Transubstantiate

New efforts to protect children win secular allies.

Ask Ian Henderson what he does for a living, and he has to decide whether to respond with the quick version—that he runs a charity—or the potentially awkward version—that he works in pornography education and recovery.

“Sometimes it’ll really open a conversation,” said Henderson, the CEO of Visible Ministries and the Naked Truth Project, which helps over 10,000 people a year in the United Kingdom through training, support groups, and counseling.

Facing a porn epidemic can feel like being dropped into the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37, Henderson said, up close with filth and pain while God shows him “how bad things have gotten.” As pornography has proliferated online, however, more of his fellow Brits are open to talking about its dark side too.

For ministries such as Naked Truth and Christian advocacy groups such as CARE (Christian Action Research and Education), opposing pornography is no longer the lonely position it was for British evangelicals back in the 1970s and 1980s, when they were maligned as prudish killjoys.

Now, websites face legal challenges for hosting abusive content; research is revealing more about how porn affects the mind; and parents of faith and no faith share concerns about kids’ early exposure to sexual material online.

“For a while, there’s been a clear divide of [pornography] being unacceptable in Christian circles and socially acceptable if you’re not a Christian,” said Hannah Lodge, an administrator at Naked Truth. “I think that gap is closing.”

When pastor Ioannis Dekas learned that his teenage son had searched for porn on a school device last year, “It was a wake-up call,” he said. “I had …

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Money promises autonomous abundance. But we need someplace where we cannot hide.

Several friends helped my wife, Catherine, and me move into our first apartment, down and then up two steep and narrow sets of stairs. Three items seemed almost impossible to get up those stairs: a fragile old chest of drawers my wife had inherited from her grandmother, a queen-sized box spring, and an unfathomably heavy sofa bed.

We christened them the Ordeal of Delicacy, the Ordeal of Dimension, and the Ordeal of Strength. Twenty years later we remember those ordeals; the friends who cheerfully endured them with us, sweating and swearing on a hot June day; and the sense of relief when we managed to overcome each one.

A few years later, it was time to move again when my wife took the job she has held ever since. This time, the college that hired her covered the moving costs.

The professional movers went through the same ordeals on our behalf that our friends had gone through a few years before—sweating and likely swearing as well—but I certainly cannot remember their names, or even a hint of their faces. They were paid, fairly, to do a fair job. And once the job was done, they were gone.

This is the power of money: It allows us to get things done, often by means of other people, without the entanglements of friendship.

To this day, I owe my friends something for the move early in our marriage—at the very least, my thanks and my affection. Indeed, I already owed them something before the move. To be a friend is to be intertwined with someone else in a loose but permanent way.

But our relationship, such as it was, with the professional movers was different. It began and ended with a modern form of magic—a transaction that, without the slightest actual effort on our part, transported all our possessions from …

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Justices pepper lawyers with possible scenarios and questions about coercing high school players.

The US Supreme Court justices spun more than a dozen hypothetical prayer scenarios during oral arguments in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District on Monday.

They asked the lawyers arguing for their respective sides if a teacher could pray before class or after, silently or out loud, in a clear voice or a low mumble.

They asked if coaches could pray on the sidelines, in a press box, or a huddle. If they could pray with a prefatory statement that student participation wasn’t required. Or with the sign of the cross, the words of the Our Father, or hands lifted high. Could they pray with a crowd, into a mic, into a camera, with a group of players gathered around, or if no one was there and they were alone?

Justice Stephen Breyer, pointing out that the court has ruled on prayer in schools several times before, said, “This doesn’t seem like a new problem; it seems like a line-drawing problem.”

And then one of the justices even asked about literal lines drawn on the ground. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wanted to know why Washington state high school coach Joseph Kennedy insisted on praying in the center of the field, at the 50-yard line.

“He had to thank God,” she said. “But why there?”

The real line the court was trying to find, though, wasn’t marked with field paint. The justices tried to push the lawyers and each other to agree to a point where prayers protected by the First Amendment could be separated from prayers prohibited by the protections of the First Amendment.

Everyone agreed that the coach has a right to pray, but only as an individual and not as a representative of the public school, and not in a way that would coerce students into a religious practice.

“You’re not …

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Aimee Byrd is correct that the book diagnoses flawed understandings of human sexuality, but her interpretative choices are open to question.

Standing outside a Coptic church in Cairo, I saw a mosaic that sent me back to a college hermeneutics class. In the image’s foreground, a man lay slumbering as an angel hovered over him, pointing. I followed the finger to a horizon dotted with pyramids. And I recognized the Bible’s second “Joseph and Egypt” story, which recounts the holy family’s flight from Herod’s persecution.

The image reminded me of how I’d wrestled with a passage from Matthew’s Gospel: “Out of Egypt I called my son” (2:15). The passage was suggesting that when the toddler Jesus returned from the land of pyramids, he had “fulfilled,” in Matthew’s words, a vision from the prophet Hosea: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (11:1). Yet Hosea, for his part, wasn’t issuing a prediction about the coming Messiah. He was thinking back to an event he knew from Israel’s history: God’s deliverance of his people from Pharoah’s yoke.

For years I struggled to see how the holy family’s return from Egypt truly fulfilled Hosea’s prophesy. But then my hermeneutics professor explained that Matthew was using “fulfilled” to mean something closer to “epitomized,” or “filled to the full in meaning.” In modern parlance, we might imagine Matthew saying, “Talk about calling your Son out of Egypt!”

When we try shoehorning a prediction into our reading of Hosea’s vision, my professor said, we end up distorting it. Instead, he argued, we should treat Matthew’s choice of language as an exercise in literary layering. In other words, he was drawing on earlier biblical …

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Torn between “pro-Putin” and “pro-prayer,” only a minority have spoken out publicly against the invasion. Ukrainian seminary leaders call for repentance.

Russian sermons—to the extent legally possible—reflect the national mood.

“Honor the tsar!” preached Alexey Novikov of Land of Freedom Pentecostal church in Moscow two days after the February 24 Russian invasion of Ukraine, quoting from 1 Peter 2:17. While not pro-war, it was certainly pro-Russia. Once a lawfully elected president commits troops, he said, it is a Christian’s duty to support them.

One month later, Mikhail Belyaev of Source of Living Water Baptist church in Voronezh, Russia, asked, “Why are the churches silent?”

Many Ukrainian evangelicals are fuming at their cross-border colleagues for failing to speak out against the war. They also cite the apostle Peter, placing priority on the same verse’s earlier command: “Love the family of believers.”

But Belyaev’s sermon was not pro-Ukraine. His congregation 320 miles south of Moscow provides a different answer.

The churches are not silent, he said. They are preaching the gospel and praying for peace.

“Russians take the Ukrainian complaint seriously,” said Andrey Shirin, associate professor of divinity at the John Leland Center for Theological Studies, a Baptist seminary in Virginia. “But they put God before the nation—and think many Ukrainians put too much stock in their nationality.”

Shirin left Russia 30 years ago and said that, then as now, most believers are wary of politics. And while some pastors have criticized the war, a pro-Ukraine sermon would be hard to find.

Throughout the war, polls have shown strong support for what Russia has legally mandated be called a “special military operation.” Between 65 percent and 89 percent have signaled approval; 71 percent …

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The moral authority of high school coaches raises First Amendment questions the Supreme Court will have to consider in “Kennedy v. Bremerton.”

For nearly as long as there have been football coaches, there have been praying football coaches. And praying football coaches have frequently been at the center of the rough-and-tumble, back-and-forth debate over the place of religion in American public education.

Joseph Kennedy, a high school coach from the Seattle area, is the latest to take the field. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District on Monday. His lawyers will argue that the First Amendment protects his right as an American citizen to bend a knee and say a prayer after high school games.

The opposing counsel will also invoke the First Amendment, arguing that because Kennedy is paid by the public school, his prayers infringe on the rights of players, who shouldn’t be pressured to pray by a government employee.

But why football coaches? Why not praying principals, drama teachers, shop class instructors, or crossing guards? The football coach, it turns out, has a special place in the American struggle over the meaning of the freedom of religion.

We can trace the story back to one of the first men to turn coaching into a full-time profession, Amos Alonzo Stagg. He trained to be a minister before deciding, as he wrote in his autobiography, he “could influence others to Christian ideals more effectively on the field than in the pulpit.” From 1892 to 1932, Stagg built a college football powerhouse at the University of Chicago—and prayer was absolutely part of the program.

In Stagg’s day, American football was just developing as a sport. Key to its appeal and growing acceptance was the idea that it was more than a game, that it offered a space for young men to build character and develop the moral virtue …

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