Scouts in the balance

Will the Boy Scouts of America survive a double-barreled attack from atheists and homosexual activists?

Abigail and Samuel

A pair of tiny twins illustrates the agonizing challenges that premature births present to parents and doctors

Terror-fighting tangle

The effort to protect Americans is tied up in a morass of competing agencies, bureaucratic complexity, and special interests

After the explosion

Among relief groups in West, Texas, was one that offered something more than material aid

Voices

Janie B. Cheaney

Conversations with wisdom

Wisdom cries aloud in the streets (Proverbs 8), but she tends to lie low at commencement ceremonies. While valedictorians and guest speakers drone on about Daring to dream or Reaching for the star...

Andrée Seu Peterson

One monster among many

As I say goodbye to the Kermit Gosnell murder trial and take my life back, I would like to disentangle the layers of challenges I saw running concurrently throughout the weeks of my voluntary sequ...

Marvin Olasky

As she lay dying

“Honor your father and mother.” The commandment is unambiguous, but we’ve seen notorious cases of dishonor in which kids get rich by slashing their celebrity parents’ reputations. The rest of us, ...

Joel Belz

Connecting obvious dots

The lead paragraphs in The Wall Street Journal’s front-page story were chilling: “After last week’s Boston Marathon bombings, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva phoned her son Tamerlan in Massachusetts to ...

Mindy Belz

Tar bubbles and terrorism

When I was a girl about 4 years old, I ventured into the street with a playmate one hot afternoon to pop tar bubbles. Playing in the street was a no-no and my mother greeted me grim-faced when I c...

The Editors

Mailbag

‘R-rated libraries’ April 6 As a Christian librarian working in a public library system, I do not consider it my job to monitor what a child checks out of the library. That’s the pare...

Notebook

Money

Builder and giver

When Bob Perry died, on April 13 at 80, the first persons to find out were the members in his church, where word spread throughout the congregation on Sunday morning. His pastor, David Fannin, sai...

Technology

Funny money

If the World Wide Web were an ocean, and gamblers and drug dealers were pirates, their gold purses would be filled with “bitcoin.” What’s bitcoin, you ask? It’s imaginary money, a computer-...

Science

Moderate warriors?

If environmentalists and members of the oil and gas industry can find a rare point of agreement, it’s this: The two people President Obama has selected to head the Environmental Protection Agency ...

Religion

Property loss

The Virginia Supreme Court has mostly affirmed a lower court ruling that granted control of a historic Falls Church sanctuary to the Episcopal Church and the Episcopal congregation that meets at t...

Lifestyle

Womb to grow

Many moms remember on Mother’s Day how they gave birth. Debi Beasley remembers driving with her husband Kent for seven hours from Los Angeles to Santa Rosa, Calif., in 1997 with seven frozen embry...

Houses of God

Mini Russian Orthodox Church

The Russian army is training a unit of parachuting priests to be dropped with a self-assembly mini Russian Orthodox church in order to hold services for troops around the world. The small church i...

Sports

Odd man out

For years, even decades, talking heads have speculated over what grief lay ahead for the first openly gay athlete in one of the nation’s three largest sports. They imagined scenarios something aki...

Culture

Books

Graduation presents

A book to give a student finishing high school and heading to a liberal college: Letters to a Young Progressive by Mike Adams (Regnery, 2013). Four decades ago I could have used a professor like A...

Movies & TV

Vice

It’s hard to decide which is the more interesting development—HBO figuring it can carve a niche in broadcast journalism with an edgy newsmagazine aimed at a young male demographic, or the response...

Notable CDs

The singing is buoyant, smooth, and occasionally rich enough for soul, the instrumental backing snappy, precise, and all-too-often slick enough for megachurch sanctuaries if not Vegas. Yet somehow...

Notable Books

Is it true that unmarried, inner-city fathers don’t care about their kids? That’s the crucial question Edin and Nelson seek to answer in this fascinating, in-depth study of unmarried dads in Camde...

Movies & TV

A bit rusty

Tony Stark of Iron Man 3 blasts into theaters with quite a reputation preceding him. Having last appeared in the 2012 spring blockbuster, The Avengers, a film that earned $1.5 billion worldwide, R...

Movies & TV

Kon-Tiki

In 1947, six Scandinavians, led by Thor Heyerdahl, sailed 4,300 nautical miles across the Pacific in a raft to prove that pre-Columbian South Americans could have settled Polynesia. The movie Kon-...

Movies & TV

Box Office Top 10

Cautions: Quantity of sexual (S), violent (V), and foul-language (L) content on a 0-10 scale, with 10 high, from kids-in-mind.com S ...

Movies & TV

Mud

Writer/director Jeff Nichols’ new movie is, well, clear as mud. While adeptly illustrating a segment of life in the South, Nichols (Take Shelter) serves up a tale about two teenage boys, El...

Q&A

Moral markets

Steve Forbes turned 65 last year, but with probably half a billion dollars at his disposal, is not dependent on Social Security. He inherited money and multiplied it as CEO of Forbes, Inc., and ed...

Music

Folk surprise

Boosted early on by her association with the petulantly radical Ani DiFranco and recently by tours with the insufferably fey Bon Iver, Anaïs Mitchell might seem like the singer-songwriter least li...

Dispatches

Quotables

‘Flush it.’ A staff member at Dr. Emily Women’s Health Center in the Bronx, New York, to a pregnant woman who had asked what she should do if her baby “comes out” at home before h...

News

'Are you human?'

Twelve members of a jury had to weigh two versions of reality as the capital murder trial of Kermit Gosnell drew to a close. On April 30 the jury began deliberations to decide whether Gosnell had ...

News

Cheating on kids

ATLANTA—Shelby McDonald started looking for a school for her daughter Sydney in 2009. Recently divorced and living in her parents’ basement, McDonald thought she had only one option—traditional pu...

News

Good neighbor policy

Moments after twin explosions rocked downtown Boston on April 15, bystander Nicholas Yanni realized his wife was in trouble: Shrapnel from the blast had shattered her lower left leg. Nearby, Yanni...

News

Drought then deluge

Midwestern farmers who last year sweltered through the worst drought in half a century delayed plantings in April because of a new plague: flooded fields. Relentless spring rains caused rivers to ...

News

Fest season

WILKESBORO, N.C.—This year’s outdoor festival season kicked off in April with MerleFest in the Appalachian town of Wilkesboro, N.C. (pop. 3,413). It went on without its founder, guitar player Doc ...

Human Race

Died Country music legend George Jones, 81, died April 26 in Nashville after a brief illness interrupted his ongoing tour. Jones, who was often called the greatest living country music sing...

Looking Ahead

Mother’s Day Mother’s Day isn’t just for moms. It’s for florists too. The annual holiday, which falls on May 12 this year, accounts for roughly a quarter of all flowers sold in the United S...

Quick Takes

Head drama A body part floating in a river is usually evidence of foul play. But a head found floating in the Hudson River may be from a different kind of play. The Marist College men’s cre...