Here's what's happening on the church and culture front today...

Featured

Jan 21, 2025

More teens say they're using ChatGPT for schoolwork, a new study finds

Jan 21, 2025

Comfort levels with using ChatGPT for different types of assignments vary among students: 54% found that using it to research new topics, for example, was an acceptable use of the tool. But only 18% said the same for using it to write an essay. (Restrepo, NPR)

Jan 21, 2025

How MAGA Is Taking Back the Culture

Jan 21, 2025

Across many facets of society—in sports, entertainment, the classroom and the workplace—there are signs that MAGA isn’t just retaking the White House. It is gaining a firmer foothold in the broader culture. (Zitner & McGraw, The Wall Street Journal)

Jan 21, 2025

Texas could join Louisiana with a law to require the Ten Commandments in classrooms

Jan 21, 2025

Key Texas legislators say they intend to pass a law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms. The move would add some big-state momentum to a trend started by Louisiana last year with a law that is blocked in court but has other states looking at similar proposals. (Schneider, NPR)

Jan 21, 2025

Nothing Bundt Cakes now requires stores to open on Sundays. Some franchisees are furious

Jan 21, 2025

Store owners from Iowa to Oregon to Florida expressed frustration at the policy change to CNN, saying the option to close on Sundays was a deciding factor in choosing to invest in the franchise. Many of them had poured out their own savings into opening the bakeries. (Maruf, CNN)

Jan 21, 2025

News Archive:

Featured

More teens say they're using ChatGPT for schoolwork, a new study finds

How MAGA Is Taking Back the Culture

The End of the DEI Era

Many DEI programs are sputtering or dying, and the anti-DEI movement is ascendant. Some people, especially but not limited to those on the right, have long viewed contemporary efforts to strengthen DEI practices as performative, meddlesome, or ineffective. (Hendrickson, The Atlantic)

Men, Women and Social Connections

Roughly equal shares of U.S. men and women say they’re often lonely; women are more likely to reach out to a wider network for emotional support (Goddard & Parker, Pew Research Center)

Apart from handfasting ceremonies, in which the bride and groom’s hands are bound with a cord to symbolize the union of their souls physically and spiritually, Ms. McMullen-King said most of the weddings she officiates don’t look particularly out of the ordinary. But appearances are rarely the point at weddings that invoke the cosmos. (LaGorce, The New York Times)

In statehouses across the country, lawmakers this year will consider bills that, if widely adopted, could chart a new course for how Americans approach end-of-life decisions by giving terminally ill patients a legal means of choosing how and when they die. (Bellware, The Washington Post)

[Some] hospitals have begun to embrace programs targeted at spiritual support in addition to physical care. Those programs are supported by a growing body of research on the health benefits of spiritual practice.(Thorp, NPR)

We are “in an entirely different era,” said Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. “The technological access to pornography has exploded.” He said that warrants reconsidering rulings from decades past that invoked the 1st Amendment to strike down anti-pornography measures. (Savage, Los Angeles Times)

Driven by Islamic extremism, authoritarian regimes and war, high-level persecution and discrimination impacted 380 million Christians around the world in 2024, according to the annual World Watch List report by the evangelical nonprofit Open Doors released Wednesday (Jan. 15). (André, Religion News Service)

Everyone knows about the events of 9/11. But few are aware that, a century and a half before, September 11 was associated with a ghastly act of violence that was similarly driven by religious zealotry and a desire to punish Americans. The events of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which took place in early September 1857, and came to their horrific conclusion on the 11 September, have been called “the darkest deed of the 19th century”. (Larman, The Telegraph)

TikTok users are pushing back against the looming TikTok ban set to potentially go into effect Sunday by downloading a Chinese app called RedNote, which some users are calling “China’s TikTok.” TikTok’s ban was largely derived from national security concerns related to TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and many users are moving to RedNote as an explicit form of protest. (Rosenblatt, NBC News)

Johnson made the comments shortly after the House passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act in a 218-206 vote, with all House Republicans and two Texas Democrats — Reps. Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar — voting in favor of the bill. The legislation bars transgender athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s sports from elementary school through college. (Jenkins, Religion News Service)

The Texas Supreme Court will hear arguments on Wednesday in a battle over whether Southern Methodist University can separate from the United Methodist Church. The university, founded in Dallas by Methodists in the early 20th century, has been trying to extricate itself since 2019, a period of intense turmoil in the denomination over whether the church should accept gay clergy or gay marriage. (Graham, The New York Times)

Around half of adults across the world hold antisemitic beliefs and deny the historic facts of the Holocaust, according to the latest edition of the largest global study of anti-Jewish attitudes by the Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based advocacy group. (Pancevski, The Wall Street Journal)

Tens of thousands of naked Hindu ascetics and millions of pilgrims took dips in freezing water at the confluence of sacred rivers in northern India on Tuesday, in the first of a series of major baths in the Maha Kumbh festival, the largest religious congregation on Earth. (Saaliq, AP News)

The government has been warned by the equalities watchdog that rules could “disproportionately curtail” freedom of expression and be applied to “overheard conversations”. Ministers have proposed that employers must protect workers from being harassed at work by “third parties” such as customers or clients. If they fail to do so they could be sued. (Scott, The Times)

The new Syrian government’s consistent rhetoric of tolerance has some analysts asking: Is the talk merely an attempt to assuage a nervous international audience? (Casper, Christianity Today)

After rising for about 20 years, the share of U.S. adults who are not living with a spouse or partner has modestly declined since 2019. In 2023, 42% of adults were unpartnered, down from 44% in 2019, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. (Fry, Pew Research)