World Religions News

When thou lookest about thee with a perceptive eye, thou wilt note that on this dusty earth all humankind are suffering. Here no man is at rest as a reward...

The post Why Do We Suffer? appeared first on BahaiTeachings.org.

Breaking News - CNA

Jan 3, 2026 / 02:50 am (CNA).

Multiple explosions rocked Caracas and several other Venezuelan cities early Saturday, Jan. 3, accompanied by the sound of apparent military aircraft flyovers.

Residents reported shaking windows and columns of smoke rising from strategic locations, including military bases.

"The explosions were so strong they made the windows of my house shake. When we looked outside, numerous plumes of smoke were rising over Caracas," said Andrés Henríquez, a correspondent for ACI Prensa, CNA's Spanish-language news partner.

"There were many, countless. Then, videos and reports began to emerge of explosions in other cities."

Regime calls on citizens to mobilize

In a furious response issued Saturday, the Maduro regime denounced the blasts as “extremely grave military aggression” by the United States, alleging an attempt to seize Venezuela’s strategic resources.

Foreign Minister Yván Gil Pinto announced that President Nicolás Maduro has signed a decree declaring a “State of External Commotion” — a constitutional emergency measure granting the regime sweeping wartime powers to mobilize the military and suspend civil guarantees.

Citing Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, the government vowed to “exercise self-defense” and called on citizens to mobilize against what it termed an “imperialist attack” intended to force regime change.

Shortly after the regime reaction, U.S. officials reportedly confirmed to CBS News that President Donald Trump had ordered the strikes.

The developments follow recent escalations, including the U.S. designation of Maduro as alleged leader of the "Cartel of the Suns" narco-terrorism ring.

Church warns of persecution

The violence validates grim warnings from the Venezuelan Bishops’ Conference (CEV). In their recent Christmas message, the bishops cautioned that the “joyful experience” of the season was “overshadowed” by the country's “turbulent national reality” and “generalized impoverishment.”

Tensions between the Church and the regime have spiked since the disputed July 2024 elections. The episcopate has repeatedly demanded the release of political prisoners — including minors — while Maduro recently accused Cardinal Baltazar Porras of conspiracy during the October 2025 canonization of Venezuela’s first saints.

Analysts told CNA recently that the Church likely faces "more persecution" in 2026 as the regime becomes increasingly isolated.

This is a developing story. Latest update on Jan. 3 at 3:42 am ET with the first official reactions and statements from Venezuela and the U.S.

Father Mike Schmitz before his show in Vail, Colorado, as part of his Parables Tour. | Credit: Daniel Milchev

Jan 2, 2026 / 20:17 pm (CNA).

The existence of hell as an option for human beings at the end of life is proof of God’s goodness, according to Father Mike Schmitz.

“At the end of our lives, he simply gives us what we’ve actually chosen,” Schmitz said during his talk, titled “...And at the Hour of Our Death,” at the SEEK 2026 conference in Columbus, Ohio. “I think this is incredible to realize, that if I want not God, I get not God.”

“At some point, if with my choices, I’ve said, ‘God, I want not you,’ he lets me have not him — which is another way to say, hell,” he continued. “That’s what hell is. Hell is existence apart from God. If that’s what I want, God, in his goodness, in God’s justice, he’ll give that to me.”

Some 26,000 attendees have gathered through Jan. 5 in Columbus, Denver, and Fort Worth, Texas, for the SEEK 2026 conference organized by FOCUS.

Schmitz addressed various ways Christians think about death, noting that what we believe tells us a lot about how we see life and the degree to which we trust God. He then highlighted a theory that posits that God reveals himself at the hour of our death in his full glory, so that it becomes impossible not to choose him and, therefore, for anyone to go to hell.

This theory, Schmitz said, “is B as in S.”

“That is, bologna sandwich,” he clarified.

“Not only is it false, but it makes God a tyrant,” he said. “God tolerates our evil choices to preserve our free will. God doesn’t want any of us to sin. He tolerates that. God allows us to do that to preserve our freedom. Why? Because God’s saying, ‘You matter, your choices matter.’”

Schmitz pointed out that if at the end of life, “after allowing us to go through an entire life, lifetimes, where our choices hurt people around us,” God were to overwhelm human capacity to choose God, it would be “slavery.”

“If God, at the moment of our death, is going to force us to choose him because of his love, he’s a bad God,” he said. “Why? Because if God has known this whole time that the last, greatest, most important choice of our life, he was going to strip away from us, rendering our entire previous life meaningless, why did he keep us in this world of suffering?”

“The fact that God preserves our freedom even if we don’t want him demonstrates to us that he is still good,” Schmitz said. “The existence of hell, the reality of hell, the fact that our choices matter are the only thing that preserves God’s goodness.”

Ultimately, Schmitz told conference participants, “all of this starts right now.” Referencing “The Grinch,” he pointed out that while purgatory serves as a sort of “plan B,” life “is meant to be the place where God grows your heart two sizes two big.”

“You guys, purgatory has already started,” he said in conclusion. “Which means heaven has already started every day.”

US President Donald Trump warned that Washington would respond militarily if Iranian authorities killed demonstrators, as anti-regime protests spread across multiple cities in Iran and have already become deadly.

The post Iran Authorities Denounce President Trump’s Statement That US Is ‘Locked and Loaded’ To ‘Rescue’ Protesters appeared first on Jewish Journal.

The tabernacle of Holy Thorn Monastery church in Valladolid, Spain, was forced open and the Blessed Sacrament was stolen. | Credit: Creative Commons/Nicolás Pérez

Jan 2, 2026 / 17:00 pm (CNA).

The tabernacle of Holy Thorn Monastery church in Valladolid, Spain, was forced open and the Blessed Sacrament was stolen.

The Cistercian monastery, which was founded in 1147, preserves a relic of Christ’s crown of thorns.

The monastery’s parish priest, Father Francisco Casas, filed a complaint with the Civil Guard on Dec. 28, 2025, after informing the archbishop of Valladolid and president of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, Luis Argüello, of what had happened earlier that day.

In March 2025, this same act of desecration was committed in Our Lady of the Meadow church in the town Arroyo de la Encomienda on the outskirts of Valladolid.

According to the Holy Thorn Monastery’s website, the perpetrators did not touch anything else, so “their target was the Lord.”

Act of reparation

In response to this “offense of exceptional gravity,” Argüello will perform an act of reparation at 6 p.m. local time on Jan. 3 at the monastery.

The act of reparation will be carried out “for the harm caused to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, the real presence of Jesus Christ in the bread and wine, transformed into his body and blood after the consecration,” the Archdiocese of Valladolid stated on its website.

After lamenting that this is the second desecration in an area church in just nine months, the archdiocese urged the faithful “to pray in reparation for this sacrilegious act, as well as to safeguard the celebration of the Eucharist and the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle.”

The monastery is asking Catholics “not to remain indifferent” to such a grave offense and to join in the act of reparation — either at the monastery or individually — to spend this time with the outraged Lord and give public witness to their faith.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

SAN FRANCISCO (RNS) — In early 2025, when Paul Taylor left the Palo Alto church he’d pastored for 18 years to focus on nonprofit work, he didn’t know where it would lead. Certainly, Taylor didn’t anticipate that, in September, he would be invited to a wood-paneled venue in downtown San Francisco, where the founder of PayPal expounded on the Antichrist for four Mondays in a row.

The sold-out lecture series, delivered by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, was hosted by The ACTS 17 Collective, a Christian organization that has made headlines for its big-name speaker events. But September’s lectures, billed as “Peter Thiel on the Antichrist through the lenses of faith, science, and culture,” drew a new level of intrigue — and controversy. The first night, devil-costumed protesters clogged the sidewalk while ticket-holders filed into San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club.

Taylor, who attended the off-the-record talks with Denise Lee Yohn, his co-founder at the Bay Area Center for Faith, Work, and Tech, was most struck by the audience. What initially felt like a “tech networking event” quickly turned spiritual, he said. “The idea that faith was the surface-level conversation in the room was remarkable to me.”

Given Thiel’s prominence as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and a Trump ally, the lectures have sparked dissection, alarm and parody. They’ve also brought attention to a growing Christ-curiousness in Bay Area tech circles. Where some see Thiel’s Antichrist lectures as evidence of a larger revival, others argue the version of evangelical Christianity taking hold is steeped in tech elitism and right-wing politics. 

According to leaked transcripts of the events shared with Religion News Service, Thiel reiterated ideas he has presented for decades, suggesting government regulation of tech could fuel a “one World State.” He offered up activist Greta Thunberg and AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky as “legionnaires of the Antichrist,” if not the Beast itself. 

Bradley Onishi, a religion scholar who taught at the University of San Francisco for years, sees nothing novel in Thiel’s ideas. “For all of Peter Thiel’s heterodox Christianity, he’s basically got the same Antichrist as Billy Graham,” Onishi said. What’s more noteworthy, he argued, is how Thiel’s brand of Christianity is gaining traction in Silicon Valley, historically one of the country’s most irreligious and progressive areas. 

Throughout 2025, numerous news outlets highlighted a growing embrace of evangelicalism in the Bay Area. At the center of this coverage has been ACTS 17, whose name is both an acronym for Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society and a nod to the biblical chapter where the Apostle Paul proselytizes to Athenian intellectuals. 

“We’re redefining success for those who define culture,” proclaims the ACTS 17 website, describing their events as a place “where tech founders, producers, designers, and creatives talk candidly about how faith and work collide.”

The nonprofit is run by Michelle Stephens and Michele Chinn Fahey, two friends who met through Epic Church, the San Francisco non-denominational megachurch they attend.

Stephens sees ACTS 17 as a funnel toward faith for “folks that have significant money, fame, and power,” she said. It’s a demographic she believes deeply needs Christianity: “Many people in tech have this idea that what they’re building is ‘the savior,’ which makes them a god, and we need to address that. We need to have Jesus at the center of what they’re building.”

As for the Thiel connections: Stephens’ husband, Trae, is a partner at Founders Fund, Thiel’s venture capital firm. And at ACTS 17’s kick-off event in May 2024 — held at the San Francisco mansion of tech CEO Garry Tan — Thiel gave a “fireside chat” on “political theology.”

Since that launch event, ACTS 17 has hosted a handful of speakers on the intersections of faith, science, tech and culture, including Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health and a well-known evangelical, and Pat Gelsinger, former Intel CEO and executive director of Gloo, the Christian AI start-up. Trae Stephens, who also co-founded the defense tech company Anduril, has also spoken on leadership, calling and AI.

At these events, start-up founders, venture capitalists, robotics engineers and other attendees mingle, appetizers in hand, while DJ Malcolm “CANVA$” Maholmes blasts remixed worship songs. In the weeks following each event, participants are invited to “Continuing the Conversation” gatherings at local coffee shops or to Sunday services at Epic Church.

In his final Antichrist lecture, Thiel praised the work of ACTS 17. “Whatever you’re doing here in San Francisco is more important than everything everybody’s doing in Christian work in the rest of the world, combined,” he said.

Stephens, for her part, is far more measured. “No one’s work for the Lord is more important than another,” she said. “I just regard us as doing our part.”

If ACTS 17 is the top of this Bay Area evangelical funnel, then Denise Yohn and Paul Taylor view their organization — Faith, Work, & Tech — as the narrow end, doing “the deep, slow work of discipleship,” as Yohn put it. 

Inspired by the Center for Faith & Work, part of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, FWT offers one-off events and multi-week formation programs to help participants integrate their Christian beliefs into their careers. So far, Yohn and Taylor have been overwhelmed by the response. On Nov. 1, they hosted their second Bay Area Faith & Work Summit, drawing hundreds of tech professionals and even a German documentary crew covering the Christ-ward shift in Silicon Valley. 

While flattered by the international attention, Yohn was caught off-guard by questions she felt “conflated” their work with Trumpian politics. “What we’re doing here with Faith, Work, & Tech: it is in no way associated with what people would think of as the MAGA movement,” she said.

Yohn is also friends with Stephens, and they have discussed ways to collaborate. In 2026, FWT intends to host dinner discussions that might build on ACTS 17 speaker events. At least one, Yohn said, “will probably be on the End Times or the Antichrist.”

Whether all of this constitutes resurgence remains to be seen. As of 2024, according to the Pew Research Center, most Bay Area adults do not identify as Christian, and the number who do has dipped from 48% to 46% since 2014. Still, there are indicators of change: the American Bible Society recently found Bay Area young people are more likely to pick up a Bible than older generations. And nationally, Barna Group research suggests that among churchgoers, Gen Z and Millennials attend more often than older generations.

The ACTS 17 “Next Steps” webpage recommends seven San Francisco churches, all of them nondenominational and evangelical. One is Canvas Church, which Pastors Travis and Jena Clark started in 2013. After losing 70% of their members during the pandemic, Canvas has experienced tremendous growth since 2023, with numbers nearing pre-pandemic levels. Many of their congregants work in tech, Travis Clark said. 

He points to political division and young people’s “hunger” for community and meaning as factors in the growth. “After Charlie Kirk was assassinated, you did see quite a few churches in the city — including ours — where attendance jumped,” Clark said. “In San Francisco, that’s not normal. So, I would say there’s definitely a shift.”

The Rev. Kevin Deal — a priest at a progressive, LGBTQ+ affirming Episcopal church in the city — sees opportunity and risk in this shift. For instance, a few of the congregations on the rise are, according to Deal, more conservative and “homophobic” than they let on. “Some churches have gotten good at making their initial presentation palatable to a very wide audience, and then, entering more deeply in, the restrictions are revealed,” he said.

Deal publicly criticized Thiel’s Antichrist lectures, calling them “antithetical” to the Gospel. While he believes ACTS 17 events can be an entry point for sincere faith, “so far, it seems centered on Peter Thiel and his kind of apocalyptic cynicism,” Deal said.

Stephens argued that critiques like Deal’s miss the larger frame around the lectures. “What you don’t know is, in the days and weeks before the event, leaders in our community were praying over the event: for protection, for hearts to be transformed, for Jesus to move,” she said. 

While Onishi, the religion scholar, definitely sees motion, he argues “elitism” is a significant driver of this movement. Tech leaders see themselves as “part of a very small subset of people who will determine the fate of Western civilization,” Onishi said, citing Thiel’s critiques of diversity or Elon Musk’s embrace of “cultural Christianity.” For the tech class, he argued, evangelical Christianity is now offering a “transcendent” story to wrap around their “civilizationalism.”

“Does that signal revival in the Bay?” Onishi said. “I don’t think so. I think it signals revival in a certain social enclave of the Bay Area.”

Paul Taylor sees more at play. Alongside FWT, he joined the leadership team of Transforming the Bay with Christ, a nonprofit founded in 2013 by Gloo’s Pat Gelsinger that seeks to “catalyze a Gospel movement” through church networking. This new role has Taylor meeting with congregations throughout the region, and he said he’s encountering growth both inside and outside tech circles.

A trail runner, Taylor often finds himself on a hilltop with sweeping views of the South Bay. Lately, gazing out, he said he’s felt a sense of culmination, as if his longtime prayer — “God, pour out your Spirit on the Bay Area” — is being answered. 

“Maybe not in the ways we anticipated,” he acknowledged. “But it does feel like that’s happening.”

This article was produced as part of the RNS/Interfaith America Religion Journalism Fellowship.

(RNS) — A group of faith leaders, including several prominent conservatives, is pushing the Trump administration to formally include a religion engagement group within the Group of 20 summit, to be hosted at Trump’s golf club in the Miami area next December.

In November, over 80 leaders, led by New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan; Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center; former Vatican ambassador Mary Ann Glendon; and First Liberty Institute President Kelly Shackelford, sent President Donald Trump a letter urging him to build on his legacy as “a stalwart defender of peace and international religious freedom” and direct his administration “to officially recognize the Religion 20 Summit (R20) as part of America’s presidency of the G20 in 2026.”

The G20 intergovernmental forum was formed in 1999 to address global economic issues, comprising 21 member with large economies, including the U.S., European Union, China and Russia. Its presidency rotates each year.

The first time a religion forum, known as the R20, was incorporated into the formal program of the G20 was in 2022, when Indonesia hosted the summit. But subsequent G20 summits did not include a religion engagement group. 

Dolan — whose retirement was set in motion last month when Pope Leo XIV appointed a successor to lead New York — also sent his own letters to Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, writing that “official recognition of the R20 offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to revitalize America’s founding vision on the global stage — affirming the God-given right of all people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — and leverage its revolutionary principles to recalibrate the trajectory of Western civilization and the world at large.” 

In his note dated Nov. 14, Dolan wrote that the coalition backing the joint Nov. 10 letter had been assembled with the “generous support” of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank embroiled in turmoil after its president defended Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview of antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes.

Dolan emphasized religion as “the greatest source of soft power in much of the world” in his letters to Trump administration leaders. He wrote that recognizing the religion engagement group could help Trump achieve the interfaith dialogue portion of his “plan to end the Gaza conflict.” 

In the lead-up to the conclave last year, Trump suggested to reporters that he’d like to see Dolan become pope. He also appointed Dolan to his Religious Liberty Commission. 

The broader coalition letter told Trump that including a religion engagement group in the G20 could strengthen international partnerships, saying, “Religious leaders often have significant influence in their respective countries and can serve as valuable allies in advancing American interests and values globally.” It also said the R20 could address the persecution of religious minorities, including Christians, Jews and Muslims and work towards counter-extremism efforts.

Since 2014, an informal group called the G20 Interfaith Forum has met in the G20 host country to discuss global goals, including the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. The group says it “provides an important context for religious voices to contribute meaningful insight and recommendations that respond to and help shape the overall G20 and thus global policy agendas.” Last year, it met in August, months before the November G20 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The group of signatories urging a formal engagement group for the 2026 G20 is distinct from the leaders of the Interfaith Forum. 

Beyond Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, and the lead signatories, the coalition backing the letter includes Sam Brownback, U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom during the first Trump administration; several current and former commissioners on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom; Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family; Kristen Waggoner, CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom; the Rev. Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals; and Zainab Al-Suwaji, the executive director of the American Islamic Congress.

The letter — dated a day before the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops elected a new president — also includes former president Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who leads the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, and the chair of the USCCB Committee on International Justice and Peace, Bishop A. Elias Zaidan of the Maronite Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon of Los Angeles. The signatories also include many prominent conservative Catholics, including R.R. Reno, editor at First Things magazine, and the presidents of many conservative Catholic colleges.

Memos supporting the religion engagement group acknowledged that getting the Trump administration’s backing for a new multilateral global initiative may be challenging. “Those committed to an America First agenda are rightly skeptical of the G20 and its constellation of globalist NGOs determined to leverage the annual G20 process to advance a wide array of agendas inimical to U.S. strategic interests and to the Trump Administration’s priorities,” a memo backing the R20 acknowledges.

But, it argues that “the Trump Administration may counter this globalist agenda while leveraging the G20 to produce a stronger, safer, and more prosperous America, and a more peaceful world,” by framing priorities in terms of “America’s founding traditions and principles, backed by the world’s major religions.”

“Unlike America’s constitutional tradition and system of ordered liberty, the French Revolution gave birth to a militant secular ideology that paved the way for Marxism, Socialism, and Communism,” the memo says. Referencing the recent election of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, it continues, “As may be seen from the recent election in New York City, present-day adherents of this ideology are viscerally opposed not only to America’s founding principles and traditions, but also to President Trump and his political agenda.”

Another memo backing the R20 writes that the religion engagement group would “foster a constructive and human-friendly environmental agenda rooted in traditional religious teachings that will discredit the secular left’s war on food and energy security, and simultaneously promote rational agricultural and energy policies” and “help end modern slavery, as exemplified by child labor in the mining of cobalt, an essential component of lithium batteries, and hence key to the globalists’ net zero agenda.”

In the official coalition letter, the leaders wrote to Trump, “The eyes of the world will be on you and America next year, and we pray you seize this opportunity to further cement your legacy as a stalwart defender of religious liberty when America’s security and spiritual well-being were under threat.”