News

This issue of A Public Witness examines the political attacks on Warnock’s faith during this campaign and his previous run, and also considers similar attacks on King. This rhetoric exposes how some preachers and politicians supporting the dominant power structures seek to excommunicate the Black church as not really Christian.

Before attending the packed Sunday morning service, Queen Sonja of Norway praised Mindekirken congregation for having maintained worship in Norwegian for all 100 years that the church has existed in Minneapolis.

Rev. Jonathan Lee Walton, an academician, preacher and administrator who has served on the faculties of Wake Forest and Harvard divinity schools, has been named the next president of Princeton Theological Seminary. He will be the first Black president of the seminary.

Two significant abolitionists are subjects of a twin set of documentaries, "Becoming Frederick Douglass" and "Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom," co-productions of Maryland Public Television and Firelight Films and released by PBS this month (October).

In this issue of A Public Witness, we introduce you to an effort earlier this month by ministers across the country to preach against Christian Nationalism on World Communion Sunday. We then take you to church to hear excerpts from the sermons before we issue an altar call of our own. 

Pope Francis on Sunday denounced Europe’s indifference toward migrants risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea as he elevated to sainthood an Italian bishop and Italian-born missionary whose work and life paths illustrated the difficulties faced by 19th Century Italian emigrants.

Robert D. Cornwall reviews "The First Advent in Palestine: Reversals, Resistance, and the Ongoing Complexity of Hope" by Kelley Nikondeha. This book is an expression of Nikondeha’s attempt to put the biblical Advent stories in a Palestinian context.

A Baptist pastor and his wife remain missing after being kidnapped Sept. 21 from their church in Russian-occupied Mariupol, Forum 18 news service reported Oct. 6. 

A review of Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence by Diana Butler Bass. And information on how to win an autographed copy of it.

Since early last year, the ReAwaken America Tour has carried its message of a country under siege to tens of thousands of people in 15 cities and towns. The tour serves as a traveling roadshow and recruiting tool for an ascendant Christian nationalist movement that's wrapped itself in God, patriotism, and politics and has grown in power and influence inside the Republican Party.