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Johnson & Johnson, with the aid of President Joe Biden's administration, has been put in charge of a Baltimore vaccine production plant that ruined 15 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine and has moved to stop British drugmaker AstraZeneca Plc from utilizing the facility to avoid any future mistakes, senior federal health officials said on Saturday. The extraordinary decision, which was first reported by The New York Times, was put into action by the US Department of Health and Human Services and will allow the Emergent BioSolutions plant to focus on making the single-dose Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. Johnson...

Emergent is a website which tracks emerging rumors, aggregates them, and evaluates their accuracy. Looks interesting.

Lighthouse Trails has watched in dismay over the past few years as Charles Stanley’s In Touch magazine has made the decision to promote contemplative/emergent names. When our editors picked up a copy of the August 2013 issue and saw a feature article written by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, we decided to call In Touch Ministries to find out who was responsible for the content in the magazine. Sadly, the response we received from the editorial department at In Touch left us with a sinking feeling that the evangelical church has been seduced and there was no turning back. We’ll talk about the...

DURHAM, N.C. (RNS) It's summer. It's hot. It's the South. That must mean it's time for an old-fashioned camp meeting. Next week (June 23-26), the bygone staple of the tent revival will be reincarnated on a bucolic North Carolina farm as The Wild Goose Festival. Nearly 10 years in the making, the festival is an attempt to reimagine Christianity for the 21st century under a bigger, wider more inclusive tent.

Just as Barack Obama wants to change what it means to be America, controversial author Rob Bell wants to change what it means to be Christian. The cover story for the Easter Week edition of Time magazine is about Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins. Bell, perhaps the most widely known of a group of young supposedly evangelical writers who emphasize “love” and dismiss the Biblical view of judgment/retribution (referred to in Christian circles as “hell), has prompted discussions throughout the church and, indeed, throughout a wide swath of American culture, about the meaning of Christianity and the basic theological doctrines...

Just as President Obama wants to change what it means to be American, controversial author Rob Bell wants to change what it means to be Christian. The cover story for the Easter Week edition of Time magazine is about Mr. Bell’s book, “Love Wins.” Mr. Bell, perhaps the most widely known of a group of young, supposedly evangelical writers who emphasize love and dismiss the traditional view of judgment/retribution (referred to in Christian circles as “hell) has prompted nationwide discussions about the very meaning of Christianity. Chris Matthews devoted a segment of his Palm Sunday show to a discussion of...

The debate about hell incited by Rob Bell and his book Love Wins is far from dying out. A month into the controversy, two theological heavy weights are just beginning to duel it out about the ideas Bell raises regarding hell and God’s love. Conservative Christian defender R. Albert Mohler, Jr., of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, responded Wednesday to emerging church leader Brian McLaren’s blog post, saying he welcomes McLaren’s rebuttal essay. “Some theological disputes amount to very little and serve mostly as exercises in missing the point, if indeed there is a point. Other doctrinal exchanges are quite...

Martin Bashir is a reporter impatient with evasive answers. He even quotes from Kevin DeYoung’s review and asks Rob Bell to respond. Bashir gives his own take on Bell’s book: “You’re creating a Christian message that’s warm, kind, and popular for contemporary culture. . . . What you’ve done is you’re amending the gospel, the Christian message, so that it’s palatable to contemporary people who find, for example, the idea of hell and heaven very difficult to stomach. So here comes Rob Bell, he’s made a Christian gospel for you, and it’s perfectly palatable, it’s much easier to swallow. That’s...

As is so often the case, most of us first learned of Rob Bell’s new book by means of Justin Taylor and his blog, “Between Two Worlds,” at the Gospel Coalition. Justin reminds me of the steady folks at the National Hurricane Center. He is able to advise of looming disaster with amazing calmness. That is why I took special notice of Justin’s stern warning: “It is unspeakably sad when those called to be ministers of the Word distort the gospel and deceive the people of God with false doctrine.” Why would Justin feel the need to issue such a...

A new book by one of the country’s most influential evangelical pastors, challenging traditional Christian views of heaven, hell and eternal damnation, has created an uproar among evangelical leaders In a book to be published this month, the pastor, Rob Bell, known for his provocative views and appeal among the young, describes as “misguided and toxic” the dogma that “a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better.”

Let me point out that I do believe and profess both statements; however, the latter does not fully nor accurately define the former. The sad reality is that many, if not most people in the United States (and probably globally – more so in the West) believe that a belief in God simply and wholly defines what and who a Christian is. I believe it is not only a condemnation of those who state this – of their ignorance or laziness – but of the Church as a whole, in our ignorance and laziness. A partial explanation of it is...

Early in George Orwell’s iconic 1984 is a particularly haunting scene. Winston, the hero of the story, is confessing to his diary a sexual encounter with a prostitute. Though Big Brother rigidly controls even sexual union and though sex is viewed as “a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema,” still Big Brother cannot remove from humanity the desire and the need for intimacy...It wasn’t too long ago that I wrote about Brian McLaren and got in trouble. Reflecting on seeing him speak at a nearby church, I suggested that he appears to love Jesus but hate God. Based...

“I must add, though, that I don’t believe making disciples must equal making adherents to the Christian religion. It may be advisable in many circumstances to help people become followers of Jesus and remain within their Buddhist, Hindu, or Jewish contexts. Brian McLaren, "Emergent" Church leader

John MacArthur on The Jesus You Can't Ignore Tue, Aug. 11, 2009 Posted: 04:42 PM EDT We need to pay more careful attention to how Jesus dealt with false teachers, what He thought of religious error, and how He defended the truth, says evangelical pastor and popular speaker John MacArthur.Breaking the stereotype of the gentle Jesus, MacArthur illustrates in The Jesus You Can’t Ignore how Jesus was rarely cordial when confronting false teachings, hypocrisy and self-righteousness in His time. The outspoken, bold and blunt Jesus is the one whom the Church today needs to follow, he argues. The soft and less...

War is hell.” So said Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. By the time Sherman retired from active duty, that saying had become virtually synonymous with his name. Sherman’s contempt for war was well-known throughout most of his career as a soldier. A month after the Civil War ended, when Sherman was at the height of his fame and the pinnacle of his success as a soldier, he wrote to a friend, “I am sick and tired of fighting.” He was not yet finished fighting, however. He spent the next 14 years as commanding general of the United States Army. Those years...

I’ve said this many times: I can listen to a guy preach—put anybody in front of me—and I’ll tell you what his view of Scripture is by what he says. If he doesn’t preach out of the Bible, I know what his view of Scripture is, I don’t care what he says. I don’t care if he wants to die telling me he’s a believer in inerrancy, if he gets up and does not preach the Word of God, that’s his view of Scripture leaking all over the place. Look, every preacher preaches for impact, for effect, for result. You’re...

Controversial Book 'The Shack' Touts Growth Amid Sales Slump For 33 straight weeks, popular novel The Shack has been holding the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best-sellers list for Paperback Trade Fiction and reported a significant growth in sales last month while overall book sales dropped. Thu, Jan. 15, 2009 Posted: 08:29 AM EST For 33 straight weeks, popular novel The Shack has been holding the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best-sellers list for Paperback Trade Fiction and reported a significant growth in sales last month while overall book sales dropped. "During the five...

I Hope I Can Count On Your Vote Congratulations to President-Elect Barack Obama. I have many thoughts about this important election and all that has gone with it. At this exciting time I have my own announcement to make. After two years of thinking, planning and dreaming I have made a decision to add a new component to my work and service life: I am going to join the political field and run for public office. So, today I announce that I am running for the Minnesota State Legislature in 2010. While the 2008 election just ended minutes ago, I...

Pagitt and Jones have attracted national attention for calling on Christians to re-consider their theological assumptions. Solomon's Porch is the laboratory for their experiment. Pagitt started the church in 2000 after a stint as the youth pastor at Wooddale Church, a suburban megachurch led by National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) president Leith Anderson. Before moving to its current location, Solomon's Porch gathered in a downtown neighborhood near John Piper and Bethlehem Baptist Church. Piper has publicly criticized emergent, as he earlier had criticized St. Paul pastor Greg Boyd, a controversial advocate of open theism. ...(snip) The limits of Piper's flexibility,...

“Emergent” church guru Brian McLaren is urging fellow emergent Christians to see the U.S. as “others see us.” As part of this Christian enlightenment, he shares on his blog a music video in which two Iranian sisters, posing as broadcast journalists hosting an Iranian news broadcast, sing an anti-American diddy about “demoKracy,” while American bombs cascade on innocent civilians. “An Iranian-born friend sent me the link,” McLaren chimed. “And I can’t help but feel it would do my fellow USAmericans a lot of good to let this video/song sink in …” No doubt.