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Some legal scholars and advocates are calling for more disclosure about the managerial misconduct that led to the firings of two senior Episcopal Church administrators after a four-month misconduct investigation.

c. 2016 Religion News Service

(RNS) The world’s largest gathering of Muslim leaders kicks off a five-day conference this week that will call for a new peace process to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Other weighty issues at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation summit include combatting extremism within Muslim nations, countering Islamophobia in the rest of the world, and protecting the Rohingya—a group of Muslims suffering persecution in Myanmar.

The altar is set with a drum kit, a keyboard, a saxophone, and—most importantly—a much-loved vinyl rendering of a jazz classic, complete with liner notes.

This is St. John Coltrane Church, a 48-year-old San Francisco institution, where Sunday masses are built on a live performance of A Love Supreme, a 33-minute opus that saxophonist Coltrane wrote to express the awesomeness of God.

Calling for change in the way Cath­olics approach family issues, Pope Francis issued an apostolic exhortation that maintains church teachings on divorce and sexuality.

Francis used the document to outline his views on how the church should respond to modern-day realities of family life, such as encouraging husbands to do more household chores and parents to be less tied to their mobile phones.

As several southern states weighed bills on religious liberty, Mississippi governor Phil Bryant signed one that allows businesses to refuse service to LGBT customers based on religious convictions, while Georgia governor Nathan Deal vetoed a similar bill, saying the measure proposed to fix a problem that didn’t exist. 

After signing the bill on April 5, Gov. Bryant stated, “This bill merely reinforces the rights which currently exist to the exercise of religious freedom as stated in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

A pioneering mediation program in Brazil is helping the judicial system reduce a backlog of cases overloading the country’s courts by getting religious leaders involved in resolving conflicts between families and neighbors.

The Mediar e Divino (To Mediate Is Divine) pilot project in the state of Goiás has started training Christian clergy on the legalities of addressing disputes.

(The Christian Science Monitor) Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) signed a controversial bill into law on Tuesday that allows businesses to refuse service to LGBT individuals based on religious convictions, the latest episode in the ongoing tug-of-war between conservative legislatures and the LGBT community.

Civil rights activists have condemned the bill saying that it sanctions discrimination based on to sexual orientation, but Governor Bryant defended it on the basis of religious freedom.

Orthodox Jewish lawmakers have vowed to pass a law nullifying an Israeli Supreme Court decision recognizing all Orthodox conversions—not only those performed by the state-sponsored Chief Rabbinate—as legally valid.

The Israeli high court’s recent ruling compels the state to accept as Jewish all converts who have undergone Orthodox conversions inside and outside Israel. It is a defeat for the Orthodox rabbinate, which until now has enjoyed sole authority over Jewish institutions in Israel.

Millions of people in several eastern and southern African nations are facing malnutrition, disease, and other harm as a result of El Niño–related extreme weather patterns: drought in late 2015 and heavy rains in the past few months.

“We have seen too much water in some places and too little in other places,” said Nagulan Nesiah, a senior officer in Episcopal Relief and De­velopment’s disaster response and risk reduction work.