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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Luis Palau, an evangelical pastor who was born in Argentina and went on to work with Billy Graham before establishing his own powerhouse international ministry, died March 11. He was 86.

The Luis Palau Association said he died at his home in Portland, Oregon. He had announced in January 2018 that he had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

In 2001, when the Church Pension Group first started publishing differences in average compensation between male and female full-time Episcopal clergy, men earned 18 percent more than women. Nearly 20 years later, according to the most recent CPG report, the gap in median compensation between male and female clergy is 13.5 percent.

The primary factor in the lingering clergy gender pay gap is the shortage of women in higher-paying senior positions, according to both the data and the observations of diocesan leaders.