by | Dec 21, 2023 | Uncategorized
As Christians rally and pray, some political leaders break ties with the Jewish state over Gaza violence.
During the last weekend in October, hundreds of Honduran Christians gathered in their country’s major cities to pray for Israel.
Attendees performed Jewish folk dances and waved Honduran and Israeli flags. Some knelt in the middle of Parque Central in the capital city of Tegucigalpa, asking God for peace after Hamas’ October 7 attacks spurred war in the region.
These gatherings in Honduras were just one of many ways Latin American evangelicals have rallied in support of Israel. Earlier this month, more than 10,000 people marched in support of Israel in Guatemala City in an event featuring local televangelist Cash Luna, a Palestinian bishop, a Sierra Leonean imam, as well as Jewish and evangelical leaders.
While all Latin American countries have at one point diplomatically recognized Israel, nine nations—Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Honduras, El Salvador, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil—also recognize the State of Palestine. (In 1973, Cuba terminated its relationship with Israel, and in 2009, Venezuela and Bolivia broke ties with Israel over what the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs called “the gravity of the atrocities against the Palestinian people.”)
Yet as the evangelical community in Latin America grew from 4 percent in 1970 to nearly 20 percent today, their countries’ affinity for Israel has manifested in religious and political ways. Still, on the whole, Latin American countries and their citizens hold a range of views on the current conflict.
In the wake of the October 7 attacks, evangelical leaders from countries including Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, and Argentina “organized acts of prayer, demonstrations, and campaigns in favor of Israel, as well …
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by | Dec 21, 2023 | Uncategorized
Recent survey finds strong support for sometimes conflicting agendas, but also many believers who are still “not sure” what to advocate for.
In an age of polarization and strong opinions, a sizable share of American Christians are still “not sure” what they think about issues within the Israel-Hamas war.
A recent Lifeway Research survey, sponsored by the Philos Project, found significant convictions among self-identified believers: Strong majorities support Israel’s right of self-defense (83%), but also the Palestinian right of self-determination (76%) and the goal of a two-state solution (81%).
But many questions revealed uncertainties about the complexity of the conflict:
15% are not sure about the optimal outcome.
17% are not sure if Gazans are responsible for Hamas’s attacks.
18% are not sure if armed Palestinian rebellion is a natural response to mistreatment.
24% are not sure if Israel’s blockade of Gaza has oppressed Palestinians.
24% are not sure if Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza is illegal occupation.
26% are not sure if most Gazans support Hamas’s fight against Israel.
31% are not sure if Israeli settlements beyond agreed-upon borders are illegal.
Furthermore, 41 percent hover between somewhat positive (25%) and somewhat negative (16%) in their overall perception of Israel, while 11 percent are not sure at all.
For each of these issues, of course, pluralities had an opinion on one side or another, as CT noted last week. To parse out the meaning of these diverse American Christian perspectives, CT asked four evangelical experts—two from peace-focused organizations in the US, and a Palestinian Christian and a Messianic Jewish leader from Israel—to describe what they found most surprising, concerning, and encouraging about the survey results:
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by | Dec 21, 2023 | Uncategorized
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Before I begin, let me tell you that I hate what I am about to do. That’s because few things exasperate me more than the people who Well, actually Christmas songs. True, there was no innkeeper in the gospel Nativity accounts. We don’t know how many wise men there were, but we know they weren’t there at the same time as the shepherds. But nobody wants to be under the mistletoe with the guy arguing about how much Mary knew.
You no doubt know that the idea of a “Silent Night” is Victorian sentimentalism more than biblical reality. “The little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes” assumes that a baby’s cry is a sin rather than part of the good human nature the Son of God assumed. We shouldn’t stop singing those songs, but at the same time, maybe we should ponder exactly why the screams from the manger really do matter for us.
The Gospels reveal that the Nativity scene was in the middle of a war zone. Joseph was trekking to the City of David with Mary to participate in the very thing—a census—for which God had repudiated David himself. And he was doing so at the command of a pagan Roman government occupying the throne of David, seeming to invalidate the promise God made to his people. The puppet bureaucrat warming that seat—King Herod—was so enraged by the Davidic prophecies that would threaten his position that he, like Pharaoh of old, ordered all the baby boys of the region to be killed.
This mass murder was, Matthew reveals, a fulfillment of the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing …
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by | Dec 21, 2023 | Uncategorized
A new movie, “Freud’s Last Session,” imagines a dialogue—and a friendship—between the famed psychologist and C.S. Lewis.
Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis both lived in England when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany in 1939. Freud had recently left Nazi-controlled Austria with his family and was staying in London. Lewis, then at Oxford, was coming to prominence as a writer and theologian with the publication of The Pilgrim’s Regress and Out of the Silent Planet.
No record exists of the two men having ever met. But what if they had?
A new film, Freud’s Last Session—directed by Matthew Brown, adapted from a play of the same name by Mark St. Germain, and in select theaters beginning Friday, December 22—imagines a hypothetical house call by the Oxford don to the 83-year-old father of psychoanalysis. Anthony Hopkins (who also played Lewis in Shadowlands) brings a complex depth to Freud in his last weeks of life, and Matthew Goode (of Downton Abbey and The Imitation Game) is an earnest, younger Lewis who feels a bit awkward at having satirized Freud in Pilgrim’s Regress.
Soon, though, two of the greatest minds of the 20th century are debating everything from the existence of God to the origin of evil to the meaning of suffering. It’s a heavyweight matchup, and Freud’s Last Session offers ringside seats. One brief exchange gives the sense of the debate:
Freud: Your God who created good, or whatever that is, he must have also created the bad, the evil. He allowed Lucifer to live; he let him flourish. But logically he should have destroyed him. Am I correct? Think about it.Lewis: God gave Lucifer free will, which is the only thing that makes goodness possible. A world filled with choice-less creatures is a world of machines. It’s men, not God, who created prisons and slavery and—bombs. …
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by | Dec 21, 2023 | Uncategorized
George Clooney’s “The Boys in the Boat” is a nostalgic true story for a divided America.
With The Boys in the Boat, in theaters for Christmas, director George Clooney has made a flawless sports movie, telling the true story of a humble college rowing team that united Americans across class divides and the expanse of a great but troubled nation. Boys is nostalgic and grounded in history, but it speaks directly—and deliberately—to our time.
Things are hard in 1930s Washington State. The Great Depression rages, work is scarce, and hope is even scarcer. Young Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) struggles to keep himself fed as he studies at the University of Washington, sleeping at night in a wrecked car in a shantytown. By day he studies and pulls a shift at a factory—if he can get the work. When he hears that a position on the university crew team comes with a bed and a stipend, he grabs an oar.
Joe is not the only rower having a hard time making ends meet, and the crew must compete against much better-funded teams, teams with full bellies and trust funds. Harvard is a powerhouse, Yale a serious contender, and Cal-Berkeley the local rival. But something clicks in the Washington team as they start winning races, something that will eventually take them to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Along the way, they become a symbol of and for Americans: knocked down but ever rising again.
The movie is excellent, shot with loving attention to the sound of a blade slapping a wave, the heave of an oar, the poetry of a shell cutting through the water like a dagger. Turner plays Joe with quiet reserve, balanced by his lively love interest, Joyce (Hadley Robinson). Clooney, no stranger to vintage sports films after directing 2008’s Leatherheads, manages to make an austere and esoteric sport not just interesting but exciting. …
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