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The day after the election, Lisa Sharon Harper nearly gave up the name “evangelical.”

Harper, chief church engagement officer at Sojourners, a progressive Christian organization, “felt betrayed” by the 81 percent of white evangelical Christians who voted for Donald Trump for president. Their vote was essential to the victory of a candidate she described as “representing all of the things Jesus stood against—lust for money, sex, and power.”

When a 6.6-magnitude earthquake struck Norcia, Italy, Benedict Nivakoff and the other Benedictine monks who live there escaped injury.

But their historic basilica and monas­tery, built above the birthplace of St. Bene­dict, collapsed on October 30.

“Is this the end of the book or the beginning of a new chapter?” asked Niva­koff, an American monk from Connecti­cut who has lived in Norcia for 15 years and is the subprior of the community. “We want to make this a new chapter.”

Leonard Cohen, a Jewish singer, songwriter, poet, and novelist most widely known for his song “Hallelujah,” died November 7 at age 82.

Cohen, grandson of a Talmudic scholar, grew up in Montreal’s Jewish community.

“The first poetry that affected me was in the synagogue, in the liturgy and the Bible stories, and that would send shivers down my spine,” Cohen said in the documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man.

He became a Buddhist monk in the 1990s, which he didn’t see as conflicting with Judaism, according to interviews.

Before Nat Dixon preaches, he picks up his tenor saxophone and riffs a bit.

Blending the gos­pel message with jazz is what the former full-time musician has been doing for years, with his parishioners at St. Stephen’s United Methodist in the Bronx, New York, as the principal beneficiaries.

Barney Zeitz, 65, an artist on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, doesn’t know where in Europe his ancestors lived. But it could have been a town like Flieden, Germany, where there was a Jewish community from 1562 until 1938.

Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, 50, will be the first black woman to lead a diocese in the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopal Diocese of Indiana­polis elected her on the second ballot during a diocesan convention held at Christ Church Cathedral, Indianapolis, on October 28. She has been director of networking in the Epis­copal Diocese of Chicago. Other black women have served as suffragan bishop, assisting the diocesan bish­op, said Jim Naugh­ton, a spokes­man for the Diocese of Chicago.

Samuel Kabue believes in giving people chances. He was born during the “very, very hard” colonial days in Kenya and saw his hopes for life after national independence changed when he became blind at age 16.

“I am what I am because people gave me a chance to prove myself,” said Kabue, an ordained elder of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, who leads the Ecumenical Disability Advocates Net­work. He recently published a memoir, From the Village to the World.

Rachel Azaria’s office is sparsely but intentionally decorated with a Hebrew translation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s biography and a framed photo of her role model, Hillary Clinton.  

Before she became a member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, Azaria spent her childhood shuttling between the United States and Israel. This has led her to try to quell the conflicts between Am­erican and Israeli Jews over questions of religious practice.