Religious liberty can aid foreign policy
A commitment to religious liberty can pave the way for an American foreign policy with widespread backing, Southern Baptist leader Richard Land said at a Washington panel discussion. Speaking at a forum on the influence of religious leaders on foreign policy, Land said a “focus on religious freedom” and “its consequent emphasis on individual dignity and individual human rights is the foundation for a bipartisan foreign policy that all Americans can support.” The United States is especially qualified to promote a foreign policy based on religious liberty by virtue of both its devotion to such freedom from its founding and its pluralism, said Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. In the Bill of Rights, “religious freedom was the first freedom enumerated,” Land said, according to a published transcript of the discussion. “This right is, in the American construct, not merely a right among others but the necessary precursor for all other rights, because all other rights are sourced from the Creator.”
Former Broncos star leaves NFL for seminary
Former Denver Broncos offensive lineman Matt Lepsis was a drug addict before he became a Christian, and the Colorado Springs Gazette reports on the transformation in Lepsis’ life. Shortly after his conversion, he left the NFL to pursue a calling to the ministry. He is now a student at Dallas Theological Seminary. “I was getting deeper and deeper into things I shouldn’t have,” Lepsis said in the story. “I started to feel this presence. I felt the presence of God, which I never felt before.”
Huckabee pauses book tour to preach
In the midst of a turbulent economy which may “tank” and in a world where safety is an issue, there remains Good News, Mike Huckabee said recently at Westside Baptist Church in Gainesville, Fla. It’s not hope found in change, but rather it’s the hope found in something – or Someone – that won’t change. The hope is found in Christ, he said. The former governor of Arkansas who made an unsuccessful bid for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, Huckabee spoke to about 900 in the worship center on his 51st stop of a 57-city tour promoting his new book, “Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That’s Bringing Common Sense Back to America.”