb’s condition worsened. Docters found blood near his heart. This past Sunday, the Lord’s Day, the young man’s family issued a statement that his cardiac injury had led to a secondary injury...

January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month. I didn’t want to let the month pass without telling the story of young Brianna Myers, who got herself caught up in sex trafficking before being rescued. Brianna was a 17-year-old honor roll student at her small town high school in Washington State. When she wasn’t in class, when she wasn’t cheerleading, she was waitressing at a local diner. The teen caught the attention of a middle-aged man, Richard, who would become a regular customer. He seemed friendly enough to the unsuspecting waitress. He plied her for personal information, about her life, her dreams,...

Jack Koency, an 86-year-old California man, was one of nearly 1.5 million surviving World War II veterans. He was neither terminally ill, nor bedridden, nor immobile. His neighbors remember him as quiet and good natured. Koency died at the hands of Elizabeth Barrett, an acquaintance of his. She served the decorated war vet a cup of yogurt in which she ground up a lethal dose of Oxcontin with two other medications. Barrett, a social worker, pled guilty a fortnight ago to so-called “assisted suicide.” She could have received up to three years in state prison for her role in Koency’s...

President Obama began his Inauguration Day by attending worship services at St. John’s Episcopal Church in the Nation’s Capital along with his wife Michelle and their daughters Sasha and Malia. It was a rare church appearance for the First Family. During, during their first four years residing in the White House, they found time for the Lord not even half as many times as they managed to get away for family vacays. After services yesterday at St. Johns, during which the president stood to receive a blessing from Bishop Vashti McKenzie, the First Family’s next stop was the U.S. Capitol,...

Lance Armstrong is going to hell. And I don’t mean that in the figurative sense. The disgraced cyclist is destined for the “fiery furnace” from which there is no escape, where there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” And he will be joined by other celebrities of this fallen world. Like preternatural golfer Tiger Woods, John Travolta and Bill Gates. Armstrong is bound for eternal punishment not because he used performance enhancing drugs to capture seven consecutive Tour de France championships. Not because he unabashedly lied about his doping. Not because he unconscionably slandered those who exposed his cheating....

God bless Frank Newport. The Gallup Poll’s editor-in-chief is author of the recently published book, “God is Alive and Well: The Future of Religion in America.” It punctures the myth that the ranks of the nation’s non-religious are growing by leaps and bounds. The myth has gained currency in the mainstream media, thanks to a dishonest poll published this past fall by the left-leaning Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. By playing fast and loose with polling data, and by employing semantic gymnastics, Pew was able to make the dubious claim that 20 percent of Americans “do...

Elizabeth, a 13-year-old British girl, had a favorite poem, which was published in a small book, titled “The Desert,” which was authored by a hardly-known poetess, Minnie Louise Haskins. “Lilebet,” as the young lass was affectionate known by her family, so loved the poem that she shared it with her father. And he, in turn, shared it with all of Britannia. You see Lilibet’s dad was King George VI. And in a 1939 broadcast, marking the holiday season, he read aloud the poem his daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth II, entrusted to him. Haskins’ Spirit-filled prose resonated with the British...

I first caught the musical “Les Misérables” back in 1987, when it made its U.S. debut on Broadway. My lasting memory of the Tony Award winning production, which enjoyed the third-longest run on the Great White Way after “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera,” is that much of the audience wept through Act II. As “Les Miserables” appears this holiday season on movie screens throughout the country, featuring the vocal talents of actors Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway and Amanda Seyfried, among others, I now think the musical decidedly spiritual entertainment. It’s not that “Les Miz” has changed since...

The 31st annual “Christmas in Washington” concert shown on the TNT cable network December 21 suffered a dramatic 25% loss in viewers from the previous year, according to Nielsen Media Research. The 2011 cablecast of “Christmas in Washington” drew 1.5 million viewers. The 2012 showing had only 1.136 million viewers. The concert, traditionally attended by the President and his family, drew international attention over the scheduled appearance by Gangnam Style rapper PSY (given name Park Jae-sang) when it was revealed the South Korean entertainer had made highly inflammatory anti-American performances the previous decade. In an insult to America’s troops and...

My company, a major metropolitan newspaper, used to host an annual Christmas party for employees. But, this year, the paper broke with tradition, hosting instead a “holiday party,” so as not to offend the sensibilities of those that do not believe Christ the Son of the God. Well, I respect the Constitutionally-protected right of every American to practice a religion other than Christianity, the faith of this nation’s founders. Or to practice no religion whatsoever (which I suspect of many, if not most of my journalistic peers). What I find objectionable, though, is the insistence of non-Christians that the holiday...

“Wicked.” “Crazy.” “Extremist.” Those are the words Americans United For Separation of Church and State uses in reference to the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. But the organization, which claims to fight to “ensure religious freedom for all Americans,” is not using those words to describe Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who shot and killed 27 innocent souls. No, its reproach is directed at the “religious right,” including such figures as Mike Huckabee and William J. Murray, for daring to suggest that the eviction of God from the nation’s public schools just might have contributed to the rise of school-related violence and...

A letter to the editor today in the editorial pages of my local newspaper caught my attention. The writer lamented yesterday’s slaughter of 27 innocents in Newtown, Connecticut – as we all do. Then he identified the culprit – guns. We’ve never heard of a “mass-knifing” claiming so many victims, he pointed out. His implication was that, if we scrap the Second Amendment, there will be no more funerals for victims of mass murder. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Timothy McVeigh did not use a gun in 1995 when he killed 168 people, including 10 children,...

My son has been deployed overseas the past two years. My wife and I pray every day for his safety and for the safety of all of America’s sons and daughters serving in the nation’s military. That’s why I find offensive the music video in which Korean pop star PSY appeared in which he wished death upon our men and women in uniform. Like my 23-year-old son, the only child with which my wife and I have been blessed. It’s also why I am angry that PSY has not been disinvited to an upcoming Christmas concert for President Obama, whom,...

Once upon a time I was an aspiring media professional. My very first foray into the business was as summer newspaper intern with The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Near the end of my internship, I was given an assignment that haunts me to this very day. I was told to go out to a Cleveland suburb where a shooter was reportedly spraying bullets in a residential neighborhood. When I arrived at scene, police had cordoned off the block where the shooter – a troubled 17 year-old kid – was holed up in his house. After what seemed like hours, but probably...

I was in Kyoto, Japan in 1997 for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It was there that I first observed for myself the almost religious fervor of those who subscribe to the global warming orthodoxy; who accept, as an article of faith, that Earth’s 6.9 billion human inhabitants are dangerously overheating the planet. The Kyoto summit wasn’t about drafting an international treaty based on science. It was about promoting theology based on radical environmentalism. So it continues to this very week with a new study, published in the journal “Science,” reported uncritically in the mainstream media, warning...

There have been several supposedly “scientific” studies published this year that either disparaged people of faith or insidiously mocked religion. That includes a study, published in the journal Science, which asserted that people who believe in God are not analytical thinkers. There also was a study, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, which claimed that “highly religious” folk are less compassionate toward the needy than atheists. Now comes yet another study, published this week in the Journal of Sex Research, which claims that adult film actresses are actually more religious than women who don’t get paid to...

It’s been 20 years since I sat across a conference table from the attorney representing Robert Alton Harris, a double-murderer who had spent 13 years on California’s Death Row. The attorney hoped to make the case that, despite his crimes, Harris should be spared his scheduled date with the executioner. He related that the convicted murderer was born with fetal alcohol syndrome. That he was neglected as a child. That he was abused as an adolescent. I’m sorry, I told the attorney. Your client killed two boys. He deserves to pay the forfeit for taking innocent lives. And not long...

I do not know Erin Andrews’ faith life, but I do know the FOX Sports personality is doing the Lord’s work with her promotion of the Children’s Organ Transplant Association. Andrews sent a Thanksgiving shout out to her 1,598,063 twitter followers urging them to join her in support for COTA, a charity that raises funds to assure that no child is denied a life-saving transplant, or excluded from a transplant waiting list, because of limited family finances. Like little Liam Houck, the two-year toddler whose recent photo with Andrews was posted by COTA. Liam is the son of Reid and...

It never ceases to amuse – if not infuriate – how often atheists claim as one of their own much-revered historic figures who happen to make the news for some reason or another. So it was when Neil Armstrong went to be with the Lord this past August. So it was when Albert Einstein’s so-called “God Letter” went on auction last month. And so it is now with Abraham Lincoln. The nation’s 16th president is the subject of a new motion picture, helmed by Stephen Spielberg, the Oscar-winning director, with the screenplay penned by Tony Kushner, the Tony Award and...