What does the Christian Cross actually mean?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 01/18/2017 - 16:54

When we go into a Christian place of worship, we expect to see a Cross. And when crosses are removed from public places, such as crematoria or hospital chapels, we quite reasonably get rather indignant about it. But in the world in which Christianity began, a place of worship was the last place you would expect to see a Cross. We can only begin to get some sense of what it might have felt like to encounter the symbol of a cross in the first couple of Christian centuries if we imagine coming into a church and being faced with a large picture of an electric chair or perhaps a guillotine.

New documentary explores Christian responses to persecution

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 01/10/2017 - 20:31

When a man blew himself up inside a Coptic church in Cairo during Sunday mass, killing 25 worshippers on December 11, 2016, he not only performed a gruesome deed but added another instance to a global trend of recent years: the persecution of Christians.

Within a geographic band that writer Eliza Griswold has identified as the 10th parallel running from Libya to Indonesia, Christians suffer death, torture, illegal detention, the burning of their property, heavy discrimination, and other human rights violations on account of their faith.