Since the beginning of 2019, Southern Baptist Convention president J. D. Greear has been among the highest-profile advocates for preventing sexual abuse and protecting victims of abuse in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
Now advocates for abuse survivors are criticizing Greear after his church decided to hire a teaching pastor who has been accused of mishandling an abuse claim in the past.
A day after Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University in Virginia, tweeted an image of a face mask depicting figures in blackface and dressed as Klansmen, Christopher House, an online instructor for the university, announced his resignation on Facebook.
Many United Methodist clergy gave Pentecost Sunday sermons on the scourge of racism, prompted by the latest high-profile killing of a black man in police custody. But DeAndre Johnson may have outpreached and outreached them all by offering his own protest hymn, “It Is Enough!”
The video of Johnson singing for online worship at Christ Church Sugar Land, in Texas, had about 19,000 Facebook views as of June 2, with hundreds of shares.
With the increasing rate of COVID-19 cases in Nigeria, the Catholic community is responding and supporting the government’s efforts to combat the virus.
In May, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria donated 425 church-run hospitals, clinics, and health facilities to the government. The hospitals, which will be used as isolation centers for coronavirus patients, were handed over to the presidential task force that coordinates the pandemic response across the country.
In the early evening on June 1, President Donald Trump stood before the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in downtown Washington and held aloft a Bible for cameras.
The photo opportunity had an eerie quality: Trump said relatively little, positioned stoically in front of the boarded-up church, which had been damaged the day before in a fire during protests sparked by the death of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis.
The church appeared to be completely abandoned.
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.
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.