In the past few years, Americans have grown generally more positive toward the Bible, but that doesn’t mean they’re reading it more.

According to a Lifeway Research study, U.S. adults increasingly view the Bible as a book worth reading multiple times, but few have actually done so.

More Americans describe the Bible as true, life-changing and helpful today, compared to a 2016 Lifeway Research study. Additionally, more than 2 in 5 Americans (44%) say the Bible is a book to read over and over again, up 4 points from the previous study. Yet 9% say they’ve read it all more than once, unchanged since 2016. Still, half of Americans have engaged with the Bible beyond just a few stories.

Read it all.

NEW RESEARCH: In the past few years, Americans have grown generally more positive toward the Bible, but that doesn’t mean they’re reading it more. https://t.co/AQ1x8mDsLd

— Lifeway Research (@LifewayResearch) May 13, 2025

Israel had planned to strike Iranian nuclear sites as soon as next month but was waved off by President Trump in recent weeks in favor of negotiating a deal with Tehran to limit its nuclear program, according to administration officials and others briefed on the discussions.

Mr. Trump made his decision after months of internal debate over whether to pursue diplomacy or support Israel in seeking to set back Iran’s ability to build a bomb, at a time when Iran has been weakened militarily and economically.

The debate highlighted fault lines between historically hawkish American cabinet officials and other aides more skeptical that a military assault on Iran could destroy the country’s nuclear ambitions and avoid a larger war. It resulted in a rough consensus, for now, against military action, with Iran signaling a willingness to negotiate.

Israeli officials had recently developed plans to attack Iranian nuclear sites in May. They were prepared to carry them out, and at times were optimistic that the United States would sign off. The goal of the proposals, according to officials briefed on them, was to set back Tehran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon by a year or more.

Read it all.

Trump Waved Off Israeli Strike After Divisions Emerged in His Administration – The New York Times https://t.co/g52MRrZclH

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) April 16, 2025

The percentage of U.S. adults evaluating their lives well enough to be considered “thriving” on Gallup’s Life Evaluation Index stood at 48.9% in Quarter 1, 2025, matching the previous estimate from Quarter 4, 2024, which was fielded in late November. These two levels mark the first time since spring 2020 that the thriving rate has been under 50% for two consecutive measurement periods and are two of just three sub-50% estimates ever to be measured outside of the Great Recession and COVID-19 eras.

Since reaching a record high of 59.2% in June 2021 — six months into the COVID-19 vaccine rollout — the thriving rate has now shed over 10 percentage points, projecting to an estimated 27 million fewer Americans who are thriving now compared with four years ago. These results are part of the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index.

The most recent survey, conducted Feb. 18-26, 2025, included 5,876 U.S. adults surveyed by web as part of the Gallup Panel, a probability-based panel encompassing all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Read it all.

(Gallup) Americans' Life Ratings Slump to Five-Year Low https://t.co/zcBJlfbB6r #culturewatch #usa

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) April 16, 2025

One dangerous card that China’s got is its $760 billion holdings in Treasury securities. The country is the US’s second-largest foreign creditor after Japan.

Last week, the 10-year yield jumped by 50 basis points to 4.49%, the biggest weekly surge since 2001. Some of the sharpest moves were occurring during Asian hours, prompting speculation that Beijing was in the market. Will China weaponize and dump its holdings?

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent brushed this fear aside. In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, he talked about the beauty of being the world’s biggest borrower. “If you take a bank loan, the bank is in charge, they can repossess whatever you borrowed against. But if you take a big enough loan, you’re kind of in charge of the bank,” he said.

While that’s true in a distressed scenario, the dynamic doesn’t quite work here. Trump’s abrupt tariff U-turn exposed the White House’s Achilles’ heel: He blinked and paused hikes on all nations except China — after watching US sovereign bonds tank.

After all, Bessent, who’s now spearheading tariff negotiations, requires a stable bond market to sell into….

Read it all.

“One dangerous card that China’s got is its $760 billion holdings in Treasury securities. The country is the US’s second-largest foreign creditor after Japan.”https://t.co/xiuAsrNHxb

— Tim O'Brien (@TimOBrien) April 14, 2025

On Air Force fighter jets, magnets made of rare earth minerals that are mined or processed in China are needed to start the engines and provide emergency power.

On precision-guided ballistic missiles favored by the Army, magnets containing Chinese rare earth materials rotate the tail fins that allow missiles to home in on small or moving targets. And on new electric and battery-powered drones being adapted by Marines, rare earth magnets are irreplaceable in the compact electric motors.

China’s decision to retaliate against President Trump’s sharp increase in tariffs by ordering restrictions on the exports of a wide range of critical minerals and magnets is a warning shot across the bow of American national security, industry and defense experts said.

In announcing that it will now require special export licenses for six heavy rare earth metals, which are refined entirely in China, as well as rare earth magnets, 90 percent of which are produced in China, Beijing has reminded the Pentagon — if, indeed, it needed reminding — that a wide swath of American weaponry is dependent on China.

Read it all.

https://t.co/uxCarqjV10
China’s Halt of Critical Minerals Poses Risk for U.S. Military Programs
By Helene Cooper
April 14, 2025

— Capt.Dr.S.G Naravane (@sgnaravane) April 15, 2025

Fortifying the American home has become big business, selling escape tunnels, secret arsenals and even flammable moats. 

Ron Hubbard, the chief executive of Atlas Survival Shelters, runs one of many companies that designs and builds bunkers for wealthy clients. His business is booming.

A 2023 survey found that about one-third of American adults were prepping for a doomsday scenario, spending a collective $11 billion over 12 months.

Read it all

From underground bunkers to luxury panic rooms, doomsday prepping is no longer fringe — it’s a booming billion-dollar industry reshaping how Americans face the future.#US https://t.co/mKWKQFO9iK

— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) April 14, 2025

After the terror, the euphoria. When, on April 9th, President Donald Trump postponed for 90 days the most illogical and destructive of his tariffs, after a meltdown in financial markets, the s&p 500 index of American stocks rose by 9.5%, its fastest daily rise in nearly 17 years. The darkest scenarios for the world economy that had been envisaged by investors until that moment are now unlikely. It seems there is some limit to the market falls the president will tolerate on his watch. After the chaos that had followed Mr Trump’s announcement of “reciprocal” tariffs a week earlier, that is no small source of comfort for the world.

But do not mistake the consolation of having avoided disaster for good fortune. The scale of the shock to global trade set off by Mr Trump is still, even now, unlike anything seen in history. He has replaced the stable trading relations which America spent over half a century building with whimsical and arbitrary policymaking, in which decisions are posted on social media and not even his advisers know what is coming next. And he is still in an extraordinary trade confrontation with China, the world’s second-biggest economy.

Investors and companies everywhere have been put through the wringer. Global markets crashed in response to Mr Trump’s first tariff announcement. The S&P 500 fell by about 15%. Long-dated Treasuries sold off, as hedge funds were forced to unwind their leveraged positions. The dollar, which is supposed to be a safe haven, fell. After the tariffs were delayed, stockmarkets enjoyed a vertiginous climb. Between its low and high on the day, Nvidia’s value fluctuated by over $430bn.

Even after the tariff pause, however, Treasury yields remain elevated. Global stocks are 11% below their highs in February—and justifiably so

Read it all.

The Economist cover 👀 pic.twitter.com/yIs3oe0hpS

— MAKS 24 🇺🇦👀 (@Maks_NAFO_FELLA) April 10, 2025

Trump has repeatedly promised to make the United States a “manufacturing powerhouse” to avoid being permanently overtaken by its Asian competitors. (In the 1980s it was Japan; now it’s China.) According to the president, friends even more than foes have been “taking our jobs, taking our wealth.” His solution is to impose tariffs on all U.S. trading partners.

There is certainly a constituency for the view that Americans were better off in the past than they are now, and that nineteenth-century policies are the way to go. Christian Whiton, for example, has argued that “reasonable tariffs, Jacksonian defense policy, and immigration control [will] set [the] stage for peace and prosperity after turbulence.”

In reality, however, applying policies that were appropriate more than a century ago, when the U.S. enjoyed all kinds of advantages as a location for manufacturing, will cause something worse than turbulence.

With his assault on “globalism,” Trump stands as much chance of success as a British prime minister who proposed to reassemble the empire, or a German chancellor who attempted to restore the Hohenzollerns to the throne. Time’s arrow does not fly backward.

Read it all.

“Trump’s Tariffs and the End of American Empire” https://t.co/Qby7iZ0RnC

— Niall Ferguson (@nfergus) April 6, 2025

As Abernathy tells it—and I believe he is right—he and King were first of all Christians, then Southerners, and then blacks living under an oppressive segregationist regime. King of course came from the black bourgeoisie of Atlanta in which his father, “Daddy King,” had succeeded in establishing himself as a king. Abernathy came from much more modest circumstances, but he was proud of his heritage and, as he writes, wanted nothing more than that whites would address his father as Mr. Abernathy. He and Martin loved the South, and envisioned its coming into its own once the sin of segregation had been expunged.

“Years later,” Abernathy writes that, “after the civil rights movement had peaked and I had taken over [after Martin’s death] as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” he met with Governor George Wallace. “Governor Wallace, by then restricted to a wheel chair after having been paralyzed by a would-be assassin’s bullet, shook hands with me and welcomed me to the State of Alabama. I smiled, realizing that he had forgotten all about Montgomery and Birmingham, and particularly Selma. ‘This is not my first visit,’ I said. ‘I was born in Alabama—in Marengo County.’ ‘Good,’ said Governor Wallace, ‘then welcome back.’ I really believe he meant it. In his later years he had become one of the greatest friends the blacks had ever had in Montgomery. Where once he had stood in the doorway and barred federal marshals from entering, he now made certain that our people were first in line for jobs, new schools, and other benefits of state government.” Abernathy concludes, “It was a time for reconciliations.”

Read it all (my emphasis).

Remembering MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. – who was assassinated 57yrs ago today.

He was 39. pic.twitter.com/nbj1c4wSIH

— Michael Warburton (@TheMonologist) April 4, 2025

 The percentage of U.S. adults who have recently been unable to afford or access quality healthcare has reached 11% — equivalent to nearly 29 million people — its highest level since 2021, according to new findings from the West Health-Gallup Healthcare Indices Study, which classifies these individuals as “Cost Desperate.”

The most notable increases since 2021 have occurred among Hispanic adults (up eight percentage points to 18%), Black adults (up five points to 14%,) and the lowest-income households, earning under $24,000 per year (up 11 points to 25%). Meanwhile, there has been no meaningful change in the proportion of White adults or middle- to high-income earners facing the same level of struggle. As a result, disparities in access to healthcare based on race, ethnicity and income are also at their highest point since surveying began.

Compared with 2021, the percentage of Americans aged 65 and above who are considered Cost Desperate has edged up just one point to 4% in 2024, while rates have risen by three points among those aged 50-64 (now 11%) and by four points among those younger than 50 (now 14%).

Read it all.

% of US adults who are unable to afford or access healthcare reached 11% (~29 million people), its highest level since 2021 per new Gallup poll.

US is one of the richest countries in the world.

In U.S., Inability to Pay for Care, Medicine Hits New High https://t.co/4WmfkkHvLn

— MCN Journal (@MCNonline) April 3, 2025

If you failed to spot America being “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far” or it being cruelly denied a “turn to prosper”, then congratulations: you have a firmer grip on reality than the president of the United States. It’s hard to know which is more unsettling: that the leader of the free world could spout complete drivel about its most successful and admired economy. Or the fact that on April 2nd, spurred on by his delusions, Donald Trump announced the biggest break in America’s trade policy in over a century—and committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.

Speaking in the Rose Garden of the White House, the president announced new “reciprocal” tariffs on almost all America’s trading partners. There will be levies of 34% on China, 27% on India, 24% on Japan and 20% on the European Union. Many small economies face swingeing rates; all targets face a tariff of at least 10%. Including existing duties, the total levy on China will now be 65%. Canada and Mexico were spared additional tariffs, and the new levies will not be added to industry-specific measures, such as a 25% tariff on cars, or a promised tariff on semiconductors. But America’s overall tariff rate will soar above its Depression-era level back to the 19th century.

Mr Trump called it one of the most important days in American history. He is almost right. His “Liberation Day” heralds America’s total abandonment of the world trading order and embrace of protectionism. 

Read it all.

“Ruination Day”: The new Economist cover amid Trump’s tariff war.

Trump has launched a global trade war, calling it a “Liberation Day.” As an economist, I know a thing or two about tariffs. So here are some predictions of what we should expect if this tariff war continues.

1/n pic.twitter.com/9uvVTcskmr

— Roman Sheremeta 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@rshereme) April 3, 2025

Donald Trump is holding a gun to the head of Volodymyr Zelensky, demanding huge reparations payments and laying claim to half of Ukraine’s oil, gas, and hydrocarbon resources as well as almost all its metals and much of its infrastructure.

The latest version of his “minerals deal”, obtained by The Telegraph, is unprecedented in the history of modern diplomacy and state relations.

“It is an expropriation document,” said Alan Riley, an expert on energy law at the Atlantic Council. “There are no guarantees, no defence clauses, the US puts up nothing.

“The Americans can walk away, the Ukrainians can’t. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

Read it all.

Trump now threatens Europe with assisting Putin in rebuilding his war machine if Zelensky doesn’t sign over Ukraine’s resources.https://t.co/jhRH9B0aeE

— Jay in Kyiv (@JayinKyiv) March 27, 2025

The US’s federal debt burden is set to surpass the peak it reached in the wake of the second world war in coming years, Congress’s fiscal watchdog has warned, underscoring growing concerns over America’s public finances.

The Congressional Budget Office said on Thursday that the US’s debt-to-GDP ratio would reach 107 per cent during the 2029 fiscal year — exceeding the 1940s era peak — and continue rising to 156 per cent by 2055. The debt-to-GDP ratio is forecast to be 100 per cent for the 2025 fiscal year.

The projections come just days after Moody’s delivered a warning about the sustainability of the US’s fiscal position, with the rating agency saying that President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs could compromise attempts to bring its large federal deficit under control by raising interest rates.

“Mounting debt would slow economic growth, push up interest payments to foreign holders of US debt and pose significant risks to the fiscal and economic outlook; it could also cause lawmakers to feel constrained in their policy choices,” the CBO said on Thursday.

Read it all.

US debt burden to top second world war peak in coming years, CBO says via @FT
https://t.co/SfaV25Dypt

— Stare Decisis (@MsResJudicata) March 27, 2025

Over the past decade China’s hacking program has grown rapidly, to the point that in 2023 Christopher Wray, then FBI director, noted it was larger than that of every other major nation combined. China’s growing heft and sophistication has yielded success in three main areas.

The first is political espionage, linked primarily to the Ministry of State Security (mss), China’s foreign-intelligence service. Last year it emerged that one group of Chinese hackers, dubbed Salt Typhoon, had breached at least nine American phone companies, giving them access to the calls and messages of important officials. Ciaran Martin, who led Britain’s cyber-defense agency from 2016 to 2020, compares it to the revelations in 2013 by Edward Snowden, a government contractor, that American spy agencies were conducting cyber-espionage on a huge scale. China was “gaining vast access to the nation’s communications via a strategic spying operation of breathtaking audacity,” he says.

A second is in areas of little espionage value: hacking that lays the groundwork for sabotage in moments of crisis or war. These efforts are led by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), China’s armed forces. In 2023 it became apparent that a PLA-linked hacking group known as Volt Typhoon had, over several years, burrowed into an extraordinary range of American critical infrastructure, from ports to factories to water-treatment plants, across the continental United States and in strategic American territories such as Guam.

All of that builds on a third type of hacking: the industrial-scale theft of intellectual property. In 2013 Mandiant, a cyber-threat intelligence firm, which is now part of Google, made waves when it exposed “apt1”, the label for a group of hackers linked to the PLA. apt1 was not focused on stealing political secrets or turning off power grids but on stealing blueprints, manufacturing processes and business plans from American firms. A year later, America’s government took the then unprecedented step of indicting five PLA hackers for this activity. Keith Alexander, a former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s signals-intelligence service, described this as “the greatest transfer of wealth in history”.

Read it all.

I wrote a piece on China’s evolution into a bigger, more sophisticated and more threatening cyber power over the past decade, and particularly in the last few years. I also look at the pivotal role played by China’s private sector ecosystem in that shift. https://t.co/EyAyZsgG84

— Shashank Joshi (@shashj) March 26, 2025

Credit rating group Moody’s has warned on the US fiscal outlook, saying President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs could hamper the country’s ability to cope with a growing debt pile and higher interest rates.

The rating agency said on Tuesday that America’s “fiscal strength is on course for a continued multiyear decline”, having already “deteriorated further” since it assigned a negative outlook to America’s top-notch triple A credit rating in November 2023.

While Moody’s highlighted the “extraordinary” economic resilience of the US and the role of the dollar and the Treasury market as backbones of the global financial system, its analysts also warned on Tuesday that the policies of the second Trump administration — including sweeping tariffs and plans for tax cuts — could do more harm than good for government revenues.

“The potential negative credit impact of sustained high tariffs, unfunded tax cuts and significant tail risks to the economy have diminished prospects that these formidable strengths will continue to offset widening fiscal deficits and declining debt affordability,” Moody’s said.

Read it all.

Moody’s warns on deteriorating outlook for US public finances https://t.co/xE1wjdoa8u

— Financial Times (@FT) March 25, 2025

Nearly four years ago, the Biden administration removed Nigeria from a list of countries whose threats to religious freedom are of “particular concern,” but continued attacks on Christians and other religious groups by Islamist militias have prompted calls from local faith leaders and members of the US Congress for the designation to be restored.

In Africa’s most populous nation, a deadly cycle of violence has unfolded for several years, with Christian clergy and laypeople as well as moderate Muslims falling victim to murder and kidnapping. The Christian nonprofit Open Doors recently reported that in 2024 some 3,100 Christians were killed and more than 2,000 kidnapped in Nigeria.

Last week, US Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, held a hearing on religious freedom violations in Nigeria that included testimony from Catholic Bishop Wilfred Anagbe of the Diocese of Makurdi, in central Nigeria, and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a former US Commission on International Religious Freedom commissioner.

Read it all.

After thousands of deaths and kidnappings, Nigerian Christians call on the US to recognize their persecution.

“We live in fear, because at any point it can be our turn to be killed.”https://t.co/ciqtVMB2Ls

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) March 24, 2025

Buried in China’s latest government budget were some numbers that add up to an alarming trend. Tax revenue is dropping.

The decline means that China’s national government has less money to address the country’s serious economic challenges, including a housing market crash and the near bankruptcy of hundreds of local governments.

Weak tax revenue also puts China’s leaders in a box as they square off with President Trump, who has imposed 20 percent tariffs on goods from China and threatened more to come. Beijing has less spare cash to help the export industries that are driving economic growth but could be hurt by tariffs.

The drop in tax collections leaves China’s leaders in an unfamiliar position. Until the last several years, China enjoyed robust revenue, which it used to invest in infrastructure, a rapid military buildup and extensive industrial subsidies. Even as economic growth has slowed gradually over the past 12 years, taking a dent out of consumer spending, tax revenue held fairly steady until recently.

Read it all.

China’s Government Is Short of Money as Its Leaders Face Trump https://t.co/ElmQsX47Dt

— Michael Standaert (@mstandaert) March 21, 2025

Since….[2023], stories like the ones we found in Levittown have become far more widespread. With federal law remaining largely silent on the legality of creating nonconsensual deepfake pornographic images, state prosecutors have scrambled to find charges that fit a new kind of harassment.

AI-based deepfaking services are hitting a peak. Traffic to the 10 most popular “nudifying” apps soared by more than 600% year over year, from 3 million views in April 2023 to 23 million in April 2024, according to figures provided to Bloomberg by a research company that asked not to be identified in connection with its data on online pornography. In January this year alone, the websites received 18 million views, the research shows.

With a stamp of approval from first lady Melania Trump, lawmakers this year are expected to pass a bill criminalizing the posting of nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes on the internet. It will penalize the posters with prison time and the platforms with fines if they don’t remove the fake pictures quickly enough.

The proposed Take It Down Act, which passed in the Senate in the last Congress with bipartisan support, wouldn’t outlaw the apps themselves. So San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu last year tried to tackle the root cause. He brought a first-of-its-kind lawsuit charging the deepfake app creators, arguing they broke federal and state revenge and child pornography rules and broke California’s competition law. The apps named in the lawsuit have either closed or appear to be operating under different names. Some have geofenced their services so they can’t be accessed in the state. Out of 16 apps named, representatives of only one of them have responded to Chiu’s complaint.

Read it all (and consider listening to the accompanying podcast).

A new podcast tries to understand exactly who was behind a global clearinghouse of nonconsensual deepfake pornography https://t.co/ERCR6WvrLm

— Bloomberg Markets (@markets) March 21, 2025

President Trump said the US and Russia are already talking about dividing “assets” as part of a push to end the fighting in Ukraine, the latest sign that he may be preparing to sacrifice Kyiv’s interests when he speaks with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.

One objective of the call is expected to be getting the Russian president to agree to a 30-day ceasefire that Trump proposed this month and Ukraine has agreed to. Putin has been noncommittal so far, saying he accepted the idea in principle but wants certain conditions to be met.

“Tomorrow morning I will be speaking to President Putin concerning the War in Ukraine,” Trump said Monday evening in a social media post. “Many elements of a Final Agreement have been agreed to, but much remains.” Those remarks, along with Trump’s comments to reporters Sunday night that the two sides were already talking about how to divide assets, suggest that many decisions have already been made — with or without Ukraine.

Read it all.

President Donald Trump said the US and Russia are already talking about dividing “assets” as part of a push to end the fighting in Ukraine, the latest sign that he may be preparing to sacrifice Kyiv’s interests when he speaks with Vladimir Putin https://t.co/VssbS4Uy1T

— Bloomberg (@business) March 18, 2025

The U.S. military will continue attacks on Houthi militants in Yemen, officials said Monday, as the Trump administration launches a new, open-ended attempt to prevent the group’s assaults on commercial shipping or U.S. and allied targets.

The Pentagon said U.S. forces had struck more than 30 Houthi targets since Saturday, including command-and-control and training sites, drone infrastructure, and weapons production and storage facilities, in what officials have said would be an intensified campaign against the militants.

“Today, the operation continues, and it will continue in the coming days until we achieve the president’s objectives,” Lt. Gen. AlexusGrynkewich, a senior official on the Joint Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon.

Read it all.

Pentagon says operation targeting Yemen’s Houthis is open-ended

https://t.co/HIXeSnFVPZ

— Mike Walker (@New_Narrative) March 17, 2025

Some firms may even intend to quietly pare back their investment plans. In 2017 Foxconn, a Taiwanese maker of electronics, vowed to spend $10bn on a plant in Wisconsin that would employ 13,000 people. Mr Trump visited the proposed site, proclaiming it the “eighth wonder of the world”. Yet after much watering down of plans, the company said last year that it had spent just $1bn on the project, and created only 1,000 jobs.

Faced with American tariffs, some foreign companies could instead direct their attention elsewhere. That has been the case with Chinese firms, which bore the brunt of the duties imposed during Mr Trump’s first term. The flow of greenfield FDI from China to America slid from $8.2bn in 2016 to $6.5bn last year. According to Morgan Stanley, listed Chinese firms generated around a quarter of their foreign sales in America in 2024, down from roughly a half in 2016. Instead, they have turned to the fast-growing economies of the global south.

If Mr Trump’s objective is to encourage foreign businesses to build in America, there are more effective policies at his disposal than tariffs. On the campaign trail the president also promised to slash red tape. Tortuous planning processes have long held back American manufacturing. For foreign firms, fixing those would be far more motivating. 

Read it all.

Will Trump’s #tariffs turbocharge #foreign #investment in America?
Companies from #Asahi to #TSMC are expanding production in the country—for nowhttps://t.co/ga2y1Ryoxw pic.twitter.com/kNAGIbbRpA

— pebbleone (@TACITWR) March 17, 2025

By March 2025, the pews of America’s churches tell a story of absence. Five years after COVID-19 shuttered sanctuaries, the faithful have not fully returned. Barna Group’s 2023 data revealed that one in three practicing Christians stopped attending during the pandemic’s peak, and while some trickled back, weekly in-person attendance among evangelicals — once exceeding 50% — now hovers near 35–40%, per reasonable extrapolation. Online worship persists, with 15–20% of believers logging in rather than showing up. The decline is not a mere statistic; it is a clarion call — a spiritual and cultural crisis demanding a conservative Christian reckoning. The church, God’s embodied witness, risks fading into a digital mirage unless we reclaim its sacred purpose.

This is no benign adaptation to modernity. Scripture commands us, in Hebrews 10:24–25, to “consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some.” The early church of Acts 2 didn’t stream sermons—they gathered, broke bread, and lived faith face-to-face. Yet today, we’ve traded this divine mandate for the flickering glow of screens, seduced by a culture that prizes convenience over conviction. The pandemic was a catalyst, not the cause; it exposed a pre-existing drift toward a privatized, consumerist Christianity. As conservatives who cherish tradition and truth, we must name this exodus for what it is: a quiet rebellion against God’s design.

The culprits are manifold, woven into the fabric of a society unmoored from biblical moorings. Technology, our pandemic lifeline, has become a gilded cage. By 2025, churches boast polished livestreams — AI-enhanced, no less — offering worship on demand. Pew Research noted in 2022 that 30% of regular attendees shifted online, and many stayed. Why rise early when you can replay the sermon over coffee? This isn’t progress; it’s capitulation to a secular ethos that reduces faith to a commodity. Meanwhile, government overreach lingers in memory — 2020’s lockdown mandates, upheld by courts but decried by conservatives, bred distrust in institutions, including the church. Some still balk at returning, fearing control more than communion.

Younger generations amplify the crisis….

Read it all.

The Vanishing Flock: Reclaiming the Church in a Post-Pandemic Wilderness https://t.co/NlX5JfUt0D

— 🇺🇸RON BEATY🇺🇸 (@ronbeatyjr) March 13, 2025

In her introduction to your latest book, Jesus Changes Everything, Tish Harrison Warren mentions something many Christians are concerned about: that we live in a post-Christian world. She’s wondering if we actually are living in a pre-Christian world and whether that might not be such a bad place to be. What’s your take on the time in which we live and the opportunities in front of the church?

Well, the mainstream Protestant church is dying. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It makes us free. I mean, for some time people argued that the world would go to hell if it were not Christian. That may be the case. But being Christian doesn’t mean you need a Christian America. 

What I think we’re experiencing is the ultimate working out of nihilism, which so often goes with liberalism. Liberalism is the presumption that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story.

Read it all.

In an interview with @Plough’s Charles E. Moore, Stanley Hauerwas meditates on the necessity of the gospel, the politics of the kingdom, and the high demands of sanctification.https://t.co/XI9F2ySH5C

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) March 11, 2025

The question of which view of religious freedom—the Puritans’ or the Quakers’—was the more Christian one is a debate for theology; it seems plain to me at least that the Quaker view is more that of contemporary Christianity, especially as articulated in the Catholic Church’s Dignitatis Humanae. What the social science behind the Pew Religious Landscape Survey can suggest is that, at least in the long run, Quakers’ respect for freedom of conscience might be more effective than Puritans’ integration of church and state in maintaining a Christian society. Although the differences in Christian identification between New England and the Delaware Valley today are not so large in the case of certain states, the Delaware Valley still comes out on top; and its metropolis, Philadelphia, easily outdoes New England’s preeminent city, Boston. Moreover, the one outlier state in New England that does better than much of the Delaware Valley in Christian religiosity—Rhode Island—was precisely founded on the principle of religious freedom, in protest of Puritan rigidity. 

How might New England’s and the Delaware Valley’s different religious attitudes have accounted for their long-term religiosity? Although many New England Puritans were surely sincere, their harsh public policing of orthodoxy led many other Christians (like Roger Williams) to leave New England. Many who stayed perhaps conformed outwardly without interior sincerity. Some came to see Christianity cynically—as a tool of hypocritical political rulers who only wanted to control others—and they made little effort to pass on belief to their children. Others conformed out of fear and came to see Christianity as rules by which to live in order to survive, not a truth that sets one free; such religiosity was probably not very attractive to potential converts. Many later New Englanders, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, saw the society of their Puritan ancestors this way—as shown in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Speculations aside, both historical data and scholarship (such as Kevin Vallier’s book All the Kingdoms of the World) show how religiously authoritarian regimes tend to harm both religious and political culture in the long run.

In the Delaware Valley, on the other hand, religion and politics were clearly distinguished: people were given the freedom to open themselves genuinely to religious truth, without fear of political reprisal. Thus, as Dignitatis Humanae says, truth was allowed to enter their minds “by virtue of its own truth, . . . quietly,” and therefore permanently, “with power.” If religious truth is to take possession of a person, he has to make it his own, in love, until he says with the poet in the Song of Songs: “I have got him, and I will not let him go.”

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Society Stays Christian Longer If It Respects Religious Freedom: New Evidence from Pew https://t.co/6XZtA79pwL

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) March 7, 2025

In his speech to Congress on March 4th President Donald Trump painted a fantastical picture. The American Dream, he declared, was surging bigger and better than ever before. His tariffs would preserve jobs, make America richer still, and protect its very soul. Unfortunately, in the real world things look different. Investors, consumers and companies show the first signs of souring on the Trumpian vision. With his aggressive and erratic protectionism, Mr Trump is playing with fire.

By imposing 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, also on March 4th, Mr Trump is setting light to one of the world’s most integrated supply chains. Although he belatedly delayed duties on cars by one month, plenty of other industries will suffer. He has also raised tariffs on China and has threatened the European Union, Japan and South Korea. Some of these duties may also be deferred; others may never materialise. Yet in economics as in foreign relations, it is becoming clear that policy is being set on the president’s whim. That will cause lasting damage at home and abroad.

When Mr Trump won the election in November, investors and bosses cheered him on. The S&P 500 rose by nearly 4% in the week after the vote in anticipation of the new president lighting a bonfire of red tape and bringing about generous tax cuts. His protectionist and anti-immigration rhetoric, investors hoped, would come to nothing. A stockmarket correction or a return of inflation would surely curb his worst instincts.

Alas, those hopes are going up in smoke….

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La copertina del nuovo Economist. Gli Art Director non hanno mai avuto tanta materia prima. pic.twitter.com/rnuMWWYaN1

— Jeanne Perego 🥨 (@jeperego) March 7, 2025

“We have a lot of data to go to a permanent Standard Time,” Burman said. “So hopefully (Daylight Saving) will, in the next few years, get eliminated.”

There are biological reasons the time change is harmful, said Dr. Jigme Sethi, physician-executive for Sleep Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina. The body has an internal clock that governs many functions and runs on a 24.2-hour cycle, the circadian rhythm of activity and rest. There is also a solar clock that pays attention to light and darkness and helps set the internal clock, Sethi said. When those are properly aligned, the body functions normally.

But with Daylight Saving, there is more darkness in the morning, when the body is trying to wake, and more daylight into the evening, when rest and then sleep should be coming on, Sethi said.

This can lead to immediate consequences. The number of fatal accidents increases by 6 percent the weekday after, and those accidents are more likely in the morning, according to a 2020 study. An analysis of criminal sentences handed down on the Monday after the time change found sleep-deprived judges gave out prison terms that were 5 percent longer than those on the preceding or following Mondays, one study found.

Medical errors also seem to rise soon after the time change, Sethi said.

But there are also long-term consequences, particularly for children, Burman said.

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Daylight Saving Time is more diabolical than losing an hour of sleep, experts say https://t.co/m41qUbirkX

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) March 7, 2025

In this light, we can see that the dizzying changes of the past decade represent the dying lurches of a postwar consensus and a re-enchantment of the West. History, contra Fukuyama, is not linear, and epochal shifts will often entail volatility as the old order grapples with its demise. In other words, Pew’s RLS data is more evidence of what N.S. Lyons called the “end of the Long Twentieth Century.” And it may be the strongest evidence yet that we’ve truly turned the page.

Lyons is following Rusty Reno, who sensed in his 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods that the era of a Western “open society” consensus was coming to an end. In its place, “strong gods” would return. These strong gods “are the objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.” While the twentieth century saw an attempt to domesticate the strong gods through the promotion of weak ones like “inclusion” and “multiculturalism,” the quest has proved futile. These weak gods stand in negation to certain values—“anti-racism” or “anti-totalitarianism”—and are therefore incapable of stirring the aspirational loyalty necessary for a cohesive society.  

But not all strong gods are equally benevolent. Some can be quite destructive. Reno argued that to counteract the rougher edges of strong gods like nationalism, we will need “to nurture to primeval sources of solidarity that limit the claims of the civic ‘we’: the domestic society of marriage and the supernatural community of the church, synagogue, and other communities of transcendence.”

Thus, we can say that religion is perhaps the strongest of the strong gods….

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Read more in @commonplc, an essential journal: https://t.co/FNH7Z8pLNd

— Emile Doak (@EADoak) March 6, 2025

He was born in 1930, in San Bernardino, California. Money troubles drove the family to Illinois, where his dad ran the printing press for a local newspaper; when Gene was 13, his father walked out and didn’t come back. As a kid, Gene moved around a lot. He was rebellious, usually in trouble; he once spent a night in lockup for stealing a bottle of soda and some candy. At 16 he ran away from home and joined the Marines, lying to the recruiter about his age. He wound up in China, while still a teenager, during the last throes of the Communist revolution, and was later stationed in Japan as a field radio operator. He got discharged after a motorcycle accident, studied journalism for a while, and then—remembering the James Cagney movies his mom had taken him to see when he was a kid—decided he might like acting. How hard could it be, right? 

It took him a decade to make it. In the meantime, he crashed out of auditions, struggled to make ends meet, and got thrown out of acting school at the Pasadena Playhouse, where his classmates voted him Least Likely to Succeed. He shared the award with his buddy, a kid called Dustin Hoffman.

Hackman gets called an everyman, I suspect, partly because he didn’t have classic movie star looks, but also because his charisma, as intense as it was, was essentially the opposite of what you normally get from movie stars. He held your attention by contracting, rather than by expanding, his ego. Compare him to Cruise, his costar in The Firm. Cruise is one of the most natural movie stars the world has ever seen, and his charisma is so expansive it’s almost imperial. When he’s onscreen, he’s always striving to be the most of whatever it is he’s being: the most fighter pilot, the most superspy, the most lawyer who knows you ordered the Code Red, the most sports agent, whatever. The role, whatever it is, is like a vast space he has to fill, or like an accelerant poured over the flame of his persona. He’s always projecting Tom Cruise-ness to the outer reaches of the universe.

Hackman, by contrast, drew you in by holding back. Even when he was playing a loudmouth or a bully, he always held something in reserve, and because he was so naturally gifted, this felt like an act of generosity rather than stinginess. He didn’t have to overpower you or cow you into submission, the way Cruise or Jack Nicholson or even Humphrey Bogart might. He had a trick of making room: for you, for the story, for the world outside. There was something almost restful about watching him, because he never approached a movie like it was a battle he needed to win. 

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Gene Hackman was a colossus who knew how to shrink into a role. The revered actor, who was found dead on Wednesday at the age of 95, was a master at drawing viewers in by holding himself back.@brianphillips: https://t.co/vmxwpPabfH

— The Ringer (@ringer) February 28, 2025

Donald Trump, seeing “a big, beautiful Ocean” between his country and the world’s problems, wants to curtail America’s responsibilities abroad. His party is also broadly keen on increasing military spending, and the Trump administration, working with Congress, has new priorities for the Pentagon.

In February several media outlets reported that Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, had ordered a $50bn cut to Pentagon spending. Yet the reported memorandum’s vague language and fuzzy maths belied the reality that Mr Hegseth was seeking cuts merely to offset new spending on “America First” programmes. The Pentagon chief vowed that the changes would make the American “military once again into the most lethal, badass force on the planet”.

Defence spending is poised to rise above levels in the Biden era, when the former president consistently requested after-inflation reductions to outlays. On February 21st the Senate approved $150bn in new defence spending, on top of the department’s existing annual budget that approaches $900bn. The following week a House bill approved $100bn. Some Hill appropriators wonder whether these big numbers will survive the give-and-take of complex spending negotiations, but it is clear that if Mr Trump is pulling back from the world, he isn’t yet pulling back on defence spending. 

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America is set to spend more—and differently https://t.co/MY9pqNzJyp #economy #usa #governmentspending #Trumpadministration #military #technology #21stc

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) March 3, 2025

The rupture of the post-1945 order is gaining pace. In extraordinary scenes at the UN this week, America sided with Russia and North Korea against Ukraine and Europe. Germany’s probable new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, warns that by June NATO may be dead. Fast approaching is a might-is-right world in which big powers cut deals and bully small ones. Team Trump claims that its dealmaking will bring peace and that, after 80 years of being taken for a ride, America will turn its superpower status into profit. Instead it will make the world more dangerous, and America weaker and poorer.

You may not be interested in the world order—but it is interested in you. America’s Don Corleone approach has been on display in Ukraine. Having initially demanded $500bn, American officials settled for a hazy deal for a joint state fund to develop Ukrainian minerals. It is unclear if America will offer security guarantees in return.

The administration is a swirl of ideas and egos but its people agree on one thing: under the post-1945 framework of rules and alliances, Americans have been suckered into unfair trade and paying for foreign wars. Mr Trump thinks he can pursue the national interest more effectively through hyperactive transactions. Everything is up for grabs: territory, technology, minerals and more. “My whole life is deals,” he explained on February 24th, after talks on Ukraine with Emmanuel Macron, the French president. Trump confidants with business skills, such as Steve Witkoff, are jetting between capitals to explore deals that link up goals, from getting Saudi Arabia to recognise Israel to rehabilitating the Kremlin.

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A mafia-like struggle for global power has begun, with rules that do not suit America. Other countries are already planning for a lawless era https://t.co/DOIFBsgW0A pic.twitter.com/n36hVsuZir

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) February 27, 2025