Briefly noted

The Holy Cross Hospital and an affiliated nursing school in Leogane, Haiti, have been approved to receive a $200,000 grant from the Louisville-based Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. The hospital was described as destroyed in news reports, but the nursing school began operating as a makeshift hospital quickly after the January 12 earthquake struck. The hospital and school are ministries of the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti but have been a major focus of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission in Haiti.

Joseph Lowery, an icon of the 1960s civil rights movement, cautioned an Auburn University audience not to “sanitize” Martin Luther King Jr.’s achievements. Speaking on King’s birthday, January 15, Lowery said some have hijacked King’s dream to try to derail affirmative action. Lowery said the median income of African-Americans is still about 67 percent of whites. “I’m serious about the need to recapture the spirit of affirmative action,” he said.

It was disappointing that a recent female candidate was not elected Britain’s first female Anglican bishop but still “encouraging” that a woman was one of the three candidates considered by the Scottish Episcopal Church, said a group that advocates for women’s rights. Alison Peden was the first Anglican woman to be short-listed in Britain as a candidate for bishop. On January 16 an electoral synod of the Scottish church instead chose Gregor Duncan as the new bishop of the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway. “It was good to think that we could have had a woman bishop in the Anglican church in Britain, and I am sure it will happen before long,” said Christina Rees, chairperson of WATCH (Women and the Church).