Dr Paul Allen

In recent decades, the Commonwealth of Virginia has served as a barometer for the entire nation. Once a solidly “red” state, Virginia has become a “purple” state thanks to massive political and demographic transitions. Virginia’s boundary with Washington D.C. is the gravitational force that pulls Virginia from the right to the center-left. Thus, in every presidential election cycle, the political pundits and campaign operatives all ask the same crucial question:  “Which way will Virginia go? ” In recent days, however, Virginia is the subject of disturbing headlines that cascade from the national news media—headlines that the citizens of Virginia did not foresee. It all started in the early part of last week when the Commonwealth’s Governor, Ralph Northam, advocated for a radical abortion bill that would legalize abortion up to the moment of birth—indeed, in this horrifying interview, Governor Northam appeared to support infanticide. By the end of the week, the headlines took an u

PHOTO FROM CHINESE SOCIAL MEDIA (SUBMITTED TO CT) Despite the effort of hundreds of Chinese Christians who formed a " human shield " to defend their brand-new megachurch, reports of its demolition have emerged from southern China . Wenzhou 's Sanjiang Church—an impressive eight-story structure that government officials previously called a "model project"—took six years and  $3.2 million  in donations to build, according to  The Washington Post . The congregation is listed under the  government-approved   Three-Self Patriotic Movement ,  reports   AsiaNews , yet it occupies five times more square feet than what regulations originally designated— complicating the common narrative  of "atheist government persecutes Christians." Image: World Watch Monitor While excavators spent Monday, April 30, tearing down the church, Communist Party officials  insisted the destruction was because of city zoning, not religious persecution, reports 

The metric expansion of space. The inflationary epoch is the expansion of the metric tensor at left. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) This is a challenging day to be a journalist on the science beat, if the goal is to avoid ultimate questions . I am happy to report that  The Washington Post  — to my surprise, quite frankly — didn’t try to avoid the obvious. Here’s the  top of its story  on the Big Bang update that is making global headlines: In the beginning, the universe got very big very fast, transforming itself in a fraction of an instant from something almost infinitesimally small to something imponderably vast, a cosmos so huge that no one will ever be able to see it all. This is the premise of an idea called cosmic inflation — a powerful twist on the big-bang theory — and Monday it received a major boost from an experiment at the South Pole called BICEP2. A team of astronomers led by John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that it had d

English: Icon of Jesus Christ (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Al Mohler. A recent letter to columnist Carolyn Hax of The Washington Post seemed straightforward enough. “I am a stay-at-home mother of four who has tried to raise my family under the same strong Christian values that I grew up with,” the woman writes. “Therefore I was shocked when my oldest daughter, ‘Emily,’ suddenly announced she had ‘given up believing in God’ and decided to ‘come out’ as an atheist.” The idea of a 16-year-old atheist in the house would be enough to alarm any Christian parent, and rightly so. The thought that a secular advice columnist for The Washington Post might be the source of help seems very odd, but desperation can surely lead a parent to seek help almost anywhere. You usually get what you expect from an advice columnist like this — therapeutic counsel based in a secular worldview and a deep commitment to personal autonomy. Carolyn Hax responds to this mother with an admonition to respect th