A Passion of the Christ sequel

As Christians we can rejoice for the recovery of NFL athlete Damar Hamlin, whose on-field injury inspired an outpouring of prayers, but we can also take action to better care for the players who put their bodies on the line for the sport.

After churchgoers watched hospitals close in rural Tennessee, they decided to set up a mobile medical clinic. The church fleet now offers dental care and a haircut, too.

Reading Genesis this January? Bible professor Dru Johnson explains why you shouldn’t skip the weird sex stuff.

Behind the story

From Daniel Silliman: My dad read the Bible for the first time in jail. He didn’t grow up a Christian and had no idea what the Bible said, when a bit of drug dealing left him with some sharply limited reading choices. So he turned to the Scriptures and started naturally enough at the beginning.

He quit in chapter 6. There’s a story there about giants having sex with women, right before God gets overwhelmed by humans so evil even their imaginations are bad, and my dad thought, “This is too weird.” It would be several years and a dramatic conversion experience before he tried again.

I was thinking of that when Dru Johnson, a Bible professor at The King’s College in New York, offered to write about sex in Genesis for this short series we’re running for people starting their year’s Bible reading at the start of the Bible. There’s a lot of sex in Genesis, Johnson writes. But it’s there for a reason! And if you want to take the Bible seriously, you can’t be too polite to sit with the strange story of God working with people, including the weird sex parts.

In other news

The Justice Department is appealing a ruling that held the government liable for the 2017 shooting rampage at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. A year ago, the court found that officials failed to submit records that would have prevented the killer from obtaining his gun.

Students can take a course on the history of faith and firearms in America at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

The United Methodist Church has appointed its first Native American bishop, a member of Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma.

A Passion of the Christ sequel, set 24 hours after the crucifixion that was dramatized for the screen in 2004, is scheduled to start shooting this spring.