Legalized assisted suicide is gaining momentum

Legalized assisted suicide is gaining momentum. Are evangelicals on the sidelines?

A teenage school-shooting survivor found help recovering from trauma with faith—and EMDR, an increasingly popular therapy.

In Texas, international student ministries are helping students struggling with post-graduation job uncertainties due to recent H-1B visa changes.

A letter from Christianity Today president Nicole Martin on helping the church think clearly.

Behind the Story

From senior staff writer Emily Belz: Today’s story about EMDR was brewing for a while in my mind. In covering the Annunciation Catholic School shooting late last year, I kept hearing families bring up going to eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy to deal with the trauma. For other stories over the years, I’ve heard Christian counselors bring it up. Then I started noticing friends talking about it. That puts an automatic flag in my mind for a potential story, especially since it was not a topic CT had covered before.

Also making it story-worthy is some amount of tension over it: A biblical counseling organization (generally speaking, a more conservative subset of Christian counselors) put out a statement critical of EMDR in 2021, calling it "Christ-less." Christian counselors in general support it.

My goal wasn’t to focus on EMDR when I first spoke to Ellie Wyse, who lived through a school shooting in 2019, but she brought up how much it had helped her. News in general tends to be bad, but I wanted to highlight something good that came out of a horrible news event. With war underway in Iran, evangelical leaders went to the White House to pray for President Trump. CT has previously covered the evangelical leaders who are closest to the president. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom released its annual report, recommending the State Department label Afghanistan, India, Libya, Syria, and Vietnam as new "countries of particular concern" on religious freedom.   A. R. Bernard, the pastor of one of the largest evangelical churches in New York City, was sworn in as the new head of New York Police Department chaplains alongside Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Today in Christian History March 9, 1831: Evangelist Charles Finney concludes a six-month series of meetings in Rochester, New York. The meetings, which have been called "the world’s greatest single revival campaign," led to the closing of the town’s theater and taverns, a two-thirds drop in crime, and a reported 100,000 conversions (see issue 20: Charles Finney).