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Two Republican lawmakers put up a Christmas tree in the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda despite being told they weren’t allowed to do so — a show of defiance after Gov. Tony Evers opted not to display a holiday tree there this year because the building is closed to the public due to the coronavirus pandemic.

For 23 years, Highland Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, has held a service on the second Sunday of Advent with a cross on its lawn for each person killed that year by homicide in the community. This year saw more crosses than ever for its service on Dec. 6,

The pastor of Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris’s Baptist church praises her as “human decency and dignity at its best.” Amos C. Brown, a longtime civil rights activist who has pastored Third Baptist Church of San Francisco since 1976, made the comments in a Word&Way interview.

Pope Francis says the Christmas season provides reason for hope amid the difficulties of the coronavirus pandemic. During his Sunday blessing, Francis noted that the Vatican’s Christmas tree had gone up last week in St. Peter’s Square, and that work is underway to build the life-size Nativity scene next to it.

Against the backdrop of a pandemic’s blight and wounds from an acrimonious election, a group of acclaimed actors on Sunday will stage an online reading of a religious text with remarkable relevance to the current moment: the Book of Job.

Only a few dozen people attended the lighting of the Christmas tree in the biblical city of Bethlehem on Saturday (Dec. 5), as coronavirus restrictions scaled back the annual event that is normally attended by thousands.

An early morning fire Saturday in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood has destroyed the 128-year-old sanctuary of Middle Collegiate Church, one of the oldest congregations in the city.

Live Nativities, in which visitors drive — and sometimes, especially in warmer climes, walk — through a number of scenes retelling the biblical story of Jesus’s birth, have been popular around the U.S. for years. And it’s an idea whose time has come as the pandemic stretches into the Christmas season.

During their lives they somehow slipped out of sight to the rest of us, and when death came to these 1,547 residents of Los Angeles County, they had become anonymous to the world. But this year’s annual Ceremony of the Unclaimed Dead was livestreamed due to coronavirus.

The unprecedented pace of developing vaccines for COVID-19 has not jeopardized their effectiveness or safety for Americans, the director of the National Institutes of Health said Thursday (Dec. 3) in a webinar hosted by the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.