Below are this week's Articles of Interest as compiled by Mr. Van Baker. This collection of articles is cultivated by Mr. Baker with the goal of highlighting some of the trends, upheavals, and things to watch for in our society. These articles are not necessarily the express views of the United Church of God, Mr. Baker, or me as the pastor, but they are informative of what is occurring in our nation and culture. In accordance with Christ's warning to correctly discern the times (Matthew 16:1-4), it is wise to be aware of what is going on around us.

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Canadian Military Chaplains Can’t Mention God in Public – While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seeks to make US military chaplains more explicitly religious, the Canadian government is heading in the opposite direction as new directives ban chaplains from using religious language at public events. Released on July 29, the instructions noted that members of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) making public remarks at any type of public or semi-public event “shall uphold the principle of state religious and spiritual neutrality by not using words, actions, or symbols that are specific to a particular SFT [Spiritual or Faith Tradition] on the part of the Government of Canada.”
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/08/canada-chaplains-ban-god-religion-military/

The little-noticed Supreme Court case that could impact where people pray – Daniel Grand wanted to host a small prayer session at his home near Cleveland. Instead, he wound up on a four-year pilgrimage to the Supreme Court. Grand, an Orthodox Jew, had invited about a dozen people to his rec room in early 2021 for a minyan, a prayer gathering of at least 10 men. Hours after learning about the invitation, city officials in University Heights, Ohio, sent him a cease-and-desist notice demanding that he first obtain a special-use permit. “I was taken aback, frankly,” Grand told CNN. “I knew I didn’t need a permit to pray.” For a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court that almost always sides with religious interests, Grand’s little-noticed appeal is primed to expand the power of churches, synagogues and other religious entities to challenge zoning laws that restrict their access to residential neighborhoods.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/10/politics/prayer-supreme-court-religious-zoning

Sports Gambling Is Still a Bad Bet – Where betting is legalized, lives are being destroyed. The cost to consumers is not only in the bet. According to a 2025 article ... in The Atlantic, for every dollar spent on betting, household investing fell by an average of two dollars. The years since 2018 have been marked by large increases in over-drafted bank accounts and maxed-out credit cards. Legalized sports gambling has increased “the risk that a household goes bankrupt by 25 to 30 percent” and has caused debt delinquency to surge. The financial strain, in turn, worsens social pathologies. According to research cited by Lehman, an upset loss for an NFL home team correlates to a 10% spike in male domestic abuse. Overall, states with legalized sports gambling have seen an estimated 9% increase in “intimate-partner violence.” As it turns out, it is possible to legislate morality, or, in this case, to legislate an increase in immorality.
https://breakpoint.org/sports-gambling-is-still-a-bad-bet/

Russians Open Churches In Africa: Is It ‘Spiritual Colonialism’? [The ancient Greek Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church ] are now competing for the same continent. One has been there since the first century, while the other arrived in December 2021 — and has expanded with striking speed. It has become more than just a turf battle between the two churches over the hearts and minds of local Orthodox priests and laypeople. To some observers, it’s part of a growing, concerning trend of Russia deepening geopolitical ties throughout Africa, and leveraging soft power to remake the continent in its own image.
https://religionunplugged.com/news/russia-orthodox-church-is-rapidly-expanding-across-africa

The Shroud of Turin: Anything Left to Say? The history of Christianity’s most controversial relic.
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/the-shroud-of-turin-anything-left-to-say/

God and the Astronomers – If you were guessing, would you say a pastor or an astronomer was most likely the author of this quote: “Astronomy leads us to a universe created out of nothing”? If a pastor said it, you might well dismiss it as more a belief than a fact. If an astronomer is the author of that quote, then it merits your most serious consideration. How did it get here? Or has it just always been? So who said the quote in the lead above? Arno Penzias, the Nobel Laureate in Physics and the American physicist and radio astronomer who, with Robert Woodrow Wilson, discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) that provides strong evidence for the Big Bang theory of the universe’s beginning. In the following short video produced by the John 10:10 Project and Illustra Media, Robert Jastrow, founder of NASA’s Goddard Space Institute, explained why his agnosticism fails to explain how the world came to be. He passed away in 2008 without coming to a satisfactory explanation.
https://www.hillfaith.org/intelligent-design/this-is-huge-god-and-the-astronomers/

Why are so many young women leaving Mormonism? A recent article in BYU Studies called attention to two clear trends in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States. The first is that Mormons are succeeding in many ways — we pray more, attend church more and report being happier than most other Americans. The other trend the article noted is that markedly fewer people are staying in the church. We’re keeping about half, which is a big drop from what it used to be. We kept about 8 in 10 childhood members back in the 1980s. And the biggest bombshell? Women are now more likely to leave than men, especially if they’re younger.
https://religionnews.com/2026/08/04/why-are-so-many-young-women-leaving-mormonism/

The machines that will replace us are already more clever than we are, and there's no putting this genie back in the bottle – When even the captain leaves the ship, we know it’s ready to sink. This week one of the most prominent men in Silicon Valley resigned and has gone off to write poetry. Mrinank Sharma, former head of the £255billion Anthropic company’s Safeguards Research team, has left because, as he explained artificial intelligence (AI) guarantees that ‘The world is in peril.’
https://righttimes.substack.com/p/ai-we-have-already-doomed-ourselves