It seems like the women of Scripture are having a moment in the days leading up to Easter (April 21), celebrated by many Christians as the day they believe Jesus rose from the dead.
Mary Magdalene is getting the Hollywood treatment in a film that bears her name. …..

Three women stand out to the scholar among the women following Jesus, just as Peter, James and John hold a special place among the Twelve. Mary Magdalene; Mary, the mother of James and Joseph; and Salome are described in the Gospel of Mark as watching the crucifixion from a distance.
Mary Magdalene is singularly important among them, Smith said, and is named more frequently than some of the disciples in the Gospels. She is the first person to see Jesus after his resurrection and the first to proclaim the news to the other disciples....

Smith said she sees that treatment of Mary Magdalene as a “dismissal of women’s power and women’s agency in a real way.”

Fully 12 percent of people who voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries voted for President Trump in the general election. That is according to the data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study — a massive election survey of around 50,000 people. (For perspective, a run-of-the-mill survey measuring Trump's job approval right now has a sample of 800 to 1,500.)

Estimates show more than 58 percent of eligible voters went to the polls during the 2016 election, nearly breaking even with the turnout rate set during the last presidential election in 2012, even as the final tallies in states like California continue to be calculated, according to statistics collected by the U.S. Elections Project.

Here, you have somebody who not only acts in a way that is not consistent with anything that I hear in scripture or in church, where it’s about lifting up the least among us and taking care of strangers, which is another word for immigrants. And making sure that you’re focusing your effort on the poor. But also personally, how you’re supposed to conduct yourself.

Not chest thumping look-at-me-ism, but humbling yourself before others. Foot washing is one of the central images in the New Testament. And we see the diametric opposite of that in this presidency. I think there was perhaps a cynical process where he decided to, for example, begin to pretend to be pro-life and govern accordingly. Which was good enough to bring many Evangelicals over to his side. But even on the version of Christianity that you hear from the religious right, which is about sexual ethics, I can’t believe that somebody who was caught writing hush money checks to adult film actresses is somebody they should be lifting up as the kind of person you want to be leading this nation.

b]Alleged child molester Roy Moore is currently the Republican field for the party’s Senate nomination, which would open the door to Sen. Doug Jones (D) winning reelection.

The latest Mason-Dixon poll of the Alabama Republican Senate primary found:
But Jones’s re-election chances will be affected by who he draws as his Republican challenger in 2020. Currently, Roy Moore – who Jones defeated in 2017 – is the top choice of GOP voters. Statewide, 27% of Republicans support Moore as the nominee, ahead of three current Congressmen – Mo Brooks at 18%, Bradley Byrne at 13% and Gary Palmer at 11%. DelMarsh (4%) and Tim James (2%) trial the field and a significant 25% are undecided.

Anthony Graffagnino describes himself spiritually as both frustrated and curious.
A Pentecostal turned Unitarian, the 28-year-old Graffagnino said he’s had his fill with “stale and dead expressions of faith that I saw really doing nothing to better the people around me or the world around me.”
Discovering the Christian mystical tradition through the work of Franciscan friar Richard Rohr helped change that.

“Father Richard’s work allowed an entryway into Christianity when I didn’t think there was any,” said Graffagnino, who is studying to be an interfaith chaplain at Starr King School for the Ministry, a Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley, Calif....

While many younger Americans today are spiritually unaffiliated, aka “nones” — a quarter of all adults under the age of 30 in the United States say they don’t identify with any religion or spiritual tradition, according to the Pew Center for Religion and Public Life — millennials are increasingly finding contemplative spirituality appealing.

In a major fail for Fox News as the network held a town hall with Bernie Sanders on Monday, nearly everyone in the bipartisan crowd raised their hands when asked whether they support a “Medicare for All” health care system.

After explaining that the audience is filled with folks of all political ideologies, Fox host Bret Baier first asked the crowd whether they are currently on private health insurance through their jobs, which prompted most hands to go up.

When Baier asked those same people whether they would trade their employer-provided health insurance for a “government-run” system, almost every hand in the crowd remained raised, and many audience members cheered for the idea.

The story of God has always intrigued people from all different faiths, times, and places. It has been a question that nearly everyone has pondered over and a journey that all take at some point in their life...…


Just like the doctrines mentioned in the episode, Islam also believes in achieving eternal peace not only in this life but also the life after death. Based on the teachings of the Quran and the traditions of Muhammad, the founder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad presented that life after death would not be material. Instead, it would be of a spiritual nature of which we can only visualize some aspects.