Mennonite Church USA announced that Sue Park-Hur will fill the denomination’s newly created director of racial-ethnic engagement position. Park-Hur had been MC USA’s denominational minister of transformative peacemaking.
According to a press release, the new position was created to help leaders in the country’s largest Mennonite denomination define its diversity, equity, and inclusion goals as well as its standards and desired outcomes.
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary professor Reginald Blount has been tapped to lead the school’s Center for the Church and the Black Experience. He succeeds Taurean J. Webb, who has served as CBE director since 2019.
The CBE, which was founded in 1970, provides leadership training for Black seminarians and pastors. Blount is an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and currently pastors Arnett Chapel AME in Chicago.
A small but determined group of Ukrainian asylum seekers has discovered that the quickest route to safety in the United States currently runs through Mexico, immigrant rights advocates say.
A diplomatic arrangement predating Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enables Mexico to fast-track Ukrainian passport holders into the country and to the American border, where the majority are gaining entry into the US within three to four days, said Danilo Zak, policy and advocacy manager for the National Immigration Forum.
Mariam is sipping on a juice box while sitting on the front steps outside a hotel not far from the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest of cities for Muslims. She first says she is ten years old but then decides she is eight.
Her mother, in a black abaya and a face veil, is sitting a few steps away on the pavement, selling scarves to a group of pilgrims.
It is 6:30 a.m., and dozens of pilgrims stop as they walk back to their hotels after performing fajr, the morning prayer at the Grand Mosque.
When droughts strike in eastern Africa, clerics, church experts, and faith-based agencies are some of the first to mobilize to address food security and deliver humanitarian aid. Now such groups are moving again as severe drought—the worst in 40 years—unfolds in the east and the Horn of Africa.
Three successive rainy seasons have failed to materialize, and scientists and relief agencies are blaming climate change for bringing droughts in a region battered by conflicts and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.