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Christian ethicist James M. Gustafson died on January 15 at the age of 95.

Gustafson’s 45-year teaching career spanned three institutions: Yale—both in the divinity school and the religious studies department—the University of Chicago, and Emory University. Among his students were ethicists who would go on to have substantial influence of their own, including Stanley Hauerwas, Nigel Biggar, and Lisa Sowle Cahill.

In a tribute written for Emory, former university president James T. Laney said that with Gustafson’s death the world had lost a “towering scholar.”

G. Sujin Pak has been named dean of Boston University’s School of Theology. She succeeds Mary Elizabeth Moore—the first woman to lead the theology school—who announced in 2019 her intention to step down from the position she had held since 2009.

Fantasy novel enthusiasts want to turn the Oxford house of J. R. R. Tol­kien, where he wrote The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, into a meeting place for writers, screenwriters, and filmmakers from all cultures and faith backgrounds.

In 1930, Tolkien moved into the house at 20 Northmoor Road. Project North­moor is a charity created with the purpose of buying the house, currently for sale for roughly $6 million. The project has already raised about $1 million.

Logan Lawrence had already been accepted to Duke Divinity School when she heard that the school would also be offering a mostly online version of the three-year master of divinity program beginning this fall.

She immediately called to ask if she could switch her enrollment to the so-called hybrid program, which will require only one week of in-person classes each semester.

Lawrence, 20, who works as a youth pastor at a United Methodist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, is engaged to a man serving in the US Army.

The United Nations’ Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons went into effect on January 22, making nuclear weapons illegal under international law for the first time.

More than 80 nations have signed the treaty, which prohibits countries from producing and possessing nuclear weapons and from allowing them to be stationed within their borders. Notably absent among the signatories, however, are the nine nations believed to have nuclear weapons: the United States, China, France, Great Britain, India, Israel, North Korea, Pak­istan, and Russia.

They’re not just on friends’ and family members’ Facebook pages or in weird corners of the internet.

About half of all Protestant pastors in the United States say they’re hearing conspiracy theories in their churches, according to a study released on January 26 by Lifeway Research. It found that 49 percent of them report they frequently hear members of their congregations repeating conspiracy theories they’ve heard on various issues affecting the country.

President Joe Biden arrived at the White House ready to wield his pen to dismantle Donald Trump’s legacy and begin pushing his own priorities.

Presidents Trump and Barack Obama both relied on executive orders and other presidential directives to get some of their most controversial policies around a deadlocked Congress. But no president has come out of the gate as eager to use the authority as Biden.

An executive order is a written, signed, and published directive from the president that manages operations of the federal government.