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Leaders of multiracial church coalitions in three southern cities have confessed to being too “comfortable” and have committed anew to “work for justice to right past wrongs” and seek racial unity.

“As a group of racially, ethnically, and politically diverse church leaders in the Deep South areas of Charleston, SC, Montgomery, AL, and Mobile, AL, we recognize and lament how the historic nature of our cities and region contributed to racial oppression and division in our country,” they said in a statement.

Taylor Valci was seven the first time she spoke in tongues. The daughter of a Pentecostal pastor in California’s Bay Area, she grew up watching Veggie Tales and attending Missionettes, the Assem­blies of God version of Girl Scouts.

But by the time she was attending Gordon College in Massachusetts in 2016, Valci no longer considered herself a Christian, at least in part because she was starting to realize she was queer.

The red brick building at the corner of Drexel Street and Seventh Avenue South in Nash­ville has a colorful history.

In the early 1900s, it was home to a Catholic school founded to educate Black children in Jim Crow Tennessee. By the early 2000s, the building had become a swingers club.

But in November, it reopened as a faith-based shelter for the homeless, due in part to COVID-19. The swingers club-turned-shelter, now known as Drexel House, is one of a number of pandemic innovations made by faith-based groups that serve the homeless.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, a widely admired teacher and prolific writer who connected Jewish thought with a larger concern for universal human values, died on November 7.

He was 72 and had undergone treatment for several bouts with cancer, which he was first diagnosed with in his thirties.

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.

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.”

Christianity Today magazine reported that three women who worked as massage therapists at spas co-owned by the late Christian evan­gelist Ravi Zacha­rias claimed that he repeatedly masturbated and ex­posed himself during massage sessions and made unwanted sexual advances.

Although Ravi Zacharias International Ministries denied the allegations, it has launched what it called an “independent external investigation” into the claims. The findings of the investigation will be reported to the ministry’s executive committee.

After a video of an officer killing a man was released in early October, thousands of Nigerians have taken to the streets to protest decades of police brutality in the country. In particular, #EndSARS demonstrators are demanding that the nation’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad—commonly known as SARS—be disbanded.

In mid-October, questions swirled about the origins of Pope Francis’s bombshell comments endorsing same-sex civil unions, with all evidence suggesting he made them in a 2019 interview that was never broadcast in its entirety.

The Vatican refused to comment on whether it cut the remarks from its own broadcast or if the Mexican broadcaster that conducted the interview did. And it didn’t respond to questions about why it allowed the comments to be aired now in the documentary Francesco, which premiered on October 21 at the Rome Film Festival.

As an American child growing up in Belgium and France, Laura Laurie mostly learned about American history from the popular American Girl books. Her favorite was Kirsten, the girl of the 1850s, who emigrated with her family from Sweden to a homestead in what is now Minnesota.

Now Laurie thinks it’s time for the popular toy company to tell a new story of coming to America. She’s started a petition asking American Girl to model its next doll after a modern refugee.