Bill Maher calls the Capitol riot a faith-based initiative during his closing monologue on his HBO show Real Time, Feb. 5, 2021. | Screenshot: YouTube/Real Time With Bill Maher
Well-known late-night comedian Bill Maher described the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol as a faith-based initiative, using his closing monologue to make the case that the riot and the QAnon conspiracy theory are products of fundamentalist Christian “delusion.”
On Friday s edition of Real Time, HBO host Bill Maher addressed the Capitol riot in his satirical segment New Rules.” He proclaimed that “as long as we re going to go to the trouble of another impeachment trial, we might as well be honest about what it s really about.
The Rev. James Martin of New York, New York. | Facebook/Fr. James Martin, SJ
A petition has circulated asking the Jesuit Order to censure one of its priests for blaspheming one of the most sacred images of the Virgin Mary.
Life Petitions, a project of the pro-life news site Life Site News, started a petition asking the Jesuit Order to “censure James Martin, SJ, for offending Poland by blaspheming the Black Madonna” one week ago. As of Wednesday morning, the petition had garnered more than 17,384 signatures.
Martin sparked outrage when he tweeted a picture of a Black Madonna painting that replaced the golden halos surrounding Mary and Jesus with rainbow-colored halos.
Student Online Petition Urges SBU Trustees to Reverse Tenure Denials
After
Word&Wayreported yesterday (Feb. 4) that trustees at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, had denied tenure or promotion to five faculty members, an SBU student created a petition at change.org urging the trustees to reverse their decision.
The unusual move by the trustees came amid a two-year controversy over control and theology at the school, and as the school already faces an inquiry by its accreditation body after a complaint about earlier actions by the trustees and the Missouri Baptist Convention that elected them. Until recently, most of the controversy involved efforts to drive out several religion professors in the school’s Redford Division of Christian Ministry.
This article is part of the Open Letters series.
Dear Evangelical Church,
Scripture speaks to us on many issues, but none so important, glorious, and central as our Lord Jesus Christ and that is an understatement! Given who Jesus is and what he has done,
he is the very heart and substance of the gospel, indeed all of Scripture, and thus the most important person in all of human history. Just think about three examples that demonstrate this point.
First, it’s almost a truism to say that our triune God is central to everything as the glorious all-sufficient One who alone is Creator and Lord (Rom. 11:33–36). Yet, how we come to know God as triune is largely due to the incarnation of the divine Son and his work. As John reminds us, Jesus is “the Word made flesh” (John 1:14), yet from eternity he was the divine Son who was “with God” and “was God,” thus revealing the triune relation of persons within God (John 1:1). Apart from Christ’s incarnation, we would not know