The following articles have been selected because they are informative, instructive, entertaining, or simply interesting. Articles appearing in Your Friday Five do not represent an endorsement.
We’re at an unbelievable place where a pastor could be arrested for holding church in America.
Pastor John MacArthur may face fine, arrest for holding indoor services, Christian Post
County officials have allegedly threatened Grace Community Church in California with fines and possible arrest for reopening his church in defiance of lockdown orders from Gov. Gavin Newsom during the pandemic. Still, Pastor John MacArthur has vowed to continue in-person services.
“We will obey God rather than men,” MacArthur said in a video statement Friday. “We’re going to be faithful to the Lord and we’re going to leave the results to Him. Whatever happens is going to be what He allows to happen. But He will be on our side because we will be obedient and faithful to His word.”
Christians are responding to the terrible explosion in Beirut.
16 Beirut Ministries Respond to Lebanon Explosion, Christianity Today
“Throughout the whole civil war [1975–1990], we never experienced anything like this blast,” said Tony Skaff, pastor of Badaro Baptist Church in Beirut.
“But this incident made us remember, triggering many very sad memories within our community.”
One of the world’s oldest religions is nearly gone.
The last of the Zoroastrians, The Guardian
But the funeral stirred in me a new interest in the 3,500-year-old Zoroastrian religion and today’s tiny Parsi community. As the religion’s followers declined, why were Parsis so dogmatic about keeping their doors closed to mixed-heritage children, let alone accepting outside converts? And did this mean that the whole Parsi community was heading for the same fate as my grandfather: a drawn-out but sadly inevitable disappearance?
A better choice could not be made.
Billy Graham statue to replace that of white supremacist in US Capitol, RNS
[Charles] Aycock was one of the masterminds of the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot and coup, in which a local government made up of Black Americans was overthrown and replaced by white officials. North Carolina’s other statue is of Zebulon Vance (1830-1894), a former governor and U.S. senator who was also a Confederate military officer.
With statues to white supremacists and Confederate leaders toppling across the nation, North Carolina’s reconsideration might seem timely. But in fact, installing a statue of Graham at the U.S. Capitol had widespread support long before the most recent reckoning on race.
Truth is fallen in the streets.
The Cost of Telling the Truth in a World of Lies, Trevin Wax
Why would intellectuals and celebrities who had admired and befriended Sebastian slowly shift their allegiance away from him in order get in line with another way of viewing the world? Because survival seemed at the time to depend not on truth but falsehood, and since no one wants to think of themselves as committed to lies, the solution is to reframe the grand falsehoods so that one maintains a respectable inward sense that the truth has not been sacrificed. In reality, however, the truth has been twisted. Devastatingly so.