While the coronavirus rattles the United States, causing economic hardship for millions and killing more than 90,000 Americans, the findings of a poll by the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research indicate that people may also be searching for deeper meaning in the devastating outbreak.
Dennis Schvejda, a landlord who owns two apartment buildings with 16 units in Walton, New York, was worried as May began. After expenses—which include maintenance, utilities, and taxes—his taxable apartment income is about $115 a week, he said. With the US facing unprecedented job losses and the steepest economic reversal since the Great Depression, he didn’t know if the May rents would be coming. If not, he said, he would have been forced to sell.
A leading gun control advocacy group has enlisted more than a dozen religious leaders to boost voter turnout this fall in support of candidates who support measures to prevent gun violence.
Everytown for Gun Safety, which expects to spend $60 million on this year’s elections, is forging its interfaith effort amid ongoing concerns about shootings at houses of worship. The group’s partners include representatives from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh backgrounds, several of them well-known progressive activists.
Francis Collins, world-renowned geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, is the 2020 recipient of the Templeton Prize. The award, valued at $1.3 million, honors individuals who use scientific advancements to answer the deepest questions related to humanity’s existence and purpose.
Popular Christian evangelist and apologist Ravi Zacharias died May 19 at age 74, a few months after being diagnosed with cancer.
Zacharias rose to prominence in 1983 when he was invited by Billy Graham to speak at the inaugural International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists in Amsterdam, according to an obituary published by the ministry Zacharias founded.
In his message, he pleaded with Christians not to try to “humiliate” those with different worldviews.
“When you are trying to reach someone, please be sensitive to what he holds valuable,” he said.
A Muslim leader who spent the past several years leading a small national following from a federal prison has been released early due to the coronavirus.
Earl Abdulmalik Mohammed claims to be the rightful ideological successor of W. Deen Mohammed, the massively influential black Muslim leader who shepherded the Nation of Islam toward orthodox Sunni Islam under a new association, the American Society of Muslims.
Hadar Cohen, Ala’ Khan, Maya Mansour, and Jonathan Simcosky arrived as strangers, ready to embark on a new interfaith journey. The four roommates moved into a house in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles earlier this year.
They come from different faiths: Baha’i, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. They live rent-free in a new interfaith experiment known as the Abrahamic House, the brainchild of 33-year-old Mohammed Al Samawi, a Muslim man from Yemen who, in his memoir, The Fox Hunt, writes about the threats he endured for his interfaith advocacy.
When COVID-19 cases started popping up in Colombia in mid-March, Bogotá mayor Claudia López realized her city had a head start on at least one response: car-free streets.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is taking a toll on Christian publishing companies. The publishing arms of the nation’s two largest Protestant denominations—the Southern Baptist Convention and the United Methodist Church—both announced staff cuts at the end of April as a result of the virus.
The United Methodist Publishing House will lay off about 70 of its 296 employees in June. The Southern Baptist Convention’s LifeWay Christian Resources started reducing staff on May 1, in addition to implementing hiring and salary freezes and cutbacks.
Following the release of a video months after the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a black jogger in Georgia, religious leaders have raised their voices to ask questions about how and why he died.
On May 7, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced it had charged two white men, Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son, Travis McMichael, 34, with murder and aggravated assault in the case, more than two months after Arbery’s death in Brunswick.