The rift marks the largest denominational schism in U.S. history. A quarter of the church’s approximately 30,000 congregations said they planned to remove themselves from the United Methodist Church as of Dec. 31. The church is one of America's largest Protestant denominations. (Jiminez, USA Today)
Read MoreThe feat, described today in Nature Communications, marks the first successful cloning of the species. It was achieved using a slightly different approach from the conventional technique that was used to clone Dolly the sheep and other mammals, including long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis), the first primates to be cloned. (Naddaf, Nature)
Read More"Holoportation," three-way romances involving robots, extending the natural lives of dogs — they're all on the latest prediction list from Faith Popcorn, the flamboyant futurist and trend-spotter who introduced the world to terms like "cocooning" and "cashing out." (Kingston, Axios)
Read MoreAlmost 5,000 Christians were killed for their faith last year. Almost 4,000 were abducted.Nearly 15,000 churches were attacked or closed. And more than 295,000 Christians were forcibly displaced from their homes because of their faith. (Casper, Christianity Today)
Read MoreOver the past few years, conservatives have rapidly lost trust in higher education….This decline is something close to common knowledge. Less discussed is the fact that public confidence in colleges has fallen significantly across all ideological groups since 2015. (Barro, The Atlantic)
Read MoreMore than 4 in 10 of clergy surveyed in fall 2023 had seriously considered leaving their congregations at least once since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, and more than half had thought seriously of leaving the ministry, according to the survey released Thursday by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. (Smith, Religion News Service)
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