Creative Joy

The owner and operator of a Downey, California, firm has pleaded guilty to wire fraud in a Ponzi scheme that collected nearly $1 million from victims who were falsely promised that their money would be used to host Christian rock concerts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Janine Giordano Drake

Read the rest of this entry »

Moscow police have been searching the Church of Scientology on Taganskaya Street since Thursday morning.

Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Harvey

Read the rest of this entry »

An autopsy report released Tuesday shows 5-year-old Jadon Higganbothan died from a gunshot wound to the head before being wrapped in plastic bags and buried in a shallow grave behind a Durham, N.C. home.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Emily Clark

A secret infant baptism orchestrated by a formerly Catholic wife who renounced her faith when she married into an anti-Catholic family sounds like a plotline to an early twentieth century soap opera. And it makes me think of my family. Randalls recent post with David Hall discussing his interest in history got me thinking about my own familys history. My family may not be Italian, but my great-grandmother Stella Foster Myer was a sort of German version of theimmigrants daughters that Robert Orsis earlier work focuses upon, because Stella too was caught between early twentieth century tensions of family and religion.
Stella Foster was born in 1898 to a very Catholic, very German immigrant family on a Midwest farm. As she grew up, she considered becoming a nun an idea further enforced by remaining single for as long as she did. In 1922 she married my great-grandfather Paul Myer, a 25 year old son of German immigrants who were Lutheran and anti-Catholic. (The picture is of the renovated barn at the farm where Stella and Paul raised their family, circa now). When my mother first told me this story, my immediate question for her and her older sister was: how on earth did Stella and Paul meet, let alone engage in a courtship? The simple answer is that they were neighbors. The Foster family lived on a farm south of Topeka, Kansas down the county road from one of the Myer familys farms. Stella and Pauls marriage may have been a bit of one of convenience at its outset they married old for the small-town early 1920s but my aunt in particular remembers seeing her grandparents engage in light-hearted teasing indicative of a strong bond.

Read the rest of this entry »

After Osama bin Laden was killed, we talked about whether, drawing from your religious perspective, you would have sanctioned his death if you had been an adviser to the president. Most of you, in one way or another, said that you thought his death should not be celebrated, but that it would fit under the just war theory.

Read the rest of this entry »

Militants with suspected ties to Iranian security forces have threatened to kill nearly a dozen evangelical Christians who fled Iran unless they “repent” and return to Islam.

Read the rest of this entry »

[Cross-posted from the HS blog]

Read the rest of this entry »

Once again the book “To Train Up A Child,” by Michael and Debi Pearl of ‘No Greater Joy Ministries’ features in a murder investigation.

Read the rest of this entry »