The Blue Christmas service at First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C., was just what Charles Pugh, who worshipped alongside a couple of dozen others, needed that cold night in the nation’s capital.....

The service was one of several events in the Washington area and many more across the country that have marked one of the longest nights of the year. They are acknowledgments that — despite the mall music and tinseled trees — the season can also be the darkest time of year for those who are grieving, no matter the source of their grief.

The pagans at the Oak Spirit Sanctuary decorate their trees, hang wreaths and tell the story of Santa Claus...
Yule honors the winter solstice... when pagans focus on the sunlight to come after a season of dark, and engage in rituals that predate Christianity’s adaptation of these practices.

Nobody knows what happened to the Uighur student after he returned to China from Egypt and was taken away by police......

The student’s friends think he joined the thousands — possibly tens of thousands — of people, rights groups and academics estimate, who have been spirited without trial into secretive detention camps for alleged political crimes that range from having extremist thoughts to merely traveling or studying abroad.........


The government has referred to its detention program as “vocational training,” but its main purpose appears to be indoctrination.......

Chinese authorities had extended the scope of the program to Uighur students abroad. And Egypt, once a sanctuary for Uighurs to study Islam, began deporting scores of Uighurs to China.

For eight and a half years, I observed the ascendance of the Trump phenomenon from the perspective of a black Christian woman with a perch on the inside of the evangelical hurricane — as a professor at Wheaton College.....

So as the precinct numbers rolled in Tuesday night, they did not surprise me...... Predictably, 80 percent of white evangelical voters cast their ballots for Judge Roy Moore......

But according to CNN, 96 percent of black voters backed Jones. Among black women, the figure was 98 percent.
So in a moment where the foundational fault lines of the American creed have been laid bare by the spilled blood and suffering of my black brothers and sisters at the hands of law enforcement, it turns out that black Christians, not white evangelicals, are the story.

A friend of mine quipped on Facebook, “Are there any old famous dudes who haven’t been sexually gross?”
They are fewer by the day. With idols falling fast in media, politics and entertainment, The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen writes that a new “sex panic” might be upon us....

Thankfully, we can find in religions and secular ethics some powerful correctives to what is broken in sex culture today. First, a brief diagnosis of what has gone wrong:
We can credit the sexual revolution for honoring the joys of sex and creating space for more people to enjoy it in more ways, provided that no one is forced or harmed. But in elevating the pleasures of sex, the revolution contributed to the development of a greedy fixation on it that now prevails among some men.

At long last, the Religious Left has awakened. And if the Religious Right keeps up its unwavering support for Trump, the progressive faithful may have miles to go before they sleep.
To be fair, the Religious Left was never exactly napping. Aspects of the movement—which constitutes an amorphous group of interfaith activists that goes by many names and takes many forms—have operated since America’s founding, marching and praying in support of abolition, labor reform, and civil rights.