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Leonid Kishkovsky, who came to the United States as a childhood refugee from war-torn Poland and later became a leader in cross-church cooperation and the first Eastern Orthodox president of the National Council of Churches, has died. He was 78.

Kishkovsky died of a heart attack on August 3, according to the Orthodox Church in America, where he served as director of external affairs and interchurch relations. He had long been in high-level administration at the OCA’s offices while also serving as a parish priest for a nearby church.

Beverly Shamana, the second Black woman to become a bishop in the United Methodist Church, died August 1. She was 81 and died of complications from Parkinson’s disease, said Yvonne Williams Boyd, a California chaplain and close friend.

“Women bishops stand on the strength of her shoulders,” said UMC Council of Bishops president Cynthia Fierro Harvey in a press release. “Her commitment to the episcopacy and for women bishops was paramount.”

Shamana answered a call to ministry in the mid-1970s. She became an elder in the California-Pacific Conference in 1984.

Donald W. Shriver Jr., an acclaimed Christian ethicist and Presbyterian minister who wrote widely about the need for White Americans to face and repent of their racist past, died July 28 at 93.

Shriver served as president of Union Theological Seminary in New York from 1975 to 1991 and is credited with hiring leading Black scholars and clergy, including James Forbes, James Washington, and Cornel West. West once called Shriver “the most prophetic seminary president in the late 20th century.”

In a June 21 blog post, Farhana Khera, cofounder and ex­ecutive director of the civil rights group Muslim Advocates, said she had been forced out of her role due to gender and religious discrimination.

At least four advisory council members have since resigned in protest, and the organization is now investigating Khera’s complaints.

Stan Mc­Kenzie, the husband of Afri­can Methodist Epis­copal Church bishop Vashti Mur­phy Mc­Ken­zie, died on July 21 in Dal­las after a brief illness. He was 76.

Less than two weeks before, Mc­Kenzie’s wife—the first woman bishop in the denomination’s 205-year history—praised her spouse at the retirement service for bishops during the AME Church’s General Conference.

Edgardo Colón-Emeric began his tenure as the dean of Duke Divinity School on July 1. He was appointed to a two-year term.

Colón-Emeric, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico, is an associate professor of theology and reconciliation as well as the director of Duke Divinity’s Center for Reconcili­ation. He has served on the faculty since 2008. He is also an ordained elder in the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church—the conference’s first Latinx elder.