Adam Taylor has been named the new president of Sojourners, the national Christian social justice advocacy organization founded and led by Jim Wallis since the 1970s.
Wallis will continue working with Sojourners under the new title of founder and ambassador. In July he will also join the faculty of Georgetown University as director of a new center focused on “faith, public life, and the common good.”
William Bobby McClain, a longtime leader in the United Methodist Church and the civil rights movement, died November 18 at age 82.
McClain began preaching as a teenager in his hometown of Gadsden, Alabama. He met Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama, according to a statement from Wesley Theological Seminary, where McClain taught preaching and worship for 34 years.
William Eerdmans Jr., who led the independent religious publishing house Wm. B. Eerdmans for more than 50 years, died on November 13 at age 97.
He began working at Eerdmans, which his father founded in 1911, at age 13. During his tenure as president and publisher, which began in 1963, Eerdmans initiated a series of innovations, including books by Catholic and Jewish authors, books on race and gender, and books for children.
For a month, Richard Besdine and his wife discussed whether to see family and friends indoors this fall and winter.
He thinks they should, so long as people have been taking strict precautions during the coronavirus pandemic. She’s not convinced it’s safe, given the heightened risk of viral transmission in indoor spaces.
In the past decade, a Buddhist end-of-life movement has sprung up in non-Buddhist countries, testifying to a need for spiritual accompaniment at the end of life that is felt not only by an aging generation of Buddhist immigrants and converts but by others who want something more than a secular, clinical approach.
Oliver Peters, head of spiritual care at Sukhavati in northern Germany, said the Buddhist center looks to the teaching of Tibetan Buddhist wisdom, particularly the best-selling Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche.
In 1929, Baylor Hospital in Dallas had a problem: it was weeks away from insolvency. Teachers in Dallas also had a problem: they couldn’t afford to take time off when they got sick. Fortunately, businessman and educator Justin Ford Kimball found a deceptively simple way to alleviate both problems—and gave birth to the health insurance industry in the process.
The popular Islamic lifestyle app Muslim Pro, which has nearly 150 million downloads around the world, says it will stop selling its users’ location data to a tech firm that resells that information to the US military.
An investigation published by Vice News on November 16 found that Muslim Pro and the dating app Muslim Mingle were among hundreds of seemingly benign smartphone apps that have been providing their users’ location data to private companies.
Over the past year, awareness of the far-right collection of baseless conspiracy theories known as QAnon has grown dramatically in the United States. According to new data from the Pew Research Center, in March, only 23 percent of adults in the US had heard anything about QAnon. By September, that number had jumped to 47 percent.
The 90-year-old patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church was hospitalized after testing positive for the coronavirus, days after leading prayers at a large public funeral for the head of the church in Montenegro, who died after contracting the virus.
On November 4, the Serbian Orthodox Church said that Patriarch Irinej was hospitalized but had no COVID-19 symptoms and was in “excellent general condition.”
Rance Allen, a Gospel Music Hall of Fame inductee perhaps best known for his hit “Something About the Name Jesus,” died on October 31 at the age of 71.
A five-time Grammy nominee, Allen formed the Rance Allen Group in 1969 with two of his brothers, Thomas and Steve. They released their first gospel album in 1971 after catching the attention of a Detroit music promoter and signing with Gospel Truth, a subsidiary of Stax Records.