Bridget Moix has been named the next general secretary of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker organization that lobbies Congress on issues of peace, justice, and environmental stewardship.
She succeeds Diane Randall, who announced in June her intention to leave the FCNL after ten years.
Phil Saviano, a clergy sexual abuse survivor and whistleblower who played a pivotal role in exposing decades of predatory assaults by Roman Catholic priests in the United States, has died. He was 69.
Saviano’s story figured prominently in the 2015 Oscar-winning film Spotlight, which dramatized the Boston Globe investigation that revealed how scores of priests molested children and got away with it because church leaders covered it up.
He died on November 28 after a battle with gallbladder cancer, said his brother and caregiver, Jim Saviano.
The topics people search for each year on Bible Gateway are always interesting, according to Jonathan Petersen, content manager of the website.
But 2021’s may be the “most intriguing,” Petersen wrote on the site.
Searches for the words sorcery and sorceries saw the biggest spike, increasing 193 percent over the last year on Bible Gateway, which allows users to read and search the text of multiple translations of the Bible.
And that doesn’t appear to be because witchcraft is increasingly becoming mainstream, even trendy.
Israeli archaeologists have discovered a 2,100-year-old stronghold they believe constitutes physical evidence of the years-long armed conflict whose crucial battle is celebrated by Jews during Hanukkah.
What the archaeologists have found, they say, was built by the losers of that conflict: the Seleucids, forces of the occupying Greek empire, who were doing their best to stave off attacks by the Hasmonaeans—a family of Jewish priests led by Mattathias and his son Judah, known as Judah the Maccabee. The Seleucids were trying to eradicate Jewish worship and replace it with paganism.
In September, the Pew Research Center dug into the views adults in the United States hold on theodicy (why do bad things happen to good people?), as well as their views on the reality of heaven and hell and how one gets to either destination.
While most of the questions produced clear majority views within the American populace, detailed analysis reveals deep differences.
For example, 33 percent of American adults—including 30 percent of those who identify as Christian—believe in reincarnation. No major branch of Christianity teaches reincarnation.
During a special worship service at its general synod, the Church of Sweden formally apologized to the Sámi people on November 24 for centuries of “mistreatment and complacency.”
Non-Sámi and Sámi people, as well as Lutheran church leaders from neighboring Nordic countries, encircled a flame at the front of the Cathedral of Uppsala as Archbishop Antje Jackelén referenced the story in Luke’s Gospel of the woman who suffered a crooked back for 18 years.
As the US Supreme Court heard a Mississippi case that could topple abortion rights nationwide, the state’s only abortion clinic was busier than ever. Volunteers continued to escort patients into the bright pink building while protesters outside beseeched women not to end their pregnancies.