Pastor Bill Hybels announced Tuesday night his early retirement from Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago following accusations of sexual misconduct made by women several times during his years in ministry. Hybels was scheduled to retire as senior pastor in October after more than 40 years of leading the megachurch but said at a Tuesday night meeting with church members he would step down immediately because the controversy was a distraction to the church’s ministry.

I remember when I was a 9-year-old pastor/missionary’s kid growing up in Singapore, there was a man who always loitered around our church after Sunday service. My father’s church shared the same building with another church, and that man was a regular attender of that church’s morning service.

The Chicago Tribune, in a lengthy report published Thursday night, accused former megachurch Pastor Bill Hybels of inappropriate behavior toward women. The report states the leadership of Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago investigated the accusations and found them unsubstantiated. Hybels told the Tribune the reports were false and possibly made up to discredit him.

Beginning in the spring of 1915, the Ottoman Empire carried out a systematic extermination of Armenian Christians who occupied territory east of present-day Turkey. Over 1.5 million men, women, and children were slaughtered during a two-year period, an event credited with coining the word genocide. To this day, the Turkish government rejects that label and has made it a crime (Article 301 of the penal code) to insult the nation by mentioning it.

Larry Taunton, a Christian apologist and founder of the Fixed Point Foundation, addressed accusations of marital infidelity in a statement posted online Wednesday. “Last autumn I confessed to my wife, family, and the board of Fixed Point Foundation that I had engaged in inappropriate (consensual) behavior outside the bonds of my marriage some time ago,” Taunton wrote.

Planted on the grassy strip in front of a house two doors down is a sign announcing “Santa Stops Here. Date: December 19. Raindate: December 20.” The many little tykes on my street must be counting the days.

I remember when Santa Claus came to Walnut Hill Plaza in Woonsocket in 1960, and ahead of his visit my mother was at the stove making dinner and I stood at her elbow and looked up at her face and made her solemnly tell me the truth: “Is he really coming in a flying sleigh?” And she solemnly assured me he was.

When new Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch heard oral arguments on the high court for the first time in mid-April, he quickly asked a Justice Department attorney, “Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if we just followed the plain text of the statute?”

It was a good question from a justice known as an originalist—a judge aiming to follow the plain text of the law and of the Constitution, as its framers originally wrote it.

A similar question could be helpful for the church Gorsuch attends.