How did a name the Puritans made popular take off in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese immigrant circles? As a freshman at Biola University, Grace Brannon (née Kim), 28, encountered many Korean and Korean American women with the same first name. When several of them became part of the same friend group, they started to call themselves Grace 1, Grace 2, and Grace 3. “This was like an inside joke among our friend group. It was funny,” Brannon said. “They knew a lot of other Graces too.” The ubiquity of the name Grace among predominantly East Asian and East Asian American women has been both anecdot ..read more

Pastors and professors reflect on the ethical dilemma of extrajudicial justice against Ottoman officials responsible for genocide and commemorating their killers today. Surveying the scene on a rainy day in Berlin, the Protestant gunman recognized his target. Living hidden under an assumed name in the Weimar Republic, the once-famous official exited his apartment, was shot in the neck, and fell in a pool of blood. For many, the 1921 killing vindicated the blood of thousands. Neither were Germans. Both would eventually be immortalized. But the cloak-and-dagger story took another twist when a B ..read more

Harrison Scott Key’s latest book gives a tragi-comic take on the Christian humility required to stay married. “What happened was, my wife for a billion years—the mother of our three daughters, a woman who’s spent just about every Sunday of her life in church—snuck off and found herself a boyfriend. … He has a decorative seashell collection and can’t even grow a beard. I am not making this up.” So begins Harrison Scott Key’s third memoir How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told. If you’ve read his first two books The World’s Largest Man, which won the Thurber Prize for America ..read more

Manifesting isn’t the answer. Consenting to holiness is. Recently, a psychologist at New York University wondered if young adults were not saving money for the future because they felt like they were putting it away for a stranger. So Hal Ersner-Hershfield conducted an experiment, giving some college students a real mirror and others virtual reality goggles where, with the help of special effects like those used in movies, they could see a future version of themselves at age 68 or 70. Those who saw the older version of themselves in the virtual “mirror” were willing to put more than twice as ..read more

One formed me. The other entertained me. On a sunny March afternoon in 2014, I found myself jumping on the L train from Manhattan to Williamsburg to interview a young, urban pastor named Carl Lentz in his luxury waterfront apartment. A trendy evangelical magazine wanted me to profile him. With its nightclub venues and award-winning worship music, his Hillsong church was attracting thousands of diverse young people from around New York City. Lentz is now featured in an FX documentary, The Secrets of Hillsong, which examines his string of affairs and the embattled church he left behind. The fou ..read more

The Spirit is at work, but so are the mechanisms around high-production sets. “Bigger!” said the voice in my in-ear monitor. I was on stage in a dark room, nearly blinded by spotlights. It was my first time leading worship at a big regional conference for college students, and one of the production managers in the sound booth prompted me to raise my hands higher, move more, clap more, jump, be more physically demonstrative. I had always known conference worship sets were orchestrated, but this was the first time I could see the minutiae. At one point, I was told to imagine my arms attached to ..read more

Tearfund and A Rocha see the impact in humanitarian crises now and want to organize churches to help. When Matthew thinks about the drought in Ethiopia—the worst in 50 years—he thinks of the starving animals and malnourished people. When he thinks about the solution, he thinks of the need to address climate change. “It’s not a one-off thing. It’s not a glitch,” the director of Tearfund Canada told CT. The Christian relief organization has provided assistance through food programs established to help herdsmen who have been forced to migrate to cities as their livelihoods dissolve. But Schroede ..read more

Conservative and progressive Christians favor different approaches, and both have their place. What would the parable of the Good Samaritan look like today? In the United States, the man lying beside the road may well be dying from an overdose of fentanyl. Over the course of the pandemic, social isolation combined with a flood of super-potent synthetic fentanyl pushed overdose deaths in the US to unimaginable levels, from 70,000 in 2019 to 107,000 in 2021. Will we, like the Levite and priest in Luke 10:25–37, keep our distance? Journalist Beth Macy’s book Dopesick chronicled the current opioi ..read more

Experts from around the world explain the consequences of the AI revolution for believers on and off the internet. Hundreds of millions of people have used ChatGPT since its arrival last November to plan vacation itineraries, help them code better, create pop-culture sonnet mashups, and learn the finer details of their beliefs. For years, Christians have Googled their theological questions to find articles written by humans answering questions about God and God's Word. Now, people can take these questions to AI chatbots. How will natural language-processing tools like ChatGPT change how we in ..read more

It’s easy to forget that even the smallest gifts point to incredible divine abundance. It is difficult to remember just how much we have been given. It would have been enough if God had given us three square meals and a map for the journey. It would have been enough to have the promise of heaven. It would have been enough to have just a little air to breathe, like an emergency oxygen mask. But instead, abundance was always God’s design. He gave us songs and ocean waves lapping on the beach. He fed 5,000 and ensured there were 12 basketfuls left over. With a word, he helped some fishermen who ..read more