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January 6, 2026

Today’s Briefing

Pastors in Venezuela pray for peace after Maduro’s capture, while members of the diaspora celebrate.

One year after the devastating LA fires, churches worship without their buildings.

Author Philip Yancey confessed to an affair and is retiring from public speaking and writing.

Gen Zers with far-flung families and friends rely on digital connection but are also more wary of its pitfalls.

Daniel K. Williams’s new book, The Search for a Rational Faith, is a “rich intellectual feast” according to our reviewer.

Mike Cosper says Jewish intellectual Norman Podhoretz leaves a legacy of political principle.

Behind the Story

From editorial project manager Mia Staub: I live in Los Angeles, and it is hard to believe it has already been one year since the fires. My mind is fuzzy on when the aid trucks left the shopping-center parking lots and when the Pacific Coast Highway reopened. What I do remember is the overwhelming feeling when I woke up to the red and gray sky, the anxiety while sitting and watching the news all day, and the internal clock reminding me to check in with friends and family around the city throughout the day. I remember when the news helicopter feed caught the start of smaller fires closer to my neighborhood.

The city is vast, but it suddenly felt so small. The sense of community the fires established would be integral to the city during a historic year. Later in 2025, the National Guard would come to LA to aid in immigration raids. Every Saturday, my apartment building’s call box would have cards in English and in Spanish explaining one’s rights if ICE comes to the door.

My friend attended a worship night at a church days before two asylum-seeking leaders there were detained. The practices of networking about fire-relief efforts became the same strategies for checking in with one another about the immigration raids.

The tumult of events in Los Angeles in 2025 reshaped the city, making a transient place feel like a rooted community. The churches of Los Angeles have been instrumental in that shift. Today, we are sharing the story of three churches and the challenges they have faced since the fires burned their sanctuaries.

In Other News

Bible sales are up, but so are sales for sex-filled “romantasy.”
An evangelical hospital in Zimbabwe treats life-threatening illnesses amid a struggling public health care system.
A Spanish Christian who went viral for botching a restoration of 20th-century fresco Ecce Homo has died.

PAID CONTENT FOR GLOO

Values-Aligned AI

Technology has revolutionized our world time and time again. Electricity transformed daily life, increased industrial productivity, and provided safer and more stable power for lighting, heating and cooking alike. Television…

Today in Christian History

January 7, 1536: Catherine of Aragon, whose divorce from Henry VIII was the catalyst for the English Reformation, dies (see issue 48: Thomas Cranmer).

Church Scandals Don’t Negate God’s Faithfulness

Imagine a well-known denomination is enjoying a season of prosperity. Attendance is high. Ministry is faithful. Prayers are answered. God feels near. The good times last for years. But then,…

The Insufficient Secular Case Against Porn

If you’re a Christian reading Pornocracy, the slim new polemic from British advocates Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel, I bet you’ll find yourself nodding along. Here’s the thesis: Pornography is bad.…

Carving Out Faith

Each January, as Christmas is observed on the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar, the population of the quiet highland town of Lalibela swells with thousands of pilgrims. They arrive from farming villages,…

Journalism Was My Religion. Then I Encountered Jesus Christ.

When I was 26, I fell in love with a girl I met in the newsroom. From my desk as a journalist for a daily newspaper in Curitiba, Brazil, I…

in the magazine

As we enter the holiday season, we consider how the places to which we belong shape us—and how we can be the face of welcome in a broken world. In this issue, you’ll read about how a monastery on Patmos offers quiet in a world of noise and, from Ann Voskamp, how God’s will is a place to find home. Read about modern missions terminology in our roundtable feature and about an astrophysicist’s thoughts on the Incarnation. Be sure to linger over Andy Olsen’s reported feature “An American Deportation” as we consider Christian responses to immigration policies. May we practice hospitality wherever we find ourselves.

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