In the News

It was October 2010 the night the priest came to our door. The knock startled Tim’s dullard beagle into a howl just as Tim’s mother was serving up dinner. She and her husband had flown in from New York a few weeks earlier to care for their dying son.

Tim and I had moved to London the year before. Our friends — newsroom colleagues — visited sometimes, though only with advance notice. Tim’s brain tumour had severely blunted his wit. I was prone to crying jags. As a couple, we did not inspire drop-ins.

Tim’s mother told us to start eating and went to answer the knock. The beagle ricocheted in frenzy between food and front door. 'Charity collectors,' Tim’s father guessed. 'They love targeting dinner time.'

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Last night, in an interview on CNN, pro-life Speaker Paul Ryan explained why the Republican Congress will defund the Planned Parenthood abortion business.

Ryan said Congress has a long-standing pro-life principle that it will not force taxpayers to be involved in the abortion industry. He also said that defunding Planned Parenthood will have absolutely no negative effect on women’s health because the funding will be rerouted to legitimate Health Care Centers that actually provide healthcare for women as opposed to abortions. 

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A lot of people don’t realize that there is a genuine scientific debate over how to best help out children with gender dysphoria, or those who feel discomfort — sometimes extremely intense discomfort — with the body they were born into, and who insist they really are, or should be, a member of the other sex. That’s partly because most mainstream journalistic treatments of the subject tell stories that, while inspiring and important, are somewhat straightforward: The child knows from a very young age they were born in the wrong body, the parents (perhaps after a brief period of reflection or resistance) agree, and the kid transitions, blossoming into their true self as a result.

This definitely happens. But a lot of cases of childhood gender dysphoria are far more complicated, and that’s where the debate comes in. Last night the BBC aired an hour-long documentary called Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best? Produced by the filmmaker John Conroy, it is one of the best journalistic accounts yet to fully dive into this subject and all of its messy nuance. The film zeroes in on the controversy surrounding the late-2015 firing of Kenneth Zucker, a leading childhood gender-dysphoria researcher and clinician, and the shutdown of his gender-identity clinic — but it’s really about the broader controversy that has raged over this subject, mostly a bit beyond the attention of mainstream audiences. 

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A new study just unearthed a remarkable finding: conservative doctrine grows churches.

This isn’t necessarily what we’ve heard in recent years. Whether it’s the music, the attractive facility, or the feeling of community, we need something to keep the church growing—something besides biblical teaching. How surprising, then, that David Millard Haskell, Kevin N. Flatt, and Stephanie Burgoyne have found that doctrine grows churches. In their peer-reviewed scholarly article for the Review of Religious Research, a prestigious journal, the trio present findings among mainstream Canadian churches showing that—contra the stereotypes—doctrinally conservative churches that reach out aggressively often grow. Churches that soften biblical teachings and de-emphasize evangelism often shrink.

What might these findings mean for the future of evangelicalism? Here are four quick takeaways.

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