The Nativity scene at Claremont United Methodist Church in California is striking.
Mannequins of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are separated in individual cages topped with barbed wire. A baby Jesus is wrapped in what resembles a Mylar blanket, similar to the sheets migrants have been given in holding cells.
On a podium, a message reads: “What if this family sought refuge in our country today?”
With the closing of the Newseum on December 31, the nation’s capital has one less museum, but the Religious Freedom Center that was housed there will continue operations.
Gene Policinski, chief operating officer of the Freedom Forum Institute, which includes the center among its projects, said the building has not been the core of his institute’s operations, which occur more in other locations and online.
More than 10,000 Christians have signed a petition urging officials at Boston College to reject a potential donation from the Koch Foundation toward the Jesuit university’s political science department.
The online Christian social justice organization Faithful America submitted the signatures to school administrators on December 12, arguing that accepting money from the libertarian multibillionaire Koch family is “completely antithetical to BC’s Jesuit ideals.”
For decades, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was one of Boy Scouts of America’s greatest allies and the largest sponsor of troops. But the Utah-based church delivered a blow to the struggling organization when it announced that at the beginning of 2020 it would be pulling more than 400,000 young people out of the program and moving them into a new global program of its own.
The change may push the Boy Scouts closer to the brink of bankruptcy as it faces a new wave of sexual abuse lawsuits.
Delegates to the Union for Reform Judaism’s biennial meeting in Chicago on December 13 voted overwhelmingly to advocate for the creation of a federal commission to study and develop proposals for reparations to African Americans for slavery.
The resolution is the first such effort on the part of an American Jewish organization but has precedent among some Protestant groups.
In a surprise move, Pope Francis on December 8 appointed Filipino Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila as the head of Propaganda Fide, the major Vatican department for evangelization. It’s a move that emphasizes this pontificate’s efforts to highlight the global dimension of the church and taps the cardinal as a possible successor.
At 62, Cardinal Tagle will oversee all of the Catholic missions in the world, a natural transition from his current appointment as president of the global Catholic charity Caritas Internationalis.
Deborah Krause has been named the first female president at Eden Theological Seminary. She will replace David Greenhaw, who will retire from the United Church of Christ institution this summer after a 23-year tenure.
Krause currently serves as a professor of New Testament studies at Eden. Krause has worked to make Eden a more diverse campus. She led the seminary’s participation in the Ferguson freedom movement following the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in nearby Ferguson, Missouri.
Scholar and author Jerry Pattengale has been appointed interim CEO and president of the Religion News Foundation and CEO and publisher of Religion News Service, a subsidiary of the foundation. Pattengale replaces Tom Gallagher, who was hired in 2016. A reason was not given for Gallagher’s departure.
“During this season of rapid change in the media industry and nonprofit sector, RNF and RNS are well-positioned for continued growth,” Pattengale said in a press release. “Our future looks bright, thanks to the remarkable expertise of our board, staff and journalists.”
Donna Mote regularly accompanies military personnel escorting the caskets of fallen service members through Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, where she serves as a chaplain.
Mote is the first person to greet the escorts once they step off the plane. She stands shoulder to shoulder with them while an honor guard marches with flags of the five military branches. She stays with them through their layover at the airport. She’s there for support. In many cases, the escorts are grieving because they knew the deceased.
Christian conservatives have unfairly co-opted religious liberty as their political issue, says a new report from the Law, Rights, and Religion Project at Columbia Law School.
“Far from abandoning this fundamental right, people of faith outside the conservative movement have taken up the fight for religious freedom in a wide variety of contexts,” the authors wrote in Whose Faith Matters? The Fight for Religious Liberty Beyond the Christian Right.