Scott Black Johnston and Patrick O’Connor, two Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) pastors whose congregations have ties to the Trump family, met with the president for 20 minutes days before his inauguration.
Eyob Yishak, who coordinates the peace office of the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus and teaches at Mekane Yesus Theological Seminary in Addis Ababa, was one of several leaders who gathered to talk about the role of religious groups in peace building.
The Lutheran World Federation and the Zimbabwe Council of Churches hosted a consultation, Faith-Based Engagement in Conflict Transformation, in December in Zimbabwe.
While the Iraqi conflict is not over, Archbishop Yousif Mirkis of Kirkuk is focused on how to heal his deeply divided country.
He called for a Marshall Plan for Iraq, referring to U.S. aid to Western Europe after World War II, during a visit to Paris to raise funds for an educational project he oversees. He is part of the Chaldean Church, which represents Catholics from Iraq and neighboring countries.
Through the project several hundred university students—Christians, Yazidis, and Muslims—study and live together.
Ibrahim Nseir was chatting at a Beirut hotel in late November with others attending a gathering of Protestant leaders from around the Middle East and beyond when a call came from his wife in Aleppo, Syria.
She had just heard that one of the families in their Presbyterian congregation had a rocket land in front of their house at midnight. It blew out the windows, covering the sleeping family with shards of glass. The family survived.
Paula White, a televangelist and prosperity gospel advocate, was chosen to deliver an invocation at Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
On New Year’s Day at New Destiny Christian Center, her predominantly African-American megachurch just outside Orlando, she preached: “God is not going to change the government. He’s going to send someone to do it.”
Among those chosen to pray at an inauguration, White is the second woman. She had delivered a benediction at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Huston Smith, author of the popular textbook The World’s Religions, died December 30 at age 97. He died at home in Berkeley, California, “after a long illness,” according to his website.
Initially published in 1958, his textbook has sold 3 million copies.
Jason Fader, one of a dozen surgeons serving the nation of Burundi, won the first-ever Gerson L’Chaim Prize for Outstanding Christian Medical Missionary Service.
The $500,000 prize is given by the African Mission Healthcare Foundation, which supports medical missionaries and mission hospitals. The president is Jon Fielder, a medical missionary in Kenya, who founded the organization with his friend Mark Gerson, an entrepreneur and author.
“Dr. Fader and his team are a link in a string of unsung heroes,” Gerson said in a statement.
Macleod Baker Ochola II, 84, a retired Anglican bishop in northern Uganda, is agitating for restorative justice in a region where the wounds of a brutal war unleashed by the Lord’s Resistance Army persist.
Ochola has been responding to concerns that the modern court system may not deliver justice for the people who suffered in the complex conflict.