Voters in at least two states will have the opportunity to vote for former pastor Mark Charles in November. On August 10, the independent presidential candidate—a dual citizen of the United States and the Navajo nation—announced via Twitter that he would be on the ballot in both Vermont and Colorado.
This spring, Ivy Taylor became the first woman to lead Rust College, a United Methodist liberal arts school in Holly Springs, Mississippi. The college, where journalist and antilynching activist Ida B. Wells- Barnett matriculated, is one of the oldest historically black colleges in the nation.
Liberty University in Virginia announced on August 10 that its board had chosen an interim president to lead the school days after Jerry Falwell Jr. began an indefinite leave of absence after one of his posts on social media created an uproar.
Jerry Prevo, who has served as chairman of the school’s board of trustees since 2003 and recently retired as the senior pastor of a Baptist church in Alaska, assumed the role of acting president immediately, Liberty said in a news release.
As churches closed to slow the spread of COVID-19, Elizabeth Eaton, the presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, began offering weekly video messages from her home.
But viewers were captivated by more than her words of comfort or calls for prayer and action to address issues like systemic racism. On the wall behind her was a neon sign in the shape of the Luther rose—a coat of arms Martin Luther designed more than 500 years ago for the Protestant Reformation he ignited.
A rescue ship purchased via crowdfunding, organized by the Evangelical Church in Germany, set sail from Spain in early August. Named Sea-Watch 4, the ship will aid migrants and asylum seekers attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe.
Beyoncé’s visual album Black Is King, released July 31 on Disney+, brings to life the music of her 2019 album The Lion King: The Gift.
Black Is King reimagines the story of The Lion King, which tells the tale of a young lion named Simba who flees home after his father, the king, is killed, only to rediscover himself and return years later.
“It is this human story of both Simba and black people—that we are trying to find home, come back to home and live into who we truly and fully are,” said writer and theologian Candice Marie Benbow.
The video shows Rabih Thoumy swinging a chain censer, sending smoke into the air, when abruptly there is a rumble and then a loud bang as the shock wave from Beirut’s devastating explosion slams into the church.
Thoumy darts for cover as stained glass and other debris fall from above. The camera tips over, coming to rest focused on a carpeting of glass shards covering the floor.
Kamala Harris filled two criteria that Joe Biden wanted in a running mate: she is a woman, and she is black, two critical Democratic constituencies ahead of the November elections.
On July 20, a Russian court ordered Father Sergiy, an influential monk who has denied the existence of the new coronavirus and urged his followers to ignore government lockdown orders, to pay a fine for fomenting enmity through his sermons.
A Southern Baptist pastor who gave an invocation at a celebration honoring the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan stepped down from his rural Alabama church in late July.
Will Dismukes, who is also a Republican state representative for the city of Prattville, 14 miles northwest of Montgomery, boasted on a Facebook page that he participated at an annual birthday party for Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, a prominent figure in southern history.