The Dallas Mavericks were intended to be the first Christian team in the NBA.

At the time, 1980 did not seem like a great year to launch a new professional sports franchise. Interest rates were high. The Iranian hostage crisis dominated national attention. A presidential election loomed. There was a general feeling of pessimism and uncertainty for many Americans.

But Norm Sonju had a vision—inspired by God, perhaps, but also from data and market analysis that showed Dallas had untapped potential as a National Basketball Association (NBA) city.

For two years, Sonju had worked to make his dream a reality. Now, in 1980, when his plans looked like they might be crumbling, he turned to two Bible verses he had learned from his mother as a child: “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know” (Jer. 33:3), and “Neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:39).

“The truth of God’s Word made such a difference in my attitude in those hectic days of starting the franchise,” Sonju would write a decade later. “I knew that God was in control even when things looked hopeless.”

Sonju’s Christian faith was more than a source of comfort. It was the central force behind his efforts to bring the NBA to Dallas, fueling his hopes for what the team could become and providing the point of connection with the owner who had the money to animate his vision.

These days, Christian athletes seem to be everywhere in professional sports: kneeling in prayer, pointing to the sky, writing Scripture on their shoes, thanking God from the podium and in front of television cameras.

But the origin of the Dallas Mavericks was not ...

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Migrant rights have been off-radar for many Panamanian Christians. But as pressures increase, some are speaking out ahead of this weekend’s general elections.

On May 5, Panamanians will vote for a new president. The outcome of this election may have consequences for far more than its 4.4 million residents; it could change the migration reality for the hundreds of thousands of people traveling from South America, Asia, and Africa who pass through the Central American country en route to the United States.

Leading in the polls is José Raúl Mulino, a candidate for Realizando Metas (Realizing Goals), a right-wing populist party founded by disgraced president Ricardo Martinelli. He has vowed to shut down the Darién Gap, a densely forested jungle area that migrants must traverse to enter Panama from the bordering country of Colombia.

“We’re going to close Darién and we’re going to repatriate every one of these people, respecting their human rights,” said Raúl Mulino in April.

For many Panamanians, there was no migrant crisis before 2022. After passing through the Darién gap, migrants passed through the country on government buses to the Costa Rican border. But after a shift in US migrant policy sent many back to Central America a couple years ago, hundreds have since moved to Panama City and a handful of small towns. Residents have begun to blame them for crime and for overwhelming their sanitation systems.

Though evangelicals have largely been on the sidelines, many leaders say they should have done more.

“The church does not see the refugee problem as their own problem,” said Panamanian missionary Robert Bruneau, a regional leader with United World Mission. “They believe it is something the state should do and are not aware of the great opportunity they have to graciously and honorably serve someone who ...

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Ethan Hawke has made a movie as scandalous as one of the writer’s short stories.

Why not write something that “a lot, a lot, of people like?” Regina O’Connor asks her daughter, the writer Flannery O’Connor, in the middle of the new biopic Wildcat. The same question might be put to the film itself. It’s not a movie that a lot of people will like. But unlike the author’s mother, I mean that as a high compliment. Director and screenwriter Ethan Hawke has made a film worthy of Flannery O’Connor’s genius.

An epigraph from O’Connor’s essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” sums up what Wildcat sets out to do: “I’m always irritated by people who imply writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality.” Fittingly, rather than depict the writer’s life from birth to death, Wildcat uses her fiction to discover what’s real, to “get down under things” to the problem of suffering, the limitations of human experience, the desire for goodness, the habits of evil, and, always present, the longing for God.

The result is a movie as scandalous as one of O’Connor’s short stories—“shocking to the system,” to borrow her words. Her devotees will applaud it; most of the audience will be left wondering what just clobbered them.

After that opening epigraph, Wildcat rolls a fake trailer for a 1950s-style horror flick inspired by O’Connor’s story “The Comforts of Home.” (A mother brings home a wayward, orphaned teen who tries to seduce her grown son. The son attempts to kill the teen, but shoots his own mother instead.) The trailer, starring Laura Linney and Maya Hawke—who also play the roles of Regina and Flannery— sets up expectations ...

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Why the church has struggled to address mental illness well and how we can care better.

Nearly five years ago, a high-profile pastor—one who had shared bravely and publicly about his battle with depression—took his own life. In the days after his death, a call circulated widely on social media platforms for clergy with mental health issues to be removed from their posts.

I understand the motivation. The argument was made out of a concern to prevent similar tragedies. But as a pastor who has endured chronic mental torment, the simplistic appeal struck me as an example of the widespread clumsiness within the church when it comes to addressing mental illness. Prominent Christian teachers, most recently including California author and pastor John MacArthur, have denied diagnosable conditions such as OCD and ADHD even exist.

In my own ministry, my struggles with anxiety and OCD have proven to be unexpectedly fertile soil for connecting with people. Opening up about the brokenness in my mind has led to deeper relationships as God took the affliction that initially felt to me like pure deficit and put it to work. His strength, as he tells us, shows up in our weakness (2 Cor. 12:9).

So I find it heartening to see the increased attention to mental health and compassion for mental illness in our culture. Christian resources addressing the intersection of faith and mental illness are also proliferating, providing theologically grounded pathways to better care. And there are countless examples of congregations powerfully demonstrating the love of Christ to those in mental anguish.

Still, the stigma accompanying mental illness persists, and in church settings, the issue is often complicated further by ignorance or misguided theology. Clergy tend to be the “first responders” ...

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After years of disagreement and the departure of thousands of churches, the change passed without debate.

United Methodists meeting for their top legislative assembly Wednesday overwhelmingly overturned a measure that barred gay clergy from ordination in the denomination, a historic step for the nation’s second-largest Protestant body.

With a simple vote call and without debate, delegates to the General Conference removed the ban on the ordination of “self-avowed practicing homosexuals”—a prohibition that dates to 1984.

With that vote, the worldwide denomination of some 11 million members joins the majority of liberal Protestant denominations such as the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the United Church of Christ, which also ordain LGBTQ clergy.

“We’ve singled out one group for discrimination for 52 years,” said Ken Carter, bishop of the Western North Carolina Conference. “And we’ve done that on an understanding of homosexuality whose origins came when it was understood to be a disease and a disorder.”

That, he said, has now changed. “Increasingly,” he said, “people see that God’s spirit is in gay and lesbian people.”

The morning vote on the motion was part of a larger series of calendar items voted on in bulk. They also included a motion barring superintendents, or overseers, from punishing clergy for performing a same-sex wedding or prohibiting a church from holding a same-sex wedding, though the actual ban on same-sex weddings in churches has yet to be voted on.

The vote on the calendar items was 692–51, or about 93 percent in favor.

After the vote, LGBTQ delegates and their allies gathered on the floor of the Charlotte Convention Center to sing, hug, cheer, and shed tears. ...

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A professor explains why examining a school’s doctrinal statement isn’t enough.

When I speak at churches around the country, the conversation after my talks often turns to the state of Christian higher education. I’m a professor at a Christian institution, and Christian parents and grandparents want to know where high school graduates can go to have their faith deepened rather than undermined. These concerns have only become more pressing given the ongoing rise in young people wandering away from the church and describing their religious convictions as “nothing in particular.”

The question many Christians have for me is which colleges are “safe” or “real” Christian schools, which usually means those that have a truly conservative theological ethos. For those who aren’t familiar with the world of Christian higher ed, it can be difficult to identify these schools from outside the campus community, and parents often (reasonably) conclude an institution’s stance on human sexuality is the simplest indicator of a college’s commitment to Christian orthodoxy.

LGBTQ questions are indeed important, and they can serve as a proxy for an institution’s broader theology. But by itself, this isn’t a reliable formula for finding a good Christian college. A school may stake out a bold position on sexuality and yet capitulate to what I’d suggest is the most overlooked and therefore most insidious threat to Christian education in America right now.

It’s not progressive theology. It’s a pervasive consumerist anthropology.

Theological anthropology concerns our assumptions about the nature and purpose of humanity. And by “consumerist anthropology” I mean the belief—often subconsciously held—that ...

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Every sin requires Christ’s atonement. But the Bible shows God punishing—and repairing—different sins differently.

Christian theology consistently holds together truths that seem to want to fall apart: Jesus is fully God and fully human. People are sinners and created in the image of God. The church is local and universal.

And yet, despite what we affirm, in practice, Christians are often unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. Instead of holding two truths in tension, we tend to slide to one side or the other, distorting it in the process. We treat Jesus either as an invulnerable, transcendent being or as a mere prophet. We speak as if humans are either so degraded we are capable of nothing but sin or mostly fine with a few rough edges. We think of the church as if it were only our own sect or we minimize the local congregation.

Evangelical theologians have done great work in Christology, anthropology, and ecclesiology, respectively, to retrieve those three truthful tensions. But there is a fourth tension yet to be retrieved: All sins ruin us, and yet not all sins ruin us equally.

To start, let us be clear: Sin—however small—is a serious thing. And sin is only atoned for by the work of God in Jesus Christ. But saying that Christ is the only one who atones for all sin is different from saying that all sins do the same kind of work on us.

All sins break the sinner and create havoc around us. And yet the Scriptures consistently depict the sins we do as different, not only in effect on one another but before God. Within the Law, for example, different social remedies are given for different sins, and so are different sacrifices (Lev. 4; Ex. 21). Not everything requires a bull or a goat. Sometimes a dove will do. In the Prophets and Proverbs, God distinguishes—and even prioritizes—certain ...

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As the presidential election approaches, the incumbent government seeks to win support with aid to churches and pastors.

In many countries, politicians try to win over religious voters by highlighting areas of shared interest between their agenda and the faithful’s priorities. In Venezuela, the current president is offering pastors cash.

With less than three months until Venezuela’s presidential elections, incumbent Nicolás Maduro is expanding two initiatives specifically aimed at the evangelical community, which represents 30.9 percent of the country’s population.

Bono El Buen Pastor (“The Good Shepherd Bonus”), created last year, and Plan Mi Iglesia Bien Equipada (“My Well-Equipped Church Plan”) offer resources to pastors and their churches, including cash, chairs, construction materials, and expensive sound equipment—no strings attached. Mi Iglesia Bien Equipada exists under Misión Venezuela Bella, a government program that invests in recreation and arts spaces, which has remodeled nearly 3,000 churches since 2019.

At the beginning of March, Maduro gathered 17,000 people in a pastors-only event in the northern city of Carabobo and announced that 20,000 additional pastors had become beneficiaries of the Bono El Buen Pastor program, which would deliver a monthly stipend of 495 bolivars (around $14 USD) to each new member. (Venezuela’s minimum legal monthly wage is 130 bolivars or $3.50.)

Officially, the government says the program aims to give churchgoers dignified spaces where they can develop their faith. There are, however, those who view the state’s generosity with some suspicion.

César Mermejo, president of the Evangelical Council of Venezuela and a leader of the Federación de Iglesias Mizpa de Venezuela, called these efforts by Maduro an attempt to buy ...

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But true liberty, in art and in life, is created by constraints.

Taylor Swift answers to no one.

Not music industry executives: Her songs returned to TikTok in the middle of a licensing dispute between the app and her label.

Not mayors: When she graced their cities during her Eras tour, they declared days in her honor.

Not the international community: A Singapore-exclusive stop in Southeast Asia sparked a row between the city-state and nearby Thailand and the Philippines. The Japanese embassy issued a statement about her Super Bowl travel plans.

And Swift doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. She announced new music within minutes of winning her latest Grammy for album of the year.

You might take all this as proof of Swift’s business genius, nothing personal. But in her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, there’s definitely an “above it all” attitude. These songs are snarly. America’s sweetheart may have nothing left to prove. But she certainly has scores left to settle.

Swift is hardly a stranger to revenge. This is the songwriter, after all, who brought us lyrics like “It’s obvious that wanting me dead / Has really brought you two together.”

But TTPD broadens her aggression and scorns the prospect of reconciliation. A small-town girl takes on her community over a controversial love affair and trolls her parents with a joke pregnancy announcement. A depressed performer boasts sardonically about how well she can sell happiness to frenzied fans. A woman seethes at being seen as a problematic starlet by her new boyfriend’s circle.

There’s a track suspiciously similar to an Olivia Rodrigo song (the two singers have a rumored feud). The title of another appears to name-drop Kim Kardashian, an older nemesis.

Critics agree that ...

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A late historian explores how crusade hymns told both the classic story of gospel salvation and the evolving story of evangelical worship music.

Crowds of over 50,000. Famous special guests. Hundreds of cities in the US and around the world. Beloved, catchy songs. For many, these might sound like readouts from the Taylor Swift Eras Tour hype machine. But exchange the glittery girl power for the gospel in baritone, and you have one of the most successful musical touring acts in the postwar world: the Billy Graham Crusades.

The first association that “Billy Graham Crusade” may evoke is not musical at all, but rather a close-up shot of the evangelist, with his penetrating, wide-eyed gaze and raised forearms, thundering, “The Bible says …” Admittedly, music was not the main focus.

Yet as the late historian Edith Blumhofer shows in her final book, Songs I Love to Sing: The Billy Graham Crusades and the Shaping of Modern Worship, neither Graham’s ministry nor the late-century rise of contemporary Christian music can be understood without it. As crusade song leader Cliff Barrows pursued his main goal—“sing to save”—he and his teammates bridged stylistic, cultural, and generational divides, transforming evangelicals’ music into the harmonic blend of old and new that is familiar today.

Mining rich resources

Before unpacking this highly original book, a few words about the author. Blumhofer is an American religious historian renowned for her empathetic biographies of hymnist Fanny J. Crosby and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, as well as broader studies of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. She concluded her career with this new study, sadly succumbing to a battle with cancer in the process.

To finish the project, she tapped Jesus People expert Larry Eskridge, with whom she had for many years directed the Institute ...

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Do activists often invest their work with religious significance? All the more reason for Christians to be discerning co-laborers.

I love nature documentaries, especially those narrated by David Attenborough. Whether watching with my children or on my own, I love seeing the majesty of the snowy Alps or kelp forests.

But I’ve noticed that in recent years, nearly every somber vignette of a species struggling on the edge of survival ends with a call to action. Viewers are beckoned to take responsibility for causing a poor animal’s plight and to consider how they can fix things before the species is gone forever.

I understand the impulse to believe that animals’ struggles should move humans to action. However, it is the ethics informing the narrator’s pleas that seem a bit muddled.

By many documentarians’ admission, the species we marvel at on screen have emerged out of eons of struggles to survive and adapt to their surroundings. Sometimes, the narrators even remind us that this process has resulted in countless prior species disappearing into extinction.

Whether you believe in a young or an old earth, in God’s hand or in meaningless physical forces guiding history, we can all agree that change, death, and selection favoring adaptability are features of life on earth. Witnessing it in real time makes for compelling television drama, but the moral indictment that you and I contribute to grave evil when one of these species goes extinct does not seem to square with the documentarians’ worldview.

What compels us to see polar bears possibly going extinct in terms of moral right and wrong? If we take human action out of the equation, isn’t history littered with the bones of countless species that have gone extinct? Are not humans and their actions part of nature?

A robust theology of creation care

If we listen closely, ...

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