Free Republic

Today is the first day of Advent, which marks the start of the pre-Christmas season. It is observed by many, if not most, of the Catholic faithful. And it is in popularity among Protestants, particularly those of us who count ourselves evangelical Christians. Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas and ends on Christmas Eve. During that four-week period, the Christian faithful prepare for the commemoration of the birth of Christ. Satan hates Advent. That’s because he wants to take the “Christ” out of Christmas. He doesn’t want Christmas to be a Godly “holy-day.” Rather, his aim is to reduce the...

“Who do men say I am?” Jesus posed the question to his disciples as they went out to the towns of Caesarea Philippi. John the Baptist, Elijah or other of the prophets, they answered. “But who do you say that I am?” Jesus asked them. And while 11 of the 12 disciples were uncertain, Peter responded, “You are the Christ.” This account, taken from the Gospel According to Mark, appears in slightly different form in Matthew and Luke, the other two synoptic gospels. What is noteworthy is that in none of the accounts does Jesus say He is other than...

Ivan Turing is a tech billionaire. Dr. Carolyn Tyler is a cardiothoracic surgeon. Their divine appointment informs the plot of “Proof,” a dramatic series with decidedly religious overtones, which airs on TNT. Turing, played by the actor Matthew Modine, is terminally ill. He wants to know whether there is life after death. So he recruits Tyler, played by the actress Jennifer Beals, to investigate. The surgeon reluctantly agrees. But only after the billionaire (who bears a striking similarity to the late Steve Jobs) makes her an offer she can’t refuse – leaving his vast fortune after he dies to the...

The U.S. Supreme Court must think God asleep. In its most odious decision since Roe v. Wade, which over the past four decades has resulted in the slaughter of more than 57 million unborn children, the High Court on Friday declared homosexual marriage a Constitutional right. In a majority opinion at odds with his putative Catholic faith, Justice Anthony Kennedy suggests that those who oppose “marriage equality” just don’t get where lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders are coming from. “It would misunderstand these men and women,” wrote Kennedy, “to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that...

The UK’s Daily Mail published a news story last weekend speculating on the source of a “strange sound from the sky” that has been heard across the globe for nearly a decade. Witnesses told the Mail that what they heard sounded very much like the blast of a trumpet. And that it was so loud it shook the ground beneath them. In a sidebar, the Mail listed seven possible theories, from the unremarkable to the fantastical, that could account for the strange sound from the sky. The first six included (in order) tectonic plates grinding, atmospheric pressure, trains shunting, construction...

“I’m a woman.” So said Bruce Jenner, during his coming out appearance this past Friday on a special two-hour edition of the ABC News program “20/20.” And that’s not the only shocking revelation Jenner confided to interviewer Diane Sawyer. “She” also claimed to be a Republican, a conservative and a Christian. Well, it’s conceivable that Jenner is a Republican. After all, there’s a LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) group that calls itself the Log Cabin Republicans. It’s also possible that Jenner is a “conservative.” Indeed, there have been any number of conservative lawmakers – including former Idaho Senator Larry...

A friend sent me a link to a newspaper column celebrating the supposed ascendance of libertarianism among the hoi polloi. “It is clear,” the author wrote, “that there are certain areas where an increasing portion of Americans are adapting more libertarian views and simply want the government to leave them alone and allow them to freely live their lives.” He cited as examples same-sex marriage and drug legalization. “People have generally come to the conclusion,” he asserted, “that they don’t really care to whom one is attracted or what consenting adults do behind closed doors.” He also predicted that “the...

Joshua DuBois, former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, appeared yesterday on MSNBC’s “UP with Steve Kornacki,” during which he defended President Obama’s profoundly insulting anti-Christian remarks at last Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast in the Nation’s Capital. The president admonished Christians not to think their faith somehow different than the faith that has produced ISIL (and al Qaeda and Boko Haram and Abu Sayyaf and Hamas and Hezbollah and all too many other Islamic terrorist groups). “Remember,” spake Obama, “during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” And...

“Joyous Kwanzaa.” “Happy Hanukkah.” “Merry Christmas.” “Happy Ramadan.” So proclaims the secularist “holiday” poster that greets visitors to the office building where I labor. The building owner obviously thought the poster noncontroversial. But this Christ follower found it offensive. Because the upcoming holiday is not about Kwanza, the seven-day afrocentric celebration created in 1965, nor Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish festival hardly celebrated until the 1970s, and certainly not Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting that actually takes place in June. No, Jesus is the reason for the season. It is the annual acknowledgement of the fulfillment two mellennia ago of...

It’s November 1, the day Brittany Maynard vowed to kill herself. The 29-year-old California woman says she no longer finds life worth living after being diagnosed this past spring with stage 4 glioblastoma, a malignant brain tumor. Brittany has become the poster girl for “Compassion & Choices, ” a so-called “end-of-life choice” advocacy organization that is fighting to increase the number of stateS with so-called “Death With Dignity” laws on the books. The model is Oregon, the state to which Brittany relocated this past summer because her home state of California doesn’t allow physician-assisted suicide (at least for now). Oregon...

Michael Franzese has a powerful testimony to share. It’s about his journey on the road to perdition; during which he was transformed from a made man in the Colombo crime family to a remade man in the family of Christ. The true-to-life tale of the Lord’s saving grace is recounted in the new documentary film, “God the Father.” It opens in theaters Halloween night. Franzese is the son of the one-time underboss of New York’s Colombo mob. So it was not terribly surprising that Michael chose to follow in his father’s unholy footsteps. He remembers vividly his induction into La...

It never ceases to outrage when those who abide unabashedly and unrepentantly in sin claim to be Christians. Like the two churchgoing San Diego couples whom we previously wrote about – Will and Shirley and Nate and Faith – whose idea of a small group was a casino gambling ring. They were featured in the documentary film “Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians.” More recently there was Alexis McGill Johnson, who this past spring became the chairwoman of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s foremost abortionist. Johnson publicly professes herself a Christian but thinks there nothing wrong with killing...

Organizers of the so-called People’s Climate March expect more than 100,000 people to fill the streets of midtown Manhattan on Sunday, demanding action on global warming. It promises to be one of the largest cult gatherings in U.S. history. And it will take place two days before President Obama and world leaders gather for an “emergency” climate summit at the United Nations. The march is the brainchild of Bill McKibben, a celebrated environmental activist. In May, he issued a “call to arms” in a jeremiad published in Rolling Stone magazine, which exhorted climate change cultists to descend on New York...

Actress Olivia Wilde is featured on the cover of the September issue of Glamour magazine. Inside the glossy is an article in which Wilde talks about what life is like for her “being a working mom.” An article featuring the vacuous ramblings of the newby mom (“I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself because I was becoming a mother,” she told her interviewer) would be unworthy of comment here were it not for the pictorial that accompanied the article. Or, more specifically, the photo of Wilde sitting in the booth of some Hollywood diner, glammed up in a Roberto Cavalli dress,...

Naeem Fazal was born and raised in the deserts of Kuwait. He is the son of Pakistani parents who grounded him and his siblings in Islam. Naeem moved to the United States after the first Gulf War, following his older brother Mahmoud, who had previously enrolled in Spartanburg Methodist College in South Carolina. While attending the college, Mahmoud found the Lord. And on a visit to Kuwait to see his family he announced he had converted to Christianity. Naeem was furious with his brother, cursing him for renouncing the Islamic faith they grew up with. He even went so far...

I’d heard of Nick Vujicic. I’d caught a glimpse of him on Christian television. But nothing prepared me for his recent appearance at my church. A mighty man of faith, Vujicic delivered one of most powerful, spirit-filled messages I’ve ever heard. I think the Australian-born evangelist the most inspirational Christ follower since Helen Keller. Keller’s life story was immortalized in the 1962 motion picture “The Miracle Worker.” Born in 1880, Helen was 19 months old when she contracted “brain fever,” as the Keller family doctor called it. She was struck blind, deaf and mute. Nearly feral as a child, Helen’s...

Today marks the 100th anniversary of Mother’s Day. It is the fourth-biggest holiday for spending, according to CNBC. It is the third-largest card-sending holiday, according to Hallmark, with America’s moms receiving more than 133 million cards. It’s the biggest phone-calling day of the year, according to History.com, with call volume spiking by as much as 37 percent. And it’s the biggest holiday of the year for dining out, according to the National Restaurant Association. What most of us are unaware of is the Christian origin of Mother’s Day. It wasn’t about obligatory Mother’s Day presents or perfunctory Mother’s Day greeting...

Why did Alex Hribal do it? Why did the 16-year-old sophomore at Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville, Pennsylvania stab and slash 20 of his classmates (and a security guard), leaving at least four of his victims in critical condition? WTAE in Pittsburgh reports that “investigators continue to explore bullying as a possible motive.” NBC News cites criminologists who suggest Hribal was driven “by rage and adrenalin.” The Associated Press reports “[t]he boy’s family is just as puzzled as police about what triggered the attack.” But there is an obvious explanation of Hribal’s murderous rampage, which has been ignored by...

“Save Mickey.” So pleads the Facebook page lamenting that the pit bull faces “the death penalty” just because he mauled four-year-old Kevin Vicente. The Phoenix, Arizona boy was hospitalized with a broken eye socket, check bone and lower jaw bone. “He still can’t open his eye,” said Dr. Salvatore Lettieri, chief of cosmetic surgery at Maricopa Medical Center. “Well need to fix the tear duct drainage system,” said the surgeon. “That is, if he makes tears.” Meanwhile, there are no tears shed for poor young Kevin on Mickey’s Facebook page, which announces that 50,000 people have signed a petition (on...

Chris has a gay son. He neglected to mention that when I met him at a business event the week before last, when we talked a little politics, when he invited me to join him and his buds for their weekly golf game. All was amicable on the golf course. As it turned out, two of the guys were fellow conservatives. And two others happened to be members of my church. But things got twisted when our two foursomes sat down for post-round libations and conversation. That’s because Chris, a social liberal, an Obama-loving Democrat, insisted on talking politics. And...