BreakPoint

I’ve always loved this line from poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Earth’s crammed with heaven, / And every common bush afire with God; / But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, / The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

Attempts to commercialize romantic love, what the Greeks called eros, is nothing new. But it’s quite clear that, in our Valentine’s Day traditions, we’ve lost the history of what was, historically, a feast day of the Church: The feast day of the third-century Christian martyr, Valentinus of Rome.

The decision late last week by the Church of England to now bless civil marriages and partnerships of same-sex couples made precisely no one happy. For those hoping to amend official church teaching, the measure fell short of legitimizing so-called gay marriage in the church. Advocates of historic church teaching and Biblical morality see this move as only the latest in the wrong direction by the Church of England, and another indictment of church leadership, especially the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York.

A former gender clinic caseworker has filed her concerns with the attorney general of Missouri and has gone public with what she saw behind clinic doors.

Rather than merely shock with a new display of creepiness, the "Unholy" Grammys performance marked the place where we’ve already been for some time.

Josephine Bakhita died on this day in 1947. She was a remarkable believer who reveled in the love of God and lived her life in service to Him, despite the years she suffered in abusive slavery. Born around the year 1869 in the troubled region of Darfur in Sudan, she was kidnapped by Arab slave traders while still a child, in about 1877. This began a horrific 12-year ordeal as a slave.

According to a story in Business Insider, one woman who gave up on her passion is now all the happier for it. Maggie Perkins taught middle and high school in both Florida and Georgia, but now works at Costco. She attributed the change from lunch boxes to big boxes, after years working in the educational world, to being unable to pay her bills and, more importantly, to sleep at night because of the stress from her job. 

How far would you go to rescue a child from danger? What if it were your child? What if your child was being harmed by an ideology that taught her to hate her body and question who she was?

Would the ability to have children mean that a man could actually become a woman? Setting aside for a moment the awful potential for exploitation of children involved, if science could graft the reproductive system of a female into a male body, and it could function with drugs and hormones, does that make him a woman? A mother?

Last month, according to the Congolese military, a militant group attacked a Pentecostal church, killing at least 10 and wounding scores of others. Though incidents like this are hardly new, they rarely make the news. Many in the Western world simply don’t realize how prevalent Christianity and Christian persecution are outside of Europe and North America. Plus, the creeping influence of “the critical theory mood” leaves the impression that because Christianity has been so influential in Western history, Christians must always be villains and can never be victims.