When an on-stage interviewer recently asked Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “Who are your mentors? Who do you call for advice?” he replied, “It’s different people for different things.” But then he immediately said, “I’ve become more religious.”

“Really,” said interviewer Cliff Betts, who sounded a bit surprised.

Zuckerberg tried to explain, saying, “I mean, that’s not really a mentorship thing, … but I do think that there’s a scale.

“I don’t know, the last few years have been really humbling for me. I thought I like knew a lot about how to build something and I don’t know. I think that there’s just a comfort in knowing and having confidence that there are things that are bigger than you.”

Zuckerberg was interviewed Jan. 31 at the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit in Salt Lake City.

Zuckerberg and his flagship social media platform have recently faced complaints of anti-conservative bias and election influencing. After government investigations, the enterprise has attempted to mend its reputation.

The challenges of running a social media empire that also includes Instagram might be driving 35-year-old Zuckerberg’s feelings of humility. But also during the past few years, other experiences might have been clues to his move to a “more religious” life, which involves his family. He said they would always be more important to him than his work.

Source: Christian Headlines

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A USPS worker is giving God the credit for being at the right place at the right time when he found a toddler who had been missing all night.

According to Christian Today, two-year-old Ethan Adeyemi disappeared from his home in Howard County, Maryland, around 10:20 pm last Wednesday night. He wandered barefoot along a Maryland highway the whole evening in only a sweatshirt and sweatpants.

Neighbors, K9 units, helicopters, drones, firefighters and police officers had been scouring the area for hours after the family reported him missing. But it was until Keith Rollins, the U.S. Postal worker who saw him at 8 AM, picked him up that he was safe.

Rollins was driving to work only a half-mile away from the child’s home when he saw him on the side of the road, according to WJZ in Baltimore.

“He had only a pair of sweatpants and sweatshirt, no shoes or socks,” said Rollins. “So I walked up to him. I said, ‘Hey, buddy. How you doing? What’s your name? Are you OK?’ He looked at me, but I didn’t get a response from him.”

The child was shivering, “wet to the bone and had no socks, no shoes.”

Source: Christian Headlines

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According to the Pew Research Center, almost all of the United States presidents have called themselves Christians. And half of them were Episcopalian or Presbyterian, including current President Donald Trump.

Though presidents are not required to adhere to any religion in order to be elected to the highest office in the land, a large majority of them have clung to religion and the Bible as they rose to the top, according to Fox News.

The largest group represented is Episcopalian with 11 presidents including H.W. Bush, Ford, F. Roosevelt, Arthur, Pierce, Taylor, Tyler, W. Harrison, Monroe, Madison, and Washington.

Following the Episcopalians are Presbyterians. Trump claims to adhere to this denomination, calling it a “wonderful religion.” He’s joined with Reagan, Eisenhower, Wilson, B. Harrison, Cleveland, Buchanan, Polk, and Jackson.

Baptists, Unitarians, Methodists, non-denominational Christians, and Disciples of Christ have smaller amounts.

Clinton, Carter, Truman, and Hardin were all Baptists and tied in number with the Unitarians, which included Taft, Fillmore, Q. Adams, and Adams.

Source: Christian Headlines

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Perry Noble has announced plans to expand his Second Chance Church to a larger location.

The Anderson pastor announced plans to move to the former Bi-Lo store location near Anderson Mall, a short distance from the church’s current location in a strip mall near Target.

The 28,000-square-foot location will include a 700-person auditorium, twice the size of the current place, Noble told his congregation.

It will take around $2 million, he said. Banks have not wanted to give loans because the church isn’t old and because of how he was fired from his last church, Noble said.

“This is our opportunity,” he said.

“I’ve seen the Christian celebrity side,” he said, “the book deals, the conference circuit, the magazine articles, churches being written up and bragged about. I don’t care if I ever see that again. The thing to me that is the most important is individual people meeting Jesus and finding hope again.”

The move comes about a year after the doors opened at Second Chance Church, which had existed for several months prior as an online church.

SOURCE: Independent Mail

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Jim Denison is the founder and CEO of the Denison Forum, a nonprofit Christian media organization that comments on current issues through a biblical lens. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily represent those of BCNN1.

Brad Pitt won an Academy Award last night for Best Supporting Actor. (He won an Oscar in 2014 as a producer.) In his acceptance speech, he said, “They told me I only had forty-five seconds up here, which is forty-five seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week.” Thus began a night of awards juxtaposed with politics and surprises.

Joaquin Phoenix won the Best Lead Actor award for Joker and spoke out against artificially inseminating cows. Parasite became the first non-English-language film to win the Best Picture award. Presenter Natalie Portman wore a cape on which were written the names of women who weren’t nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director.

The Oscars felt to me like an evening of cultural commentary interspersed with occasional awards. The popularity of many of the actors and presenters can delude us into thinking Hollywood speaks for us.

The opposite is actually more the case.

Of the nine movies nominated for Best Picture, Joker made the most money, ranking ninth in box office sales for 2019. Avengers: Endgame grossed more than twice that much.

Women make up 50.8 percent of the American population, but they have received .01 percent of Best Director nominations in Oscars history (five out of 447 official nominations in ninety-two years). People of color comprised nearly 37 percent of the American population in the 2010 census, but only one person of color was nominated in the four major acting categories (actress Cynthia Erivo for her lead performance in Harriet).

Of the nine movies nominated for best picture, seven are set in the past. Eight are about white people; six of the eight are about white men.

In 1940, Hattie McDaniel became the first black actor to win an Academy Award. That year, the Oscars were held in a “no blacks” hotel. After accepting her award, she was made to sit at a segregated table away from the rest of the Gone With the Wind cast.

We would like to think that the Academy Awards have become more representative of our society since then, but of the 276 acting Oscars given since 1940, only sixteen went to black actors (5.8 percent). Seven went to Latin American and Asian American actors (2.54 percent).

Some demographics are woefully underrepresented by Hollywood, while others are hugely overrepresented.

The LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD noted that in 2018, 18.2 percent of films from the major movie studios contained LGBTQ characters. 20^th Century Fox led the way at 40 percent, followed by Universal Pictures with 30 percent. GLAAD also reported that 10.2 percent of regular characters appearing on broadcast scripted primetime television programming in 2019 were LGBTQ; they want that number to grow to 20 percent by 2025.

These efforts to ensure that movies and television overrepresent the number of LGBTQ Americans are effective. According to Gallup, US adults estimate that 23.6 percent of Americans are gay or lesbian, when the number is actually 4.5 percent.

Source: Christian Headlines

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The Rev. John J. Paris is a professor emeritus and research professor at Boston College. The Rev. Kevin Wildes is university professor at St. Joseph’s University. Both are Jesuit priests. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of BCNN1.

In a recent RNS column, Charles C. Camosy, in writing about new research about people who are in a “persistent vegetative state,” cited Dr. Joseph Fins’ studies of what Fins calls “deep brain stimulation.” Fins reports that his research reveals that many patients diagnosed as in a persistent vegetative state in fact have some level of consciousness.

That leads Fins, and with him Camosy, to favor “a new civil rights” movement to be sure all brain-injured patients get “up-to-date” diagnoses, good pain management and the latest therapies to help them improve. That aspirational goal sounds as if it ought to be readily adopted.

But Camosy goes further by invoking the case of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman in a persistent vegetative state whose case drew international attention in the mid-2000s when her husband moved to end her life support. “We were there for Terri Schiavo and her family,” Camosy notes, before saying, “There are new and influential allies to be had in the fight to protect people who have serious brain injuries.” He concludes, “The time to move is now.”

It is important not to confuse Schiavo’s case with the patients with whom Fins is concerned. In his autopsy report, Florida’s Pinellas County chief medical examiner, Jon R. Thogmartin, confirmed that her condition was consistent with that of someone in a persistent vegetative state, that her brain had “atrophied” to about half that of normal, that she was blind and that no treatment could have remotely improved her condition.

Throughout his piece, Camosy’s analysis, unlike Fins’, does not differentiate among the categories of those who suffer serious brain injuries: “brain death,” “persistent vegetative state,” “locked in syndrome,” a “minimally conscious state” and “coma.” For Camosy, all of these are lumped into “persistent vegetative states” and classified as “vegetables.”

In this Camosy is not unique. John Paul II in a 2004 address to the Pontifical Academy for Life argued that patients in a persistent vegetative state are not vegetables, but human beings with all of the dignity of others created as humans. In the same address John Paul maintained that “artificial” nutrition and fluids are “natural” means, not medical treatments. As such they are “ordinary care” that must be provided to every unconscious patient.

Every medical association that has addressed the issue and every court of final jurisdiction that has ruled on it, including the U.S. Supreme Court, has rejected that analysis. Each declared that artificial nutrition and fluids, unlike food and water, are medical treatments to be assessed as any other medical intervention, i.e., on the subjective assessment of the patient (or proxy), as to the proportionate benefit and burden of the intervention.

Here the medical societies and the various appellate courts follow the consistent analysis of Catholic moral theology from Pope Basil the Great in the 4^th century through the Vatican’s 1980 “Declaration on Euthanasia” and John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, all of which hold that medical interventions have limited efficacy. They are to be utilized on the basis of the patient’s (or proxy’s) judgment on the benefit and burden that accrue to the patient from their use.

Camosy’s view that medically assisted feeding and hydration are “ordinary” treatments means they would be morally required. But traditionally, a medical treatment is considered “ordinary” only if it offers hope of improved health. If there is no hope of improvement, there is no moral reason to pursue the treatment.

Even if there is a hope of benefit, the benefit alone does not always make a treatment morally obligatory. If a treatment is either physically or morally burdensome for the patient or others, then one can morally withhold or withdraw the treatment. The assessment of the burdensomeness of a treatment is a quality-of-life judgment, made by the patient or her surrogates, relative to the patient’s perception of his or her own life.

Source: Religion News Service

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Bestselling author Wayne Cordeiro and former International Mission Board president David Platt are on a preliminary lineup of 2020 Southern Baptist Convention Pastors’ Conference speakers announced Monday (Feb. 10) at sbcpc.net.

“Beloved,” based on 1 John 4:11, is the theme of the conference set for June 7-8 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla., conference president David Uth has announced.

“The goal is for every pastor and his family to be encouraged and more committed to loving one another because Jesus first loved us,” Uth, pastor of First Baptist Church of Orlando, told Baptist Press Monday. “This verse represents both a reminder and a challenge that are desperately needed right now.

“This year’s Pastors’ Conference will be an opportunity for pastors and their families to experience a different kind of conference; one that not only celebrates our commitment to the Word of God and the ministries He has given us, but also to have fun and celebrate because we are in the entertainment capital of the world, Orlando!” he told BP.

Source: Baptist Press

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The Dakota Baptist Convention Executive Board has hired Fred MacDonald as executive director and treasurer to succeed Garvon Golden who retired.

Executive board chairman Dude Garrett announced the appointment Saturday (Feb. 8) in a press release.

“We have great respect for Fred and how God has used him in God’s kingdom work,” said Garrett, pastor of Temple Baptist Church in Fargo, N.D. “[MacDonald] is not a stranger to the Dakotas, having served in various roles in the Dakotas for over 10 years, and we look forward to his expertise in leading the convention.”

MacDonald has served in several denominational posts, most recently as director of associational missions for Pecos Valley Baptist Association in New Mexico, where he helped establish an international partnership with Hope Baptist Centre in Pretoria, South Africa. The partnership has seen dozens come to faith in Christ and 21 South African pastors and their wives trained in the biblical basics of pastoral ministry, the DBC said.

“Over the past 35 years [my wife] Denise and I have had the blessing of serving God in various churches, associations, and state conventions,” MacDonald said in the press release. “Many of these years have been spent in the Dakotas where we both grew up and went to school. We have a great love for the Dakotas and for Dakota Baptists.

“Serving with the churches of the DBC as executive director is an exciting thought,” MacDonald said. “We are honored to return and serve with the churches of the DBC to fulfill the Great Commission across the Dakotas and around the world.”

MacDonald is scheduled to begin May 1 in the post.

Source: Baptist Press

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