Police were called in after a clash on Sunday between Black Lives Matter protesters and churchgoers at a church in Troy, New York.

It’s unclear why protesters targeted Grace Baptist Church for demonstrations, but activists reportedly harassed church members.

According to the Washington Sentinel, videos shared to social media show protesters trying to block congregants from accessing the church. Many also shouted as the church members tried to take their children inside.

In one video, a female protester tells a black parishioner, “You should be ashamed, sister.”

attendees to
Grace Baptist Church
in TROY. NY had to be
escorted in and out of
church today as they were
berated by #BLM protestors:
take a hard look at this ——> pic.twitter.com/zWwpilWDy8

— Kevin McCashion 🇺🇸 (@Kevin_McCashion) June 29, 2020

In another, the Daily Wire reports, one of the protesters yells at a churchgoer, “f*** you.” The church member responds by saying “Jesus loves you,” but the protester replies by telling the man Jesus doesn’t love him.

“Stop hiding behind your godd*mn religion,” another protester shouted.

“This church is racist,” another said.

Grace Baptist, however, has said they will not be threatened. The church has asked male church members to help escort congregants inside when needed.

“We will never apologize to the mob,” a pastor with the church says in a…

(RNS) — Kanye West is running for president, and he believes God told him to do it.

That’s according to an interview West conducted with Forbes magazine this week, in which he discussed his newly announced bid to win the White House as an independent candidate.

It may be the first time the multiple Grammy-winning rapper has run for office, but it’s hardly his first foray into presidential politics. West made headlines in 2005 when he criticized then-President George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina by declaring that “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” a moment Bush himself later categorized as a low point of his presidency. Although West performed at one of President Barack Obama’s inaugural balls, Obama was caught on a hot mic criticizing the performer and calling him a “jackass,” sparking low-grade tensions between the two. And more recently, West has garnered widespread attention for his persistent support of President Donald Trump.

West is also no stranger to matters of faith: In addition to releasing the religion-themed album “Jesus Is King” in October 2019, West staged several “Sunday Services” throughout the country last year that featured gospel hymns alongside rap music.

“I love Jesus Christ. I love Christianity,” West said last year.

But in his interview with Forbes, West — who said that he has never…

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro spent months downplaying the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic, even as his country had one of the world’s worst outbreaks. Now, Bolsonaro has announced to the world that he has also been infected with the virus, the Associated Press reports.

Before displaying symptoms, he attended an Independence Day luncheon at the home of American Ambassador Todd Chapman. A photo posted to Twitter showed the President and some of his ministers sitting close to each other and not wearing masks. The U.S. Embassy announced that Ambassador Chapman and his wife have both tested negative. However, they will quarantine at home for the next two weeks.

President Bolsonaro told reporters that he started running a fever accompanied by muscle pain and fatigue, which led him to take a test on Monday. He told them he was feeling “very well” as he spoke to them outside the presidential residence in Brasilia. He attributed his recovery to taking the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine.

Despite his diagnosis, he remained steadfast in his conviction that the coronavirus does not pose a serious threat to healthy people. He has repeatedly appealed to his having been an athlete in his youth as a reason he did not feat the virus and said his contracting the virus is a result of his leadership style, which often has him amongst his fellow citizens.

According to the New York Times, he…

A popular new Netflix series available on children’s platforms includes a young transgender character and promotes the idea that gender can change.

The live-action original series, The Baby-Sitters Club, is rated TV-G and follows the story of five middle-school girls who launch a babysitting business. It is based on a collection of Scholastic books.

In episode 4, Mary Anne – one of the five sitters – is asked by a child’s mother to keep a little girl named Bailey. 

Mary Anne and Bailey hold a tea party in Bailey’s room, and when Bailey spills water on her pink dress, Mary Anne opens the little girl’s closet to get a change of clothes. But she only finds boys’ clothes.

“Those are my old clothes,” Bailey tells a surprised Mary Anne.

Mary Anne then tells the viewer: “That’s when I understood: Bailey was a little girl and her new clothes help people see it.”

The series, which was listed in Netflix’s 10-most popular titles Thursday, is available on children’s profiles. The transgender angle forms the core of episode 4. Bailey was played by actor Kai Shappley, a 9-year-old biological boy who identifies as a girl. 

Seconds after Mary Anne discovers Bailey is a biological boy, the episode switches scenes, and viewers see Mary Anne talking about the situation to her new friend, Dawn, whose father is gay. Dawn helps Mary Anne understand Bailey.

“It’s like this:…

Former vice president Joe Biden on Wednesday criticized the Supreme Court for upholding Trump’s religious liberty protections against the Obama-era abortion/contraceptive mandate and pledged to overturn them if elected president.

The presumptive Democratic nominee released a statement saying he was “disappointed” in the high court’s decision, which by a vote of 7-2 upheld a Trump administration 2018 rule that exempted employers with religious and moral objections from the abortion/contraceptive mandate.  

The Little Sisters of the Poor, an institute of Catholic nuns who serve the elderly poor, brought the lawsuit.

“Health care is a right that should not be dependent on race, gender, income or zip code,” Biden said. “Yet as a result of today’s decision, countless women are at risk of losing access to affordable, preventive care. I am disappointed in today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision that will make it easier for the Trump-Pence Administration to continue to strip health care from women — attempting to carve out broad exemptions to the Affordable Care Act’s commitment to giving all women free access to recommended contraception.”

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, requires the coverage of “preventive care” but doesn’t define what the phrase means. Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services…

Actress Alyssa Milano and several other guests, via virtual conference, recently joined Bishop Talbert Swan’s program The Bishop’s Barbecue to talk, in part, about White Evangelical’s contribution to systemic racism.

A portion of the episode “The Systemization of Racism as a Tool to Ensure the Subjugation of the Other,” featured a take on White Evangelicals as a contributing factor to systemic racism, according to those involved in the discussion.

Bishop Swan mentioned how white evangelicals immediately defend Trump as one who is appointed by God in their unwavering support for the President.

But Swan also noted how Trump has been married 3 times and has been with “prostitutes, Playboy bunnies, and pornstars” even though “Bible-thumping conservative evangelicals” say that marriage is about “one man and one woman.”

The pastor then noted that despite Obama having started a family with the same woman he has been married to for 20 plus years, many White Evangelicals called him the antichrist.

“Let’s remember that the moral majority and the Christian Evangelical right was never first and foremost about moral issues, abortion, sexuality, any of that, it was actually rooted in white supremacy,” claimed activist Tim Jacob Wise.

Bishop Swan then asked Pastor Michael McBride what he would say to his “White conservative friends” who say that Trump’s…

A New York Times story meant to prove churches are a major source of COVID-19 outbreak actually did just the opposite, some Christian leaders say.

The story referenced cases tied to churches in Texas, Louisiana, Oregon and other states and said “more than 650 coronavirus cases have been linked to nearly 40 churches and religious events across the United States since the beginning of the pandemic,” with “many of them erupting over the last month as Americans resumed their pre-pandemic activities, according to a New York Times database.”

The news aggregator website The Drudge Report linked to the story, which ran under the headline, “Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are a Major Source of Coronavirus Cases.”

But as author and blogger Ed Stetzer noted, the 650-plus nationwide church cases are only a sliver of the total number of cases nationwide.

“There are now 3 million people infected in the United States,” Stetzer wrote in his blog at Christianity Today. Stetzer is the executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center. “Furthermore, there were 60,000 cases each of the past two days in America. That’s almost 100 times the 650 cases that the New York Times reports in churches – and that is since the beginning of the pandemic.”

Others agreed with Stetzer’s take.

“This NY Times story is a joke. 650 cases = ‘major source’ of cases,” tweeted…

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Being a tour guide at the Vatican Museums is a little bit like going to hell.

Livia Galante, an experienced archaeologist and tour guide, described it as a bit like a scene from Dante’s Inferno — filled with masses of people jammed together.

Galante, who is experienced at navigating the intricate corridors of the Vatican collection, has nearly fainted and had panic attacks twice during her tours.

The museums normally host over 6 million visitors a year and on some days up to 45,000 tourists fill its galleries.

Galante recently scrolled through a dozen pictures of overcrowded halls at the Vatican Museums on her phone. The images show people packed together in the majestic halls, with only disembodied limbs sticking out from the crowd, occasionally holding out phones or umbrellas.

“Hell,” she called it.

During the coronavirus pandemic, things have changed. The museums shut down for three months and only reopened June 1.

Today, the halls are largely emptied.

Visitors can stop and take in the beauty of the recently restored Raphael Rooms and the jaw-dropping ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

“We are reclaiming ownership of space,” Galante said.

Tourists now can enjoy the museums as they were originally intended, with pause and contemplation, she said.

Before COVID-19, guides and tourists clamored for a less crowded, more enjoyable…