Nation

U.S. Rep. Cori Bush introduced legislation Monday to grant permanent residency to Alex Garcia, a Honduran immigrant who has spent more than three years inside a Missouri church to avoid deportation.

Health officials in the nation’s capital are hoping that Black religious leaders will serve as community influencers to overcome what officials say is a persistent vaccine reluctance in the Black community. Several local ministers recently received their first vaccine shots.

While defending Southern Baptist pastors who called Vice President Kamala Harris a ‘Jezebel,’ Southern Baptist pastor Tom Ascol declared Harris was going to hell. He also consigned journalists Anne Branigin and Jake Tapper to that fate for reporting on pastors who compared Harris to the biblical character Jezebel.

As controversy grows about comments by Southern Baptist pastors comparing Vice President Kamala Harris to the biblical character Jezebel, a leader in Founders Ministries, a group pushing Calvinism within SBC life, claimed critics of the pastors worship a false religion.

President Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order on Sunday (Feb. 14) reestablishing the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, undoing former President Donald Trump’s efforts to reshape an agency that went largely unstaffed for most of his tenure.

On Friday, Kansas Interfaith Action conducted a virtual vigil to draw back the curtain on lynchings and other forms of racial terrorism in the state as an effort to amplify underreported history of Kansas and address current issues of racism.

An Alabama inmate on Thursday won a reprieve from a scheduled lethal injection after the U.S. Supreme Court said the state must allow his personal pastor in the death chamber.

A new act signed by Arkansas’s governor on Wednesday (Feb. 10) would prevent the governor or other state or local officials from enacting restrictions on houses of worship and religious groups during a public health crisis.

A resolution heard Tuesday (Feb. 9) in the Missouri Senate Rules, Joint Rules, Resolutions, and Ethics Committee states “that the times have once again changed and we declare the March 22, 1852, Missouri Supreme Court Dred Scott decision is fully and entirely renounced.”

Two Texas Baptist schools have regained control over a Texas foundation established by a long-time benefactor. The two schools filed suit in September, alleging trustees of the Texas-based Harold E. Riley Foundation were part of a “coup” to divert support away from the schools.