Church

The Evangelical Covenant Church became the latest Protestant denomination in the United States to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery, the theological justification that allowed the discovery and domination by European Christians of lands already inhabited by Indigenous peoples. 

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recently approved drafting a document on receiving Communion in the Catholic Church. Mathew Schmalz, a Catholic scholar of religion, argues that battles over Communion are nothing new in the Catholic Church.

The newly elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention has apologized for giving a sermon where he used material from his predecessor without revealing where it came from.

Senior Editor Beau Underwood interviews Will Dyer, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in August, Georgia, for the first installment of our “Behind the Pulpit” series intended to pull back the curtain on the minister’s life and introduce our readers to how a diverse set of leaders go about shepherding their flocks.

In this edition of A Public Witness, we’ll walk you through the theological missteps being made by Catholic leaders attempting to deny communion to President Joe Biden and other politicians over the issue of abortion. And we’ll look at why the politics of communion matter so much to non-Catholics like us.

The nation’s largest Protestant denomination is based on voluntary cooperation by more than 40,000 churches. That cooperation is threatened by growing distrust of national leaders.

A photo essay by Editor-in-Chief Brian Kaylor about what happened during the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting this week in Nashville, Tennessee, both inside and outside the convention hall.

Members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have voted to draft a document on the Eucharist, green lighting a controversial effort championed by a group of conservative clerics who have called for denying Communion to President Joe Biden and other Catholic Democrats who support abortion rights. 

After Ed Litton emerged victorious in the Southern Baptist Convention’s presidential election on Tuesday, reports and analysis quickly portrayed the news as a defeat for the denomination’s fundamentalist wing. But rather than fundamentalism being dismissed, anti-elitism was embraced. 

One of the hot-button items expected to be on the agenda when Southern Baptists met for their annual meeting this week was critical race theory. But, in the end, the resolution the committee chose to bring to the floor for a vote did not mention CRT.