Singer Oliver Anthony, who has gotten a ton of attention after his song went viral, shared a Bible verse before a performance.

Thanks to the pervasive nature of technology, gaining attention and worldwide fame is much easier than in decades past. A few hundred retweets on the site formerly known as Twitter and shares on Facebook, someone previously unknown can become a household name. Most people refer to this as "going viral."

Much has been said and written about the Barbie movie. If anything, the amount of hand-wringing over the movie’s virtues and vices is, at least, a testimony to its power as a thought-provoking cultural phenomenon. At the risk of being reductionistic, Barbie is about seeing that which has been unseen or even ignored. Particularly, Barbie is about getting society, especially men, to see what women go through and that women are more valuable than just “the fairer sex.” To give us this sight, Barbie gives us Barbieland, a world in which the Barbie dolls run everything and that the Ken dolls are powerless, oafish, eye candy. Seeing men in such positions is a powerful—and far from subtle— rhetorical device that makes men so uncomfortable that they finally see women and what they go through.

Might I offer a cultural juxtaposition to show that there is a subtler, perhaps even more powerful story that can get us to truly see women?  The cultures of Jesus’ time—whether Greco-Roman or Judean—were far more misogynistic than ours. Women barely had standing in courts of law, were not afforded educations, nor considered even close to men in physical or mental abilities. They were seldom heard from and rarely seen for their true value. Women were background figures at best.

For the last year and a half, Ukrainians have witnessed suffering first-hand, perhaps like no other Western country in modern times. They have seen explosions, heard gunfire, escaped as buildings collapsed around them, lost their jobs and livelihoods, and watched as their friends and family have given their lives for their country.

As a Ukrainian and the area director of Young Life Western Ukraine, an organization devoted to sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with adolescents, I have witnessed both suffering and celebration, peace and turmoil, and heartbreak and courage in the teenagers my team and I minister to each week.

Police in India have issued questionnaires to at least 40 churches in Indore, Madhya Pradesh state seeking information that Christians fear will be used by Hindu extremists to attack them, sources said.

Hard-line Muslims at an open-air evangelistic event in eastern Uganda on Aug. 11 assaulted a preacher and more than 20 other Christians for his teaching about Christ’s divinity, sources said.

Are aliens real? Do UFOs really exist? These questions, once relegated to the confines of conspiratorial enterprises, are now legitimately being pondered among some scientists, academics — and even in the halls of Congress. It’s an issue Dr. Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist and apologist, has long researched and explored.

“I became a UFO expert, but not on purpose,” he recently told “Billy Hallowell’s Playing With Fire” podcast. “I was an amateur astronomer before I became a professional astronomer.”

Ross eventually found himself handling UFO reports at universities, exploring claims people made about aliens and unidentified phenomena. And he came to some fascinating conclusions.

Police in Pakistan on Saturday night (Aug. 19) charged a Christian with blasphemy for uploading on TikTok a video of content that last week led to attacks on Christian homes and businesses in Jaranwala more than 100 kilometers away, sources said.

A court in Indonesia last week sentenced a Muslim to three months in jail for halting a Christian worship service.

Instigated by mosque leaders, Muslim mobs on Wednesday (Aug. 16) burned 20 church buildings and ransacked Christian homes and businesses in Jaranwala, Pakistan, after a Muslim framed two Christians in a false blasphemy case, a relative said.

As the wildfires in Hawaii in 2023 wreaked devastation across the island of Maui, 68-year-old Frank Trejos lost his life while trying to protect his beloved best friend — a dog named Sam.