While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seeks to make US military chaplains more explicitly religious, the Canadian government is heading in the opposite direction as new directives ban chaplains from using religious language at public events. (MacInnis, Christianity Today)
Read MoreMarijuana is officially leading the pack for the most-used daily drug among Americans. New data from the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), reveals that there are 21.4 million daily or near-daily marijuana users in the U.S. (Stabile, Fox News)
Read MoreNew research from Barna asked U.S. adults how much they trust specific institutions, leaders and organizations, from family members to Christian churches and pastors. Comparing the results with a similar survey Barna fielded in 2024, the data reveals a clear, consistent pattern: trust runs local, and it runs small. (Barna)
Read MoreOn a hot August night on the South Side of Chicago, Rate Field, home of the White Sox, turned into a church of baseball, filled to capacity with true believers who sang, passed the peace, cheered on a celebrity nun and, of course, wore their pope hats. (Smietana, Religion News Service)
Read MoreThe confusion that results from this lost distinction causes problems in academia––see the recent kerfuffle in anthropology––as well as in medicine, law, public policy, and more. People mistake meanings and talk past one another about matters that are fraught even when definitions are clear. How did we get into this semantic mess? (Friedersdorf, The Atlantic)
Read MoreIn physical classrooms, many educators have shifted to oral presentations and handwritten exams to try to prevent misuse of an unregulated technology. But those strategies can be harder to execute online, where more than half of American college students took at least one class last year, up from about a third in 2019. (Goldstein & Blinder, The New York Times)
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