Gospel singer LaShun Pace died March 21 at age 60. Her family told local news outlets in Atlanta that the singer had been on renal dialysis for five years and died of organ failure.
Pace began her music career in the 1970s, first as a solo artist and then with her eight sisters in the Grammy-nominated group the Anointed Pace Sisters, commonly known as the Pace Sisters.
Religious historian and Muslim womanist Debra Majeed died on March 20 from complications following surgery. She was 68.
Before becoming a full-time scholar, Majeed served as a United Methodist minister. She converted to Islam in 1998 while researching the appeal of Islam to Black Americans in Chicago as part of a joint doctorate program at Northwestern University and Garrett-Evangelical Seminary.
She would later say that she came to embrace Islam because of the “pious, charitable, loving Muslim women and men” whom she met during her research.
Louisiana residents trying to recover from more than a year and a half of weather disasters are benefiting from a unique faith-based coalition formed to help with recovery and rebuilding efforts in storm-ridden Lake Charles.
The coalition consists of the Louisiana Conference of the United Methodist Church, Mennonite Disaster Service, and Fuller Center Disaster ReBuilders, a Christian nonprofit organized in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to help those who have no other means to repair their storm-damaged homes.
The God Bless the USA Bible has been resurrected from the dead but still faces some supply challenges due to “woke” companies that refuse to participate in the project, its publisher announced on March 1.
News of the Lee Greenwood project was first announced last year, but the God-and-country project ran into an obstacle when HarperCollins, owner of the copyright to the New International Version of the Bible, declined to authorize that translation’s use or move forward with the project.
Jehovah’s Witnesses will begin to meet in person starting April 1, two years after closing their worship buildings due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Door-to-door preaching, however, will not yet resume.
Kingdom Halls—where congregants typically meet twice a week—will, as of April 1, reopen for in-person worship as long as there are no pandemic-related government restrictions forbidding them from doing so. Virtual services will still be available as well.
A report from Christianity Today magazine, published on March 15, claims the ministry failed to hold former editor in chief Mark Galli and former advertising director Olatokunbo Olawoye accountable for sexual harassment for more than a decade.
That harassment included “demeaning, inappropriate, and offensive behavior,” according to the report from CT news editor Daniel Silliman, which was edited by senior news editor Kate Shellnutt and published without review from the ministry’s executive leadership.
Across the country, religious congregations have reopened after two long pandemic years, according to a new Pew Research survey.
But there has been little or no risein the number of people attending in-person religious services over the past six months, while the number of those watching services online has also remained steady.