Religious There were 1.5 million Christians in Iraq before 2003, but by mid-2019 that figure had fallen to well below 150,000; by some estimates the number of Christians there may have fallen as low as 120,000 — a decline of more than 90 percent within a single generation. In Syria, the size of the Christian population has fallen by two-thirds since the country’s civil war began in 2011, when Christians still numbered more than 2 million. The 2019 edition of “Persecuted and […]
Religious After 36 years of lobbying by Iraq, the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon was designated in July a UNESCO World Heritage Site. UNESCO warned that the site is in an “extremely vulnerable condition” and in need of urgent conservation. “The property suffers from a variety of threats including illegal constructions, trash dumping and burning, small-scale industrial pollution, urban encroachments and other environmental factors. At the time of inscription, and despite conservation efforts undertaken since 2008 with international collaboration, the general physical […]
Religious Churches in Kansas, California, Maryland, Illinois, Virginia, Texas and elsewhere have been donating to RIP Medical Debt, a nonprofit organization based in Rye, New York, that arranges payoff of medical debt, which contributes to two-thirds of bankruptcies, according to the American Journal of Public Health. When a person can’t pay a bill, that debt is often packaged with other people’s debt and sold to bill collectors for some fraction of the total amount of the bill. RIP Medical Debt buys debt […]
PBI News Listen to audio PBI Annual Report for Fiscal 2019 The Directors of the Pastoral Bible Institute (PBI) and the Editors of The Herald of Christ’s Kingdom are blessed to have completed another year of service to the Master of the vineyard (Matthew 20:7). At this time in the harvest of the Gospel Age, many still rejoice in reading our publication proclaiming the good news of God’s Kingdom and the blessing of all the families of the earth (Genesis 12:1-3). The […]
Religious Listen to audio In 2018, nearly 50 million more Christians were added in Africa, making it the continent with the most adherents to Christianity in the world, 631 million. In the U.S., from 1991 to 2014, the number of white Protestants declined by a third. More than half of U.S. Protestant congregations now have fewer than 100 members. Over the past half-century, 71 percent of growth in Catholicism has come from its Hispanic community. — From the book, “Future Faith: Ten […]