The annual battle to banish Christmas has started early this year with the beloved British children’s cartoon “Thomas the Tank Engine” carrying a “decorated tree” for the “winter holidays. The word “Christmas” is never uttered although the plucky little train engine is obviously transporting a Christmas tree. “The team behind TV’s ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ have…

Noah, machine gun preachers, religious cops, golfers finding their faith — good family movies with solid plots, beautiful cinematography and A-list stars are shaking Hollywood to its violent, filthy, perverse core — but the studios don’t care as long as it makes lots of money. “In many quarters, Hollywood has long been regarded as an essentially godless place. But…

Islam’s most populous nation, Indonesia, is the most diverse nation imaginable — a far-flung archipelego of 13,466 islands where 238 million people speaking 742 languages live in everything from luxurious skyscraper penthouses to squalid cardboard slums, mountainside-hugging bamboo huts and rain-forest tree houses. The government only recognizes six religions. Census figures show the population is overwhelmingly Muslim at 86.1 percent…

Therapy can assist a homosexual who wants to be heterosexual, according to a study published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy. Psychologists Stanton L. Jones of Wheaton College and Mark A. Yarhouse of Regent University are the authors of the longitudinal study. It tracked individuals who were seeking to change their sexual orientation — and documents their…

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More from Beliefnet and our partners