Suzanne Krauthamer Gurwitz remembers little about the 18 months she spent at the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Center in Oswego, New York. She was five when she, her parents, and two older brothers arrived at the former military post near Lake Ontario.
“Like other children, I played,” said Gurwitz, 80, of Plainview, New York. “I don’t remember being unhappy.”
Seven Catholic peace activists who broke into a nuclear submarine base in Kings Bay, Georgia, last year stood before a federal judge on August 7 to argue that the charges against them should be dismissed.
The activists, known as the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, are charged with three felonies and a misdemeanor and face up to 25 years in prison each for trespassing on the US Navy base that houses six Trident submarines carrying hundreds of nuclear weapons.
A federal appeals court has ruled in favor of a county seal that contains a cross, citing a recent Supreme Court decision as the governing precedent.
The unanimous ruling by the Third US Circuit Court of Appeals, issued August 8, overturned a lower court decision that found the seal for Lehigh County in Pennsylvania violated the establishment clause of the Constitution’s First Amendment.
Since they were first offered an opportunity to pool their resources and buy background checks on volunteers and employees at a discount 11 years ago, about a third of Southern Baptist churches have signed up for the OneSource program from LifeWay Christian Resources.
Signaling its support for immigrants, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted to declare itself a “sanctuary church body” at its Churchwide Assembly in Milwaukee. Later on August 7, assembly participants marched to the door of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Milwaukee as part of a prayer vigil for migrant children and their families.
Both events came in response to President Trump’s policies at the United States border with Mexico and his pledge to deport millions.
It sounds far-fetched: with a computer chip implanted in their brain, humans could boost their intelligence with instant access to the Internet, write articles like this one by thinking rather than typing, and communicate with each other without saying a thing—what entrepreneur Elon Musk calls “consensual telepathy.”
The Dominican sisters sat in silence, eyes closed, palms upturned, couches and chairs pushed together into a circle in the room at the Dominican Center at Marywood in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Their reading that evening came not from scripture but from poet Mary Oliver: “Though I play at the edges of knowing, / truly I know / our part is not knowing, / but looking, and touching, and loving.”
The candle flickering in their midst didn’t invoke a saint but rather author and activist James Baldwin.
Dallas residents Lincoln and Natalie Redmon spent two years bouncing from church to church. After marrying and moving to the city, they just couldn’t find the right fit. So late last year Lincoln Redmon wrote down a goal: “Find a home church or have God answer that prayer in a different way.”
A coalition of 430 human rights, civil rights, foreign policy, and faith organizations, leaders, and scholars has submitted a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging him to dismantle his department’s new Commission on Unalienable Rights.
On July 18, Politico reported that Trump administration officials are mulling the option of setting the annual ceiling for refugee admissions to zero. The shift could devastate the refugee resettlement program, which is largely operated by religious groups. Of the nine nonprofit organizations that currently partner with the federal government to resettle refugees, six are faith-based.