At the top of the website for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA is a simple, three-word message: “Pray for Ukraine!”
“May God hear our loving petitions and soften the hearts and minds of all, those within and outside Ukraine, during these dangerous times,” wrote the UOC’s Council of Bishops, in a statement responding to news of the Russian invasion on February 24.
Tania Tetlow has been unanimously elected the next president of Fordham University. Tetlow will be the first woman and the first layperson to lead the 181-year-old Jesuit institution. She replaces Joseph McShane, who announced his intention to step down from nearly two decades of leadership last fall.
Tetlow joins Fordham from Loyola University New Orleans, where she was also the first woman and layperson to serve as president. She is credited with increasing both enrollment and student retention at Loyola during her four-year tenure.
Abune Antonios, a confined Eritrean Orthodox Church patriarch and the longest-serving prisoner of conscience in the Horn of Africa, died on February 9 at age 94.
He had been in detention in the Eritrean capital, Asmara, since his arrest in 2006, just two years after his installation as the third patriarch of the Eritrean Orthodox Church. For 16 years, he was kept in solitary confinement under the orders of the country’s authoritarian leader, President Isaias Afwerki, for his resistance to government interference in the church.
The Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee has appointed Willie McLaurin to serve as interim president and CEO, marking the first time that any entity of the predominantly White denomination has been headed by a Black person.
McLaurin was named just over two years ago as the committee’s vice president for Great Commission relations and mobilization, a new role meant to focus on spreading the gospel and fostering relations with various demographic groups of Southern Baptists.
It might seem far-fetched for an Episcopal priest from Little Rock, Arkansas, to be working on an interfaith prayer house in Mongolia, a mostly Buddhist country. But for Susan Sims Smith, it’s just the latest stage of her longtime dedication to interfaith work.
“I’m deeply committed to Christ,” she said. “And I also have a lot of blessings from Hindu and Buddhist spiritual traditions that are enriching [my] Christian practice.”
Richard Smith, an Episcopal priest, has been working to improve the lot of workers in California long enough to have protested alongside Cesar Chavez in the 1970s during the lettuce strike, when Smith was a Jesuit seminarian.
Now retired from St. John the Evangelist, a congregation in San Francisco’s north Mission District, he is one of a small number of clergy serving as intermediaries between labor unions and employers whose workers, particularly those in food service, are considering unionizing.
The conservative political action committee CatholicVote is suing President Joe Biden’s administration in an effort to secure records of communication between the US government and Catholic groups in regard to both humanitarian aid at the southern border and recent abortion debates.
Using a pair of lawsuits, both filed on February 4, CatholicVote aims to force the government to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests submitted by the PAC in September.
Domestic terrorists who recently threatened to bomb nearly 20 historically Black colleges and universities utterly failed if their goal was to shake student commitment to their schools and to each other, institutional leaders said on February 8.
“They are disappointed. They are traumatized. But they are resilient, and they are resolved to continue to move forward,” said Felecia M. Nave, president of Alcorn State University, one of four Mississippi HBCUs to receive bomb threats on February 1.
Back in 2013, creating a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States was the rare issue that virtually all major religious groups in the United States could agree on. The cause was so unifying that conservative evangelicals joined liberal leaders from other faiths that year to muster an unsuccessful but vibrant faith-based campaign to push Congress to pass immigration reform.
But according to a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, that united religious front on the issue may be a thing of the past.
Gabriel Yemba Unda, the first United Methodist bishop of the East Congo Episcopal Area, has been elected provincial president of the Church of Christ in the Congo in the Congolese district of Maniema.
The CCC is a union of 95 of the country’s Protestant denominations.
Unda—who also is the moderator of the National Synod of the Church of Christ in the Congo—obtained 66 out of 91 votes in the elections. He will preside over various denominations of the Protestant churches in Maniema for the next six years. Unda succeeds Bishop Joseph Bitingo Lusambya, who died in April 2021.