The Lutheran World Federation has elected the first woman to head its global communion of churches.
Anne Burghardt, an Estonian theologian, was chosen on June 19 by the LWF Council as the next general secretary of the federation, which includes 148 denominations in the Lutheran tradition from around the globe.
In late June, a documentary film chronicling a group of protesting nuns who clashed with a cardinal in the 1960s became available in select theaters and on the streaming service Discovery+.
The Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a group of nuns based in Los Angeles, “stood up to the patriarchy of the Catholic Church, fighting for equality, their livelihoods, and their own freedom against an all-powerful Cardinal who sought to keep them in their place,” according to the summary for Rebel Hearts.
When health-care leaders in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country began laying out a strategy to distribute COVID-19 vaccines, they knew it would be a tough sell with the Amish, who tend to be wary of preventive shots and government intervention.
Early on, they posted flyers at farm supply stores and at auctions where the Amish sell handmade furniture and quilts. They sought advice from members of the deeply religious and conservative sect, who told them not to be pushy. And they asked three newspapers widely read by the Amish to publish ads promoting the vaccine. Two refused.
In October 2020, Kofi Mensah was leaving a mall in central Accra, Ghana, when a group of young boys approached him and started making scornful gestures and remarks about the way he spoke and walked.
Mensah said they were profiling him because he is gay. When he asked them to stop, one of the boys shoved him and the other spat at him while people looked on.
“We [LGBTQ people] experience this almost every day, wherever we go,” he told the Century. “They treat us as though we are not humans, deserving of love and care and other privileges and rights citizens should enjoy.”
The Evangelical Covenant Church became the latest Protestant denomination in the United States to repudiate the doctrine of discovery, the theological justification that allowed the discovery and domination by European Christians of lands already inhabited by Indigenous peoples.
Delegates at the ECC annual meeting voted overwhelmingly (84 percent) on June 25 to approve a resolution acknowledging the damage done to Indigenous peoples in the Americas by taking their land and rights and to lament the church’s complicity in the continuing effects of that history.
As the search for missing people trapped in the rubble of a Surfside, Florida, condo building continued in late June, the town’s large Jewish community began burying its first victims.
Leon Oliwkowicz, 81, and his wife, Christina Beatriz Elvira Oliwkowicz, 74, were among the first apartment dwellers identified after the 13-story Champlain Towers South collapsed in the middle of the night on June 24.