News

Pope Francis issued a message on Wednesday encouraging Catholics to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, calling it “an act of love,” as part of a global effort to reduce the onslaught of the pandemic and convince vaccine skeptics.

In this issue of A Public Witness, we consider the failure of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan amid the unfolding humanitarian crisis. And we offer some lessons we hope Christians will consider from this war miscast as a crusade. 

In a pathbreaking decision, the Rev. Gina Stewart has been elected as the first woman president of the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Society, marking the first time a female has been chosen for the highest post of a Black Baptist organization. 

As most Americans absorbed the shock of the Taliban’s full takeover of Afghanistan over the weekend, officials at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service followed the rapidly deteriorating situation with resignation, knowing it could have gone differently.

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.