Web Notables (March 2, 2015)

Shocking Margaret Singer, ranting Job, a porn star finds God in Scripture, etc.

By The Editors Published on March 2, 2015

“Web Notables” is a daily feature that highlights articles readers may want to see but might have missed. It is compiled by senior editor David Mills.

7 shocking quotes by Planned Parenthood’s founder, by Becky Yeh on the website Live Action News. For example, “Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease. . . . Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks [of people] that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.”

Stephen Fry, Job, and the Cross of Jesus, by Robert Barron on the website Catholic World Report. “The most devastating rant ever uttered against God,” one far harder than Stephen Fry’s, is found in the book of Job.  God’s response, His longest speech in the Bible, provides a guide to our own answers to modern-day Jobs. Also:

In the last analysis, the best rejoinder to Fry’s objection is a distinctively Christian one, for Christians refer to the day on which Jesus was unjustly condemned, abandoned by his friends, brutally scourged, paraded like an animal through the streets, nailed to an instrument of torture and left to die as “Good Friday.” To understand that is to have the ultimate answer to Job — and to Stephen Fry.

One of the World’s Most Famous Porn Stars Opened Up a Bible, an interview with Brittni Ruiz in The Blaze. Trapped in a life in “adult” entertainment, Ruiz became a Christian, went back to pornography, then left for good after reading Revelation 2 on the way to a shoot. Now, “I love Jesus and I’m all for him. I want to do everything according to his word.”

Ten Reasons Why I’m Not a ‘Straight’ Catholic, by Jim Russell on the Catholic Vote website. The label doesn’t tell us much and what it tells us is mostly not important, explains Russell, a Catholic deacon and father of 11. “Sexual attraction is ordered, in me, toward making me what I’ve become: husband and father. . . . ‘Straight’ represents something that no longer matters to me. It can’t matter to me. There’s too much giving to do to be preoccupied or distracted by it.”

Looking Within, on “the role of Islam in jihadism,” from The Economist. In late February, “the grand imam of Egypt’s al-Azhar mosque, part of a university that is the Sunni world’s oldest seat of learning, declared that extremism was caused by ‘bad interpretations of the Koran and the Sunna [the doings of the Prophet Muhammad]’, and that what was taught in Islamic schools and universities needed to change.” Al Qaeda and ISIS still disagree.

Do Digital Decisions Disciple?, by Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra in Christianity Today. “Of the 1.6 million people who told the BGEA [Billy Graham Evangelistic Association] they prayed ‘to accept Jesus Christ as [their] Savior’ in 2014, less than 15,000 did so in person, while more than 1.5 million did so with the click of a mouse.”

However, the biggest group doing online evangelism, Global Outreach Media, gets only 5 to 10% of those who make online decisions to connect with an online mentor, much less go to a church. John Cass of BGEA says: “True growth doesn’t come from clicking a button saying you’ve prayed a prayer, but from beginning to understand how God loves you. Ultimately, we want to see people handed off to a local body of believers.”

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