Faith based organization sponsors ad during the Super Bowl

What are your thoughts? The Christian group Focus on the Family has sponsored an ad during this year’s Super Bowl game. According to the Associated Press, Florida quarterback, Tim Tebow, and his mother will be in the ad discussing his birth. Reportedly Tebow’s mother gave birth to him after it was advised that she have [...]

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Are faith communities adequately supporting families with disabled children?

I’m working on a story right now about a Columbia woman’s journey to find a church home that loves and accepts her as a single mother of two children, one of whom has autism. Her journey has been long and full of heartache, but she has found a congregation that is willing to learn how [...]

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SNAP advocates for church sex-abuse victims

Members of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, held two sidewalk news conferences Wednesday, one outside of the Catholic Diocese of Jefferson City and the other in front of Columbia’s downtown police station. After several alleged church sex-abuse cases have come to light in Missouri recently, SNAP hand-delivered a letter to [...]

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Faith groups and the flu

With MU Chancellor Brady Deaton’s e-mail Monday night confirming an H1N1 flu outbreak on campus, the Missourian’s budget meeting Tuesday was abuzz with ideas on how to cover the many angles of this health concern. On the faith beat, since we specialize in covering issues related to large communal gatherings of people who tend to [...]

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Faith and health care: a starting point

If you drove down Green Meadows Road on Saturday night, you might have seen a small circle of people standing on the lawn of the serenely lit Rock Bridge Christian Church, holding candles whose flames danced in the breeze of the unseasonably cool evening. If you stood on that lawn with them, you might have [...]

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thoughts on a Christian Science piece?

I’ve been thinking of writing about Columbia’s First Church of Christ, Scientist for a while now; I’ve visited the church twice this summer and have spoken with members of the congregation about upcoming events. But I’d rather do something less newsy, and more thematic. What would people reading this blog and/or the Missourian like to [...]

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Where faith and medicine intersect

It seems that it’s easy to find news stories about people who feel persecuted for practicing the religion of their choice. The latest might be a Minnesota woman who has put her religious practices in the spotlight by refusing medical treatment for her teenage son, who has cancer. The story has been in the headlines [...]

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