Here are a few more interesting pictures from Israel. I hope you enjoy.

I'm going to open up the comments on this post because I would love to hear your feedback on this.

In a previous post I noted about how the ACLU went after the Gideons and a judge said that the bible is an "instrument of religion" which is why she thinks the bible should be banned from distribution. And as I was thinking about the reason the bible is being "banned from distribution" I had a few thoughts concerning what else we should "ban" because the item is an "instrument of religion".

As anyone knows if you've been in the blogosphere long enough you're going to have to deal with people who leave rude, nasty, unnecessary and annoying comments and trackbacks. As a result of the few who have been doing this on this blog, I have turned off all the comments for future posts - including this one.

Since it's Monday (again), I thought it might be fun to open the week with a question to you all. How was your weekend? Is there any news you have heard about Christian persecution that you've been thinking about? Is there anything in the media that has caught your attention today that we should know about?

Every once in awhile the ministry of The Voice of the Martyrs comes under criticism by people who hear about the ministry. Recently we came across a blogger that criticized Bibles Unbound for sending only New Testaments, and not whole Bibles. VOM’s Todd Nettleton posted a response to this blogger, who wrote that she wouldn’t support a program “that divides the Scriptures in half.” I thought that his response was worth re-posting here.

I wanted to let you all know that there will not be a persecution blog round up this week. I'm flying to Portland, Oregon very early tomorrow morning for a conference and will not be in the office until Monday morning. Please send your entries for next week and we will resume the round up then.

Last night I was reading Psalm 10 and I couldn't help but think of the persecuted church as I was reading it. When you consider that the saints of old were persecuted this Psalm is really no surprise. Yet, even though we may not be persecuted in the same way I know we often feel the same cry of our hearts. The Psalmist begins Psalm 10 this way,

A few days ago I was reading a very cool little book called Christmas in My Soul (Vol 1) by Joe Wheeler and in the book was a little history of how St. Nicholas became Santa Claus. Well, that captivated me because one of the things I read in this book was that St. Nicholas was a persecuted Christian! So of course, I thought ...this is great for this blog.