One Young Woman’s Efforts to Help Trafficking Victims

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Katie MehrlichOne of the greatest joys of pastoral ministry is seeing the amazing ways that people respond to God’s move in their lives. We have a committed group of students working to raise awareness about human trafficking and to fight back against the injustice. Katie Mehrlich is a sophomore student leader in that organization. She is also insanely talented as a worship leader and song writer, and she leads a Bible study on campus for other students through CRU. I asked her recently to tell people about what she is doing now to make a difference for trafficking victims.

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Are You Being Colonized by Liberalism?

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File:Bill Maher by David Shankbone.jpg

Photo: David Shankbone

Bill Maher and Ben Affleck got into a heated exchange this weekend that is actually really helpful for understanding a key issue that is important to religious persons: To what extent can liberalism critique religious ethics and theology?

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When Blogging Becomes Sinful

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imageMaybe I am becoming the negative and divisive person that I so dislike as representative of Christianity. It seems like there is an occasion every couple months that Mark Driscoll infuriates me to an inch of losing my Christianity. It happened again this week- and he isn’t even active in the blogosphere right now- as some folks uncovered some heinous things he said 14 years ago. I suppose that he has become something of a punching bag for me as he rants ridiculously and his blogging group of neo-peep followers applaud him for it.

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Palestinians are People: A Missionary’s Observations

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Photo: Tarek

As of today, 197 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,500 have been injured in Israel’s constant bombing of Gaza over the last 10 days. Though Palestinians have fired lots of rockets and mortars at Israel in this same time frame, reportedly only one Israeli has been killed. This outburst of violence is the worst in five years. This is a guest post written by an American friend of mine that is a missionary to the West Bank. I asked her to give advice to all of us for whom this conflict is just a bunch of numbers: 197. 1,500. I hope this reminds us that each of those numbers is a person made in the image of God.

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The Most Important Action for Pro-Life Christians: Foster and Adopt

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A picture of my family on my son's adoption day.

A picture of my family on my son’s adoption day.

When my wife and I decided to have a child in 2011, we decided to foster parent as a response to a calling. There are more … ahem … “natural” ways to have children and we certainly considered that path. But we knew that we had the capacity and the life situation to consider adoption through the foster care system and that is what we did. We believed then as we do now, that fostering and adoption are faithful responses to the Christian calling to care for orphans. [Read more…]