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News Stories

Every dispatch, brief and reflection, newest first. The Watchman, The Advocate and The Discerner in one place.

Engraved study scene, house Discerner art

The Law Arrives Quietly This Morning. The Sisters Are Already at the Bedsides.

Laws do not arrive the way we imagine. There is no bell, no procession. At midnight, somewhere in an Albany server, a date field ticked over, and New York became a state where a terminally ill person can ask a physician for the drugs to end their life. That is

Engraved village road at dusk, house Watchman art

He Won the Debate. The Road Home Was Nine Miles Long.

Bernard Mulongo was 25. He pastored the New Restoration Church of Christ in Butebo District, in eastern Uganda. He had a wife and two children, ages 4 and 7. On Saturday, July 18, he traveled to Mbale for an open air debate between Christians and Muslims. He spoke well. Pastors

Engraving of a village house at dusk, a birthday garland across the veranda and one paper lantern glowing above the empty doorway

The Evidence Was a Birthday Party. The Sentence Is Five Years of Hard Labor.

On April 27, 2024, in a village in Dindori district in central India, a man named Suday Singh Maravi threw a birthday party for his daughter. She was turning five. Friends and relatives came, and among the guests were six pastors and another Christian man. By evening a crowd of

Engraved study scene, house Discerner art

Before They Come for the Pastor, They Practice on His Children

There is a kind of courage we almost never talk about in church, and it belongs to children. Not the courage of the missionary or the martyr. The courage of a nine year old who bows his head over lunch at a school where the teacher has already told him

Engraved village scene at dusk, house Watchman art

They Read the Names Over the Graves in Naridon. All Twenty-Eight.

On Saturday, thousands of people stood in Naridon village, in southern Kaduna, while twenty seven coffins were lowered into the ground. The attack came the previous Sunday, July 26, shortly before midnight. Armed men moved through the village for nearly two hours. Homes burned. By morning about thirty people were

Engraving of a Punjab courtyard at dusk, an oil lamp kept burning in the doorway

A Judge Handed Her to the Man Accused of Kidnapping Her. She Is Thirteen.

Amber Nadeem walked out of a courtroom in Faisalabad on July 25 with the relatives and lawyers of the man accused of abducting her. Her parents stood in the courtroom and wept. The law had just told them, in effect, that it was finished with their daughter. She is thirteen

Engraving of a nun at the bedside of a dying patient, morning light through a tall window

Assisted Suicide Becomes Legal in New York This Week. The First Fight Was Over the Nuns.

Start with what the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne actually do. They run a 42 bed home in New York where the dying poor are cared for without charge until natural death. It is the kind of ministry that exists because someone believes every hour of a human life is worth