In February, President Joe Biden signed an executive order saying he would “begin the hard work of restoring our refugee admissions program.”
Part of that work was to include raising the number of refugees allowed into the United States from 15,000, a historic low set by the former president, to 125,000 in the new administration’s first full fiscal year.
But as of April, the number hadn’t yet budged.
New Mexico has become the latest state to provide a legal pathway for terminally ill patients to choose when and how they die.
On April 8, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed the Elizabeth Whitefield End-of-Life Options Act, named for a New Mexico judge who advocated for medically assisted suicide laws in 2017 and died from cancer the following year.
Connecting legislation with spirituality and supporters with tangible actions propelled death penalty opponents in Virginia to victory, said two organizers of the movement during a March 29 webinar hosted by Baptist News Global.
Derek Kubilus is no cookie-cutter United Methodist minister.
He has the dynamic voice of a talk radio host, brings his two Great Pyrenees to Bible study, and calls himself “vicar” rather than “pastor.”
Though he has historical and theological reasons for using that title, Kubilus acknowledges it’s also a way of standing out—a rhetorical bow tie.
“Honestly, I just like to be different,” he said.
In Milan’s chic Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a spacious mall that would be jammed with shoppers were it not for the pandemic, a young Black woman wearing a violet hijab and matching lipstick propped up her phone and moved her hips to a tinny-sounding beat coming from the device.
Aida Diouf Mbengue, 19, was recording a TikTok video to share with her 345,000 followers. She is making a name for herself as a self-styled “Afro-influencer,” one of a group of young people of African origin who have come together in Italy to try to increase their social media clout.
James McKendree Wall, who served as editor and publisher of the Christian Century from 1972 to 1999, died March 22 at the age of 92. He is remembered at the Century for his ecumenical interests, his stabilization of the magazine’s financial picture, and his encouragement of some new directions for the Century’s pages.
The second woman to be ordained a priest in the Anglican Church of Kenya, Emily Awino Onyango, has been appointed to serve as assistant bishop in the Diocese of Bondo. She will be the first female Anglican bishop in East and Central Africa.
Onyango currently teaches church history at St. Paul’s University, a private, ecumenical school just outside Nairobi. She is chair of the African Centre for Biblical Equity and is a founding member of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians.
Just before Easter, rapper Lil Nas X revived a bit of the “satanic panic” of the 1980s with the release of the music video for his song “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” which is rife with satanic imagery.
In the video, Nas, who is openly gay, is depicted as being thrown out of heaven before descending into hell, where he gives Satan a lap dance, kills him, and assumes his horns for himself—all while singing about his painful journey to self-acceptance.
A new study shows overwhelming public support for LGBTQ nondiscrimination laws.
The 2020 American Values Atlas study from Public Religion Research Institute finds 76 percent of Americans favor laws that would protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in jobs, housing, and public accommodations—up from 72 percent in 2019, and the highest percentage recorded by the public polling firm since it began asking the question in 2015.
In March 2020, when parents were thrust into the so-called new normal, Jodie Pope Williams, an academic adviser at Madison Area Technical College in Madison, Wisconsin, had been able to keep her chin up: working from home and online learning felt fresh well into April and May, she said.
Then the summer rolled around, and things took a turn for the worse.