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(The Christian Science Monitor) "What would happen if a mother from Guatemala showed up at your church door with a little kid in her arms and said, 'Can you help me?'"

Max L. Stackhouse, an influential theologian and social ethicist, died at the age of 80 at his home in West Stock­bridge, Massachusetts, on January 30.

Stackhouse taught at Andover Newton Theological School for nearly 30 years, and then at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1993 to 2006. He was an or­dained minister in the United Church of Christ and had served as president of the American Theological Society and the Society for Christian Ethics.

He authored or edited 25 books, including On Moral Business and God and Globalization.

c. 2016 Religion News Service

CANTERBURY, England (RNS) A new book examining the decline of the Church England was withdrawn from circulation by one of the U.K.’s leading publishing houses, Bloomsbury Publishing.

That Was The Church That Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People was supposed to be released on February 11.

c. 2016 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS) Episcopal Church presiding bishop Michael Curry is describing the recent censure of his church over allowing clergy to perform same-sex marriages as a “fair” move by the wider Anglican Communion.

Anglican primates voted last month in Canterbury, England, to remove the Episcopal Church from votes on doctrine and to ban it from representing the communion in ambassadorial relationships for three years.

Larycia Hawkins, a professor at Wheaton College who faced termination from her tenured post at the evangelical school for publicly saying Christians and Muslims worship the “same God,” has announced in a joint statement with the college that she will leave the school.

The statement said they reached a “confidential agreement under which they will part ways.”

Wheaton president Philip Ryken e-mailed students, faculty, and staff Feb­ruary 6 to announce that the “complex and painful” controversy has now “come to a place of resolution.”

The family of writer and farmer Wendell Berry has lived among the hay fields and rolling knobs of central Kentucky for nine generations. Now, the 81-year-old writer wants to pass on his farming legacy.

He has selected a small Catholic liberal arts college about an hour’s drive from Louisville, run by the Dominican Sisters of Peace. The sisters have been part of this community since 1822, teaching and farming on their own 550-acre stretch of land. That impressed Wendell Berry’s daughter, Mary Berry.

(The Christian Science Monitor) As Colin Christopher sat among a diverse group of American Muslims meeting with President Obama on Wednesday, the young environmental activist could only feel inspired as so many people talked about protecting the country’s tradition of religious liberty.

In a time of rising Islamophobia, President Obama made a plea for religious tolerance during his first presidential visit to an American mosque.

In keeping with local Muslim tradition, Obama removed his shoes and began by noting that many Americans have never been to a mosque.

“This is where families come to worship and express their love for God and each other,” he said.

A luxury housing construction project in the works at Union Theological Seminary could potentially save the school’s Upper Man­hattan campus by raising more than $100 million for urgently needed renovations and repairs.

But supporters say it’s a risky venture with no guarantees of success. And opposition is mounting from stakeholders who worry that the institution, renowned for solidarity with society’s poor and marginalized, could lose its soul in the process.

Several American Jewish groups celebrated a recent Israeli government decision to greatly expand—and fund—a pluralistic and egalitarian prayer section adjacent to the Western Wall plaza as a first step toward official Israeli recognition of non-Orthodox streams of Judaism.

The Western Wall, or Kotel, the holiest site in Judaism after the Temple Mount, is a remnant of the second Jewish Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in the year 66.