The entire board of Willow Creek Community Church and its remaining lead pastor, Heather Larson, announced at a church meeting Wednesday night they were stepping down. Their departures follow the abrupt resignation of Lead Teaching Pastor Steven Carter on Sunday and the publication of another report of sexual harassment involving church founder and former Pastor Bill Hybels.

Two court dramas in the last half of July and 6,000 miles apart showed the need for two new hyphenated words: hyper-sexualist and hyper-Islamist.

Definitions of the words’ cores run like this: Stressing sex as a central concern of life. Believing that Islam should be a central concern of not only individual living but political and societal structuring.

Top Russian government official Alexander Torshin is a longtime attendee of the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., with close ties to the breakfast’s associated organization, the Fellowship. The breakfast is a gathering of thousands of political and ministry leaders from the United States and all over the world, and the U.S. president has attended every year since 1953.

In some ways it’s no surprise the international community rejected Ken Isaacs, the Samaritan’s Purse vice president and Trump nominee to lead the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The Washington Post and others ran a steady campaign against Isaacs after digging up several of his tweets deemed anti-Muslim. 

An Australian judge ruled Tuesday that Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican’s head budget officer, must stand trial for sexual abuse charges. After four weeks of closed preliminary hearings, Magistrate Belinda Wallington dismissed about half of the charges against Pell but said the remainder had sufficient evidence to present to a jury. Pell’s high-profile career spanned decades in Australia, culminating in a 13-year stint as archbishop of Sydney before his promotion to the Vatican in 2014. Pope Francis allowed Pell a leave of absence last year to return to Australia to defend himself.

The elders of Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago said in a letter Saturday they could have done a better job holding former Senior Pastor Bill Hybels accountable for inappropriate behavior toward women. “Bill acknowledged that he placed himself in situations that would have been far wiser to avoid,” the elders wrote.

When Blake Farenthold, a conservative Republican, became on April 6 the latest member of Congress to resign following a sex scandal, some asked why he had changed his mind and left so abruptly. The harder question was, “How did he ever get elected?”