Copa America started yesterday, June 20, at the Mercedes Benz Stadium, in Atlanta, GA in the United States. The continental competition kicked off with a match between current champions Argentina and Canada. But beyond the fine moves of Lionel Messi, Angel Di María, or Canadian Alfonso Davis, a message spoken during the opening ceremony of the competition caught the attention of social media.
The global pandemic began a decade of tremendous uncertainty, loss, and suffering. It is fruitless to try and fight, control, or ignore grief. Here, we look to Scripture for healthy examples of dealing with the trials of life.
While some parts of the world experience horrific terrorism and abuse of Christians, churches have the opportunity to make the biggest difference for religious freedom in the world today. In this final part of a series on religious freedom, our attention turns to Latin America.
Christians in Western individualistic cultures can learn much from our collectivist culture brothers and sisters. Learning the value of intergenerational engagement is one of those things, as this camping example from Brazil shows.
Sometimes that which we want most alludes us because of our yearning for it. In times of crisis and grief the hardest response is to surrender, but that is precisely what God asks us to do so that we can find fulfillment.
On Saturday, Nayib Bukele was inaugurated for his second term as President of El Salvador. Special guests included King of Spain Felipe VI, Argentinean President Javier Milei, as well as other officials. Renowned Argentinean pastor Dante Gebel blessed and prayed for the president, who was the first in El Salvador’s democratic era to achieve immediate reelection, albeit not without questions and criticism.
Among the testimonies that the Brazilian Evangelical Alliance (AEB) collected during the ongoing rain emergency in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, a woman approached Pastor Cassiano Luz, executive director of the alliance. “Can I ask you for something?” she said, and when he responded affirmingly, she whispered: “I just want a Bible.”
Religious leaders, academics and civil society representatives from Argentina recently met to discuss tolerance, world peace and freedom of religion. Held at the National Senate, the meeting was endorsed by the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States (OAS) – evidence of the interest of international organizations in this initiative.
The Archdiocese of Santo Domingo issued a document titled "Candidates in favor of life and family values", in which it detailed a list of 122 legislative candidates belonging to the major parties who are openly pro-life, and urged that they be elected to assume positions in Congress.
“Six out of ten Uruguayans prefer to invest more in the rehabilitation of inmates and their social reintegration than in allocating money for the construction of more prisons,” a recent issue of Prison Insider, an Uruguayan publication, stated. But at the same time, “only one in four see it possible to rehabilitate all or, at least, most of the people who commit crimes,” according to a study on Justice, Prisons and Rehabilitation.
Earlier this month, the Government of Ecuador declared that due to the ongoing violence that the South American country is going through, it will continue to deploy the military in the streets and prisons, even after the end of the state of emergency order that was initially issued in January.
It is not unusual to be triggered by an opinion or comments in mainstream or social media that we feel strongly against. The relatively anonymous nature of the internet feeds the urge to respond with a strong corrective. If we think we are representing Christianity well in this way, we do well to pause and think again, informed by these insights from an Evangelical political commentator in the United Kingdom.
