News

Across the nation’s deeply-religious Bible Belt, a region beset by soaring infection rates from the fast-spreading delta variant of the virus, churches and pastors are both helping and hurting in the campaign to get people vaccinated against COVID-19.

A Texas death-row inmate has sued state prison officials to allow his pastor to lay hands on him as he dies from a lethal injection. John Henry Ramirez, 37, is scheduled to be put to death in the Texas death chamber on Sept. 8.

A national nonprofit group of professors devoted to academic freedom, shared governance, and quality higher education, recently argued that Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, is not an institution where academic freedom can be expected.

In this issue of A Public Witness, we borrow a principle from economics to help Christians consider the cost of our attention being absorbed by scandals that must be addressed or frivolous issues that should be ignored. 

Senior Editor Beau Underwood interviews Vicki Flippin, who pastors First and Summerfield United Methodist Church in New Haven, Connecticut, for the latest installment of our “Behind the Pulpit” series intended to pull back the curtain on the minister’s life.

Russell Moore, Southern Baptist ethicist-turned-public theologian, said that knowing people who became seriously ill or died from COVID-19 may be causing some vaccine-hesitant individuals to change their minds.

Former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams used a virtual Washington, D.C., pulpit to preach a message supporting efforts to push back on voting rights restrictions.

Facebook already asks for your thoughts. Now it wants your prayers. The social media giant has rolled out a new prayer request feature, a tool embraced by some religious leaders as a cutting-edge way to engage the faithful online. Others are eyeing it warily as they weigh its usefulness against the privacy and security concerns they have with Facebook.

The PNBC is considered the “spiritual home” of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and formed as a breakaway group from the National Baptist Convention in 1961 after the NBC opposed sit-ins and other civil rights protests.

Belief in the possibility of redemption is lacking across American society. If Christians place their faith in a God who can redeem all things, then what response is required in this moment? This edition of A Public Witness calls for a renewed testimony to redemption's power.