News

The United Church of Christ has now paid off more than $100 million in medical debt for people across the United States. The UCC announced Monday that it used $200,000 from one of its annual Giving Tuesday campaigns to purchase and pay off $33 million in medical debt for residents of Ohio, where the mainline Protestant denomination is based.

Religious leaders and members of the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States are growing increasingly concerned over the threat of a dramatic escalation of the nearly decade-old conflict and have stepped up efforts to show support for family members and their Eastern European homeland.

Religious exemptions are increasingly becoming a workaround for unvaccinated hospital and nursing home workers who want to keep their jobs in the face of federal mandates that are going into effect nationwide this week.

We highlight the spiritual, physical, and legal trials facing minority religious groups in both Russia and Russian-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine. We then urge politicians, pundits, and preachers to recognize the extent of the Russian threat as Putin’s troops amass on Ukraine’s borders.

A West Virginia school superintendent is investigating a Feb. 2 religious revival event that occurred at Huntington High School, saying he believes some students’ rights have been violated.

Egypt’s president on Wednesday swore in the first-ever Coptic Christian to head the country’s highest court. Judge Boulos Fahmy is the 19th person to preside over the Supreme Constitutional Court since it was established in 1969.

In this issue of A Public Witness, we rewatch the plot twists as a state governor suggested there should be an unconstitutional religious test for office. Then before the credits roll, we reach the climax of our story with a lesson about faith and government service.

A team of scholars, faith leaders, and advocates unveiled an exhaustive new report Wednesday (Feb. 9) that documents in painstaking detail the role Christian Nationalism played in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and calling it an unsettling preview of things to come.

Between calculus and European history classes at a West Virginia public high school, 16-year-old Cameron Mays and his classmates were told by their teacher to go to an evangelical Christian revival assembly.

In this issue of A Public Witness, we count the fights over redistricting and the relative quietness from Christians amid this partisan fight. Then we map out what values Christians should push amid redistricting squabbles.