William Sterling Cary, a pioneering minister and civil rights activist who was the first Black person in prominent church leadership roles, including president of the National Council of Churches, has died, according to family members. He was 94.
Cary died November 14 at his suburban Chicago home following heart failure stemming from a long illness, his daughter Yvonne Cary Carter said.
Marvin Olasky, the longtime editor in chief of World, a magazine that has long aimed to pair a conservative Christian viewpoint with careful, detailed reporting, resigned on November 1, effective January 31.
Olasky had hoped to end his tenure, which began in 1994, next summer. Those plans changed after World’s publisher announced the launch of a new online opinion section, overseen by Albert Mohler, a prominent Southern Baptist seminary president known for his conservative commentary.
Bryan Massingale accepted the Isaac Hecker Award for Social Justice from the Paulist Center on November 13. Massingale, a Catholic priest and theological ethicist, was given the award for his work toward justice and inclusion for Black and LGBTQ people in the Catholic Church.
Previous recipients of the award include Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, and Helen Prejean.
In a statement, the Paulist Center said that for more than four decades Massingale had “addressed these twin bases of discrimination,” calling him a modern prophet.
New Testament scholar and archaeologist Edgar M. Krentz died on October 31. He was 93.
Krentz was perhaps best known for his 1975 book The Historical-Critical Method, which provided an introduction to and survey of historical criticism as a means of biblical interpretation. He was also a longtime professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, teaching his last class in 2018 despite retiring 20 years earlier.
Krentz’s interest in the historical-critical method began in 1963.
Thema Bryant-Davis, an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, has been elected as the 2023 president of the American Psychological Association. Bryant-Davis currently directs the Culture and Trauma Research Lab at Pepperdine University, along with the mental health ministry at First AME Church in South Los Angeles.
This summer, Donald Ottenhoff, a former Century senior editor, retired from his position as executive director of the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research. Ottenhoff led the institute, located on the property of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, for 17 years.
Ottenhoff is credited with expanding the institute beyond its original residential scholars program where, beginning in 1968, scholars could come to the campus for either a year or a semester of independent study, prayer, and ecumenical dialogue.
Religions for Peace’s deputy secretary general, Kyoichi Sugino, has resigned his position to take on the role of president of Gakurin Seminary, a lay Buddhist training institution in Tokyo. Sugino served in leadership at Religions for Peace for 23 years, becoming deputy secretary general in 2011.
Megan Rice, a Catholic sister and peace activist who spent two years in federal prison after breaking into a government security complex to protest nuclear weapons, has died. She was 91.
Rice spent 23 years in West Africa working as a teacher and pastoral guide. It was there that she started hearing about the Plowshares movement for peace.
When she returned to the United States, Rice began her involvement in antinuclear activism.
Kenneth Rowe, a historian who was known as the leading United Methodist bibliographer, died on October 8. He was 84.
“He completely reshaped how we understand the narrative of Methodism in America, expanding it to include indigenous persons, women and LGBTQ+ persons,” said the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History in a remembrance.
Rowe was an ordained United Methodist elder, but after a brief period in local church and campus ministry, he found his calling in academia.
Georgia senator Raphael Warnock received the Roosevelt Institute’s Freedom of Worship Award in a ceremony on October 13.
“I really felt that the strength of his pastoral voice was unique,” said Anne Roosevelt, granddaughter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and board chair of the institute.