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Vice President Mike Pence, projected on video screens, addresses the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting on June 13, 2018, in Dallas. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks

Vice President Mike Pence touted President Trump’s meeting with North Korean President Kim Jong Un in a speech before Southern Baptists and urged their continuing prayers as the administration moves ahead with negotiations to seek peace on the Korean Peninsula.

6-12-2018

Image via J. Stephen Conn / Flickr

“The reason for this action involved the church’s un-Christian attitudes and acts toward another associational church. These attitudes and acts were racially-motivated,” the association said in an April 4 statement. “Thus they do not reflect the values and mission of the Mallary Baptist Association.”

A boy is carried by his father as he receives HolyCommunion during a mass on Christmas Eve at Saint Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in Cairo, Egypt December 24, 2017. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh/File Photo

“Walking together” is one of the pope’s favorite mantras. When dealing with tense theological debates inside the church, he is putting equal weight on both words.

World Health Organization (WHO) workers prepare a centre for vaccination during the launch of a campaign aimed at beating an outbreak of Ebola in the port city of Mbandaka, Democratic Republic of Congo May 21, 2018. REUTERS/Kenny Katombe

The DRC government and World Health Organization, working with church-based aid organizations and others, have mounted a massive effort to contain the virus. For the first time WHO has used a vaccine to prevent the disease.

Image via Sara Davis / RNS

To be sure, Greear doesn’t advocate for women’s ordination. At his church, a woman would never appear onstage by herself to deliver a sermon. Neither does he support revisiting the Baptist statement of faith requiring wives to submit to the leadership of their husbands.

Tom Heneghan 5-31-2018

Image via Alison Killilea/Creative Commons

Despite the region’s widespread secularization, 71 percent of the 24,599 adults Pew surveyed in 15 countries still identify as Christians, even if only 22 percent say they attend church at least once a month.

Jail cells are seen in the Enhanced Supervision Housing Unit at the Rikers Island Correctional facility in New York March 12, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

“Sparks were flying all around the table, and then Jared had this idea,” Moore said. “He said — it was a brilliant idea, and this was the impetus, the beginning of things — ‘What if we got every church or synagogue to take responsibility for one prisoner re-entering society? You think that could work?’”

Image via Adelle M. Banks / RNS

“He’s placed on an emphasis on women’s role in the church that is fast being questioned, even in the confines of the present-day convention, as that letter signed by women asking for something to be done attests,” Leonard said. “These were not moderate, liberal women. These were women who came of age in the SBC and who challenged his particular theology of marriage and spouse abuse.”

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“For evangelical Christians the embassy move is part of eschatology,” the expectation of what will transpire at the end of times,” explained Rabbi David Rosen, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Department of Interreligious Affairs. “The return of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland and the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem is seen as a stage ultimately leading to the full messianic era.”

Image via Liz Donovan / RNS

Interpretations of Scripture taught throughout the evangelical world, such as dispensationalism and replacement theology, hold that the repatriation of Jews to the Holy Land is a necessary precursor to Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ. The creation of the Jewish state, and especially Israel’s seemingly miraculous victory in the Six-Day War, seemed to many evangelicals to be the fulfillment of prophesy. The Second Coming, surely, must be right around the corner.

Image via Emily McFarlan Miller / RNS

"I wanted to make a book that (says), this is how it feels, here is how it’s dangerous for me to talk about race and be a black woman in an organization that thinks it’s made it, but it still has work to do. I hope by naming those things and making those things real, it would open up the eyes of white folks and (give) people of color an opportunity to say, 'This is real.'"

Image via Emily McFarlan Miller / RNS

But since the 2016 meeting, many of its smaller U.S. jurisdictions and regional bodies, called annual conferences, have made their own decisions regarding LGBT clergy. Last year, the Mountain Sky Conference elected Karen Oliveto, a married lesbian, as the denomination’s first openly LGBT bishop.

Image via ISPU / RNS

“The vast number of Muslims say being an American is important to how they think of themselves,” said Dalia Mogahed, director of research at the ISPU. “They also say that being a Muslim is important to how they think of themselves. When you look at those identity factors, they’re actually mutually reinforcing — meaning, if you have a higher Muslim identity, you are actually more likely to have a stronger American identity. They’re not in competition.”

Aerial view of National Mall in Washington, D.C. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and organizations promoting atheism, agnosticism, and humanism announced the creation this week of the first Congressional Freethought Caucus.

The Rev. James Cone. Image courtesy of Union Theological Seminary

James H. Cone, the scholar known as the “founder of black liberation theology,” died April 28, Union Theological Seminary announced. He was 79.

Image via Ricardo Camacho / Ohio Ministry Network

R. Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, said that the Assemblies of God, founded in 1914, has had a “fascinating history” of women’s leadership, with women leading congregations and speaking from pulpits in its early days and later often finding their roles restricted.

Blanchard Hall at Wheaton College near Chicago. Photo courtesy of Creative Commons

About 50 evangelical Christian leaders gathered early this week to discuss the future of evangelicalism amid concerns their movement has become too closely associated with President Trump’s polarizing politics.

Image via Creative Commons

“Fears about the technology might go viral, especially if they’re designed to go viral, but the more lasting effect might be the way this technology is adopted and adapted by creative, mission-driven people,” Silliman said.

Kimberly Winston 4-17-2018

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The news of Silverman’s dismissal is a serious second blow to organized atheism, which has long struggled with charges of sexism and discrimination. In February, similarly explosive allegations were made against Lawrence Krauss, a prominent scientist at Arizona State University, best-selling author and popular speaker at atheist and skeptic events.

Image via Nir Levy / Shutterstock.com

I just met with the three children of Martin Luther King Jr. on a number of occasions over a two-year period and eventually they decided themselves to resolve their differences, which had existed only in court with lawsuits against each other.