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Frederick Reese accepts congressional medal for civil rights marchers

Frederick D. Reese, a Baptist minister who took part in the 1965 marches in Sel­ma, Alabama, received the Con­gres­sional Gold Medal on behalf of all of those who worked for the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Speaking at the U.S. Capitol ceremony on February 24, Reese said that God enabled the civil rights leaders to endure the beatings they faced.

“Had it not been for the Lord on our side, we would have perished by the way,” said Reese, 86, who has served as a longtime pastor and leader of the Dallas County Voters League, which invited Martin Luther King Jr. to Selma.

Max Stackhouse, influential theologian and ethicist, dies at 80

Max L. Stackhouse, an influential theologian and social ethicist, died at the age of 80 at his home in West Stock­bridge, Massachusetts, on January 30.

Stackhouse taught at Andover Newton Theological School for nearly 30 years, and then at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1993 to 2006. He was an or­dained minister in the United Church of Christ and had served as president of the American Theological Society and the Society for Christian Ethics.

He authored or edited 25 books, including On Moral Business and God and Globalization.

Larycia Hawkins, Wheaton College professor, reaches agreement with school

Larycia Hawkins, a professor at Wheaton College who faced termination from her tenured post at the evangelical school for publicly saying Christians and Muslims worship the “same God,” has announced in a joint statement with the college that she will leave the school.

The statement said they reached a “confidential agreement under which they will part ways.”

Wheaton president Philip Ryken e-mailed students, faculty, and staff Feb­ruary 6 to announce that the “complex and painful” controversy has now “come to a place of resolution.”

Wendell and Mary Berry bequest farming legacy to small Catholic college

The family of writer and farmer Wendell Berry has lived among the hay fields and rolling knobs of central Kentucky for nine generations. Now, the 81-year-old writer wants to pass on his farming legacy.

He has selected a small Catholic liberal arts college about an hour’s drive from Louisville, run by the Dominican Sisters of Peace. The sisters have been part of this community since 1822, teaching and farming on their own 550-acre stretch of land. That impressed Wendell Berry’s daughter, Mary Berry.

China imprisons pastors of prominent churches as crackdown goes on

(The Christian Science Monitor) Two prominent Chinese Protestant pastors were arrested as part of what appears to be the toughest crackdown on civil society since Mao Zedong’s Cul­tural Revolution of the 1960s.

Gu Yuese, head of China’s largest evan­gelical congregation, the Chongyi Church in Hangzhou, and his wife, Zhou Lianmei, a Bible teacher, were detained in late January and held incommunicado. Zhou was later released, according to China Aid, a religious freedom advocacy organization.