Episcopal Divinity School to join Union seminary in New York
EDS students will earn Union degrees, and EDS appointed Kelly Brown Douglas as dean.
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Persecution in Russia and Kazakhstan worsens for Jehovah’s Witnesses
Since the Russian Supreme Court labeled Jehovah’s Witnesses an extremist group, vandals have targeted followers and their bank accounts have been frozen. People have thrown stones at a St. Petersburg assembly hall and tried to burn the Moscow home of a Jehovah’s Witness to the ground, a church spokesman said.
Filmmaker wins Gabriel Award for Reinhold Niebuhr documentary
Martin Doblmeier, founder of Journey Films, won a Gabriel Award for his documentary An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story.
The Gabriel Awards, sponsored by the Catholic Academy for Communications Arts Professionals, honor work in radio, television, new media, and film. An American Conscience, which has been airing on PBS stations across the country, won in the category of television documentary.
United Lutheran Seminary in Pennsylvania names first president
Theresa F. Latini has been named the first president of United Lutheran Seminary, with campuses at Gettysburg and Philadelphia.
She begins her tenure July 1, the inauguration of United Lutheran Seminary, a consolidation of two seminaries, both affiliated with the 3.8-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. ULS’s predecessor institutions date back to 1826, making it the ELCA’s oldest seminary.
Hungarian priest welcomes refugees amid differing local views
In Körmend, a Hungarian town of 12,000 people about 160 miles and two train rides from Budapest, the community has been split by the decision of Zoltán Németh, the local Catholic parish priest, to shelter asylum seekers.
The refugee issue is a heated one in Hungary, with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government taking an increasingly hostile line against those seeking asylum in the country. In April the Hungarian authorities announced the detention of all asylum seekers, and state news outlets push a steady stream of xenophobic stories.
Indonesian Christian leader jailed under blasphemy law
Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, an Indonesian Protestant whose popularity as a politician in the world’s largest Muslim nation appeared to be a sign of interreligious tolerance, was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to two years in jail.
Duke Divinity professor disciplined amid diversity training complaint
Duke Divinity School has taken disciplinary action against a professor who wrote in an email to all faculty that a racial equity training event they had been encouraged to attend was “definitively anti-intellectual” and had “totalitarian tendencies.”
When the conflict became public, someone at the divinity school sent the full text of several emails and images of printed letters to Rod Dreher at the American Conservative, who in turn published them on his blog.
When a church closes, where does its pipe organ go?
A 112-year-old pipe organ in the sanctuary of a now-closed church needs a new home. The $500,000 instrument is in good condition and free—if you can pay $10,000 to $30,000 to remove it from the old West Nashville United Methodist Church and reassemble it.
Religious liberty executive order draws mixed reviews
In a Rose Garden ceremony at the White House on the National Day of Prayer, President Trump signed a highly anticipated executive order on religious liberty, basking in the praise of religious leaders who blessed his action as an answer to their prayers.
“It was looking like you’d never get here, folks, but you got here!” a triumphant Trump told the May 4 gathering after a series of invocations from Baptist and Catholic leaders and from Paula White, the prosperity gospel televangelist who is one of Trump’s main religious advisers.
Clash over Bear Ears land tests years of progress on Native American spirituality
(The Christian Science Monitor) Davis Filfred wishes President Trump would take a page from General “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf’s playbook in thinking about Bears Ears National Monument. When Filfred served as a Marine Corps combat engineer in Operation Desert Storm, Schwarzkopf ordered troops not to target religious or archaeological sites for bombing.