Here's what's happening on the church and culture front today...

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Mar 21, 2019

LifeWay’s store closures come two years after its competitor, Family Christian Resources, shut down all 240 locations in the midst of mounting debt and bankruptcy. Cokesbury Bookstores closed all 38 retail stores in 2013. (Shellnutt, Christianity Today)

Mar 21, 2019

The U.S. opioid epidemic's third wave begins

Mar 21, 2019

[This is] the start of the third wave of the nation's opioid epidemic. The first was prescription pain medications, such as OxyContin; then heroin, which replaced pills when they became too expensive; and now fentanyl. (Bebinger, NPR)

Mar 21, 2019

Google banned Christian YouTube ad on homosexuality after backlash from employees

Mar 21, 2019

The video in question is titled “Can you be gay and be a Christian?” and was posted on Brown’s “AskDrBrownAccount.” In the video, Brown, an author, host of the "Line of Fire" podcast, and contributor to The Christian Postand other publications, argues that homosexual sex is a sin. (Smith, The Christian Post)

Mar 21, 2019

Mar 20, 2019

Charlottesville wrestling with "civility"

Mar 20, 2019

Charlottesville has a reputation as a charming college town — home to the University of Virginia, and its founder, founding father Thomas Jefferson. After what locals now call "the summer of hate," Schmidt says it's time to rethink the Jefferson legacy and all it entails. (Elliott, NPR)

Mar 20, 2019

News Archive:

Featured

Lifeway to close all 170 stores

When Caroline Farrow, a Catholic commentator, and transgender rights campaigner Susie Green, agreed to take part in a television debate about a controversial Girl Guides policy, producers would have expected differences of opinion. But while the conversation on screen was certainly heated, it was what happened off-air when the pair continued the debate on Twitter that resulted in a six-month-long police investigation.(Evans & Swerling, The Telegraph)

The West Virginia attorney general filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against a retired top bishop and the state’s only Roman Catholic diocese, saying that they “knowingly employed pedophiles,” the latest in a string of attempts by law enforcement to hold officials accountable for sexual abuse in the church. (Dias & Jacobs, The New York Times)

A new analysis of survey data released last week (March 13) by LifeWay Research of Nashville, Tenn., found that nearly three-quarters of black young adults said they stopped attending church regularly for at least a year between the ages of 18 and 22. (Banks, Religion News Service)

The United States Supreme Court declined to hear oral arguments in a case about a Hawaiian bed and breakfast that refused on religious grounds to serve a lesbian couple, allowing a ruling against the business to stand. (Gryboski, The Christian Post)

“Once again, it has been committed by an extremist aided, abetted and coaxed into action by content on social media. This poses once more the question of online radicalization.” (Baig, USA Today)

As a report noted today, teens use Google Docs to chat with each other and "collaborate" on docs that, say, rank their classmates. (Brandon, Inc.)

More than 50 percent of Generation Z consumers and more than 40 percent of all Millennial consumers told Comparitech that they believed that sharing passwords hurts both streaming services and the content creators whose work they are enjoying for free. (Berr, Forbes)

According to a study by the AARP, there are some 40 million people in the United States considered to be family caregivers. Of the 40 million, 1 in 4 are millennials and more than half of those caregivers identify as African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic. (Mendoza, NPR)

Officials are citing a worrisome increase in methamphetamine trafficking and related deaths around the U.S., tempering otherwise hopeful signs that overall drug-overdose fatalities are finally leveling off. (Kamp, The Wall Street Journal)

Gateway Seminary is cooperating with Facebook to show the school is not a "hate group" in efforts to boost a post describing the Bible as the ultimate authority. (Chandler, Baptist Press)

Forty-nine people were killed in shootings at two mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday, in a terrorist attack that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described as “an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence.” (The New York Times)

In an online statement posted Friday (March 8), Jennifer Lyell, director of the books ministry at LifeWay Christian Resources, alleged that she was the victim of a now-resigned professor at the flagship seminary of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. (Banks, Religion News Service)

After years of vowing to police inappropriate content, YouTube continues to deliver violent imagery, drug references, sexually suggestive sequences and foul, racially charged language in clips that reach children at a troubling pace, say researchers, parents and consumer groups. (Timberg, The Washington Post)

Dad shows up at your job interview. Mom makes your medical appointments. A recent college bribery scandal is an extreme example of a broader pattern. (Quealy & Cain Miller, The New York Times)

A group of prominent scientists and bioethicists is calling for a global moratorium on any new attempts to bring gene-edited babies into the world. (Stein, NPR)

In December 2018, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Oświęcim, Poland, gained more than 120,000 Twitter followers in about five days, according to memorial officials. The growth came not from paid advertising or any concerted campaign. It was motivated by Twitter users rushing to support the memorial against a flurry of anti-Semitic tweets. (Adams, Religion News Service)