Binghamton, N. Y., November 13, 1922—Harold F. Albert, recreational director of the Endicott Johnson Corporation, was arrested yesterday afternoon on complaint of the Binghamton Ministerial Association for staging a concert by John Philip Sousa’s Band at which an admission was charged.
The other day someone sent me a link to an “Antichrist Decoder” that has been posted online by an otherwise reputable Christian ministry. You can type in anybody’s name and the program will calculate the value of the name in Roman numerals.
After checking my name to make sure that I was not the Antichrist I looked at the other names that people had plugged into the decoder and learned that Barack Obama is not the Antichrist, neither is Barack Hussein Obama. Ronald Wilson Reagan’s name doesn’t add up to 666 even if you type in two “v”s to make the W.
People were having fun with the decoder and for the uninitiated it would be at home in a carnival next to the “Love Meter” or “Magic 8 Ball.” Perhaps an “antichrist decoder” made the rounds on the county fair circuit in years gone by, or a 666 Decoder Ring was the cheap plastic treat in the box of Cracker Jacks.
History tells us that it would not be a debate between Christians and atheists. If Christianity won predominance over every other religious system in the nation, it would be a debate between Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, Catholics, Seventh-day Adventists, Pentacostals, and any other denomination you could name. Then it would be between the liberals and conservatives, and ultimately between conservatives or between liberals, the powerful – not the faithful – would control.
While the U.S. can summon hard power with relative ease, employing soft power is more difficult. Indeed, smart power suggests that hard and soft power are two sides of the same coin, that our interests are protected when our values are promoted. If Americans want to engage the world with efficient and enduring effect, we must better understand the essence of American power and the foundation of the global public square: religious freedom.
EXCERPT: PORTLAND, Ore. – A law backed by the Ku Klux Klan nearly a century ago to keep Catholics out of public schools is still on the books in Oregon, […]
On August 30, 2009, renowned evangelist Edward Earl Cleveland died at Huntsville Hospital in Huntsville, Alabama. He was 88. Cleveland worked for more than 60 years as a Seventh-day Adventist […]
EXCERPT: . . . The late senator “was a great champion of church-state separation,” said Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in a […]
EXCERPT: Â UTRECHT, Netherlands — (RNS/ENI) Four hundred years after the first Baptist congregation was established, followers have been challenged to continue championing religious liberty. “We as Baptists must continue to […]
Scott Ritsema tackles the current controversy surrounding issues of faith and political power in his new book, The Way, the Truth and the Sword: A New Christian Civics in an […]
An epic battle played out on two levels at the California Supreme Court on March 5. On a surface level, attorneys fought over a technical issue of whether the Proposition 8 prohibition on gay marriage represented a revision or an amendment. On the deeper level, the question asked was whether there are any limits on the majority to impact the rights of the minority.