Church

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly every congregation in the United States shut down, at least for a while. For some Americans, that was the push they needed to never come back to church.

Just as the sun was rising over the U.S. Capitol building on Friday morning, several prominent Christian leaders gathered across the street for a prayer vigil. This event marked the second anniversary of the insurrection that followed the electoral defeat of then-President Donald Trump.

This issue of A Public Witness will introduce you to the controversial career of Catholic Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò before looking at his role in a post-election crusade. Then it will consider the danger of the new call to fast and pray for the Jan. 6 defendants.

Historian and former denominational executive Lee Spitzer spent years researching for his new book Sympathy, Solidarity, and Silence: Three European Baptist Responses to the Holocaust. The book tells inspiring and disappointing stories of how Baptists in England, France, and Germany reacted to Hitler, the Holocaust, and the war’s refugees.

In this issue of A Public Witness, we want to share some of what we’ve learned from our Unsettling Advent series this year. We hope these insights will be meaningful in these last few days before we celebrate the birth of Jesus.

The Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations has asked Christians to evaluate their own theologies and teachings for anti-Jewish sentiments. Much of Christian preaching today acknowledges a Jewish Jesus born into an expressly Jewish context, but also implicitly paints a portrait of a Jesus whose arrival made Judaism obsolete.

In October, Christian Churches Together, an ecumenical group of Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians, gathered for its annual forum to address a topic that has plagued the church and society beyond it: polarization.

In this edition of A Public Witness, we explore some of the complexities that have emerged from the fire that gutted Middle Collegiate Church. To what degree should historic preservation laws limit what churches can do with their buildings?

A new study examines the role that politics plays in how Americans choose a new church. When it comes to politics, Mainline Protestant churches are in a difficult spot because they are more politically diverse than evangelical churches.

The conversation about Advent imagery of dark and light — and how readily it can be associated with skin color — is one many Christians are having years into a racial reckoning for both the church and the country, sparked by the murders of George Floyd and other Black people in 2020.