Nation

Faith-based refugee resettlement groups are celebrating President Joe Biden’s decision to raise the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. for the remainder of the federal fiscal year to 62,500, even as they acknowledge that they need to rebuild their capacity after years of cuts.

When U.S. Catholic bishops hold their next national meeting in June, they’ll be deciding whether to send a tougher-than-ever message to President Joe Biden and other Catholic politicians: Don’t receive Communion if you persist in public advocacy of abortion rights.

Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health and an outspoken evangelical Christian, urged his fellow evangelicals, many of whom have resisted the COVID-19 vaccine, to get the shot and encourage others to do the same.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention loosened the agency’s social distancing recommendations on Tuesday, announcing that fully vaccinated people who wear masks can safely attend many indoor events such as worship services.

Humboldt County in rural Northern California is seeing a spike in COVID-19 infections that health officials say is linked to superspreader events, including one linked to a Pentecostal church.

The renaming of Ioway Creek in Ames, Iowa, is part of a larger trend throughout the Midwest and the country. This trend involves changing Native-inspired place names from slurs or markers of Euro-American conquest to names that reflect Indigenous languages, histories, and mapmaking.

Texas prisons have resumed allowing clergy as well as spiritual advisers in the death chamber, reversing a two-year ban created after the U.S. Supreme Court halted the execution of an inmate who had argued his religious freedom was being violated.

A former Obama White House faith adviser blamed an evangelical Christian adviser to former President Donald Trump for quickening the rise of Christian Nationalism and setting the stage for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Faith leaders in Minnesota and across the United States expressed hope that their advocacy work for racial justice will gain momentum from the guilty verdict rendered against Derek Chauvin, the former police officer convicted of killing George Floyd.

In a video call hosted by the Associated Press, Rev. James Lawson and three of his workshop participants discussed their civil rights work and how it reverberates in today’s justice movements like Black Lives Matter and voting rights in Georgia.