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Caden Wakefield

The List With 117 Names On It

The List With 117 Names On It

I have been thinking all week about a list with 117 names on it. On July 8, Amnesty International UK published a report titled "A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK." It named 117 organizations as part of what it called an ecosystem sharing values,

Does It Take a Permit to Pray in Your Living Room? The Supreme Court Will Decide.

Does It Take a Permit to Pray in Your Living Room? The Supreme Court Will Decide.

In January 2021, Daniel Grand emailed some friends and invited them to pray at his house. Grand is an Orthodox Jew in University Heights, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb with a large Jewish community. He wanted to host a minyan, the quorum of roughly a dozen men required for certain Jewish

They Took Fingerprints, Blood, and Voices. Six Believers Have Not Come Home.

They Took Fingerprints, Blood, and Voices. Six Believers Have Not Come Home.

They came on a Saturday. On July 11, police in Yueyang, a city on the Yangtze in China's Hunan Province, raided multiple unregistered house churches. Believers were taken in for questioning. Most were released within a day or two. Six were not. ChinaAid, the Texas-based watchdog founded

Permission to Stand

Permission to Stand

I read Pastor Ezra Jin's op-ed on my phone, in line for coffee, between a weather alert and a text I was avoiding. It took me four minutes. It took him 266 days. Jin spent those days in a Chinese prison cell with the other leaders of

He Baptized 175 People at the River. He Did Not Live to See Monday End.

He Baptized 175 People at the River. He Did Not Live to See Monday End.

On the last Sunday of June, Father Crépin Martial Monga stood at the Mbomou River in Zémio, in the eastern Central African Republic, and baptized 175 people. Most of them, 160, were members of his own parish who had fled their homes because of the fighting. He walked the newly

The Last Family Has Left Iran's Oldest Protestant Church. The Bulldozers May Be Next.

The Last Family Has Left Iran's Oldest Protestant Church. The Bulldozers May Be Next.

St. Peter's Evangelical Church has stood in central Tehran since 1876. American Presbyterian missionaries built it on land granted by a Qajar king. For a century and a half, Armenian and Assyrian Christians worshiped there, ran two schools there, raised children there. In July, the Islamic Republic moved

She Appealed Her Conviction to Europe's Highest Court. Then a Democracy Refused to Let Her In.

She Appealed Her Conviction to Europe's Highest Court. Then a Democracy Refused to Let Her In.

Strip the case to its facts and it is hard to believe the facts. Päivi Räsänen is a Finnish member of parliament, a physician, a former interior minister, and a grandmother of twelve. In 2004 she wrote a booklet for her church on marriage and sexual ethics. In March of