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A 66-year-old Jehovah’s Witness in Russia has re­ceived a six-year sentence for practicing his faith, a particularly harsh penalty in a country where rape is punishable with a three- to six-year prison term and kidnapping with a five-year term.

Yuriy Savelyev had already been in pretrial detention for two years before his sentencing on December 16.

Savelyev is the fifth member of the religious group to receive a six-year sentence since the country declared the faith group “extremist” in a 2017 Supreme Court ruling.

A megachurch pastor pursuing a doctorate at Southwestern Baptist Theo­logi­cal Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, an­nounced in a published article on December 16 that he was withdrawing from his degree program and severing his church’s affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention over a recent statement by its seminary presidents on critical race theory.

The Episcopal Diocese of Chicago has elected Paula E. Clark as its next bishop. She will be both the first African Ameri­can and the first woman to serve as diocesan bishop in Chicago.

“I am overwhelmed. I’m humbled and filled with so much joy, people of the Diocese of Chicago. I can hardly believe it,” Clark told the convention in a video posted later on the diocese’s search and transition website.

Clark, a native of Washington, DC, is canon to the ordinary and chief of staff in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

Patriarch Irinej, head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, died of COVID-19 on November 20 at the age of 90. He contracted the virus three weeks earlier while officiating the large, public funeral of a senior bishop who had died of COVID-19.

According to reports, mourners at the bishop’s funeral did not wear masks or maintain social distancing. Many of them also kissed his body, which was in an open casket. Local health officials had flagged the funeral as a health risk.

Cheryl Stewart Pero, one of the first Black Luth­eran women to be ordained in the United States, died on October 28 after a short illness and hospitalization. She was 69.

In 1980, Pero became the second Black woman ordained in the Lutheran Church in America, a predecessor body of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She was also the first Black woman to receive a PhD in biblical studies, which she earned at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.

Eddie Benton-Banai, who helped found the American Indian Movement, partly in response to alleged police brutality against Indigenous people, died on November 30. He was 89.

Benton-Banai, who was Anishi­naabe Ojibwe, was born and raised on the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation in northern Wisconsin. He made a life of connecting American Indians with their spirituality and promoting sovereignty. He was the grand chief, or spiritual leader, of the Three Fires Midewiwin Lodge.