Author: Shalem John
Earlier in August, thousands of protesters, many of them Christians, marched nearly two miles through Narayanpur’s weekly market in India’s state of Chhattisgarh. Catholics, evangelicals, and members of other Protestant groups stood together in solidarity with the two Kerala-based Catholic nuns and a Protestant man from the Gond people group whom local authorities arrested on fraudulent charges of human trafficking and forced conversion. The three tribal Protestant women at the heart of the case walked among the demonstrators. They claim the Hindu extremists forced them to make false confessions that the nuns had trafficked and converted them to Christianity against…
About ten miles from where Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met in Anchorage on Friday, a man speaking at New Chance Church didn’t even have to mention the presidents—or their countries—as he prayed for the ongoing talks. Instead, he pointed to Jeremiah 17:7–8 (“Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord …”), before leading about 20 people gathered for the Friday-night youth service in prayer in Russian. “Only God knows the outcome,” said the speaker—himself a Ukrainian refugee—through a translator. “We do not rely or hope on some personality. … We rely on the Lord because he can do…
Kenneth Regan paused at lunch in New York to glance at incoming texts from top international chess officials. A world-renowned “chess detective,” he’s on call to review games with his specialized algorithm that detects cheating. Chess players cheat by using computers to find the best moves; an algorithm can detect the probability that a move came from a computer rather than a person. But Regan, who loves chess but also theoretical mathematics and singing in his church choir, put the phone away. He would analyze the chess games later. Instead, he resumed explaining one of the greatest unsolved conundrums in…