News

After Noel Alexander died from COVID-19, his visitation and funeral were scheduled for the church he loved. But his family said that when they arrived for his funeral, they were told they couldn’t hold either the visitation or the funeral in the spacious building because of the pandemic.

Parents across the U.S. and in many foreign countries are exploring homeschooling their children for the first time this fall as schools navigate reopening amid COVID-19 dangers and uncertainties. Christian groups and churches are among those preparing parents to meet the challenges.

Pope Francis on Wednesday warned against any prospect that rich people would get priority for a coronavirus vaccine. He also said it would be scandalous if all the economic assistance in the works, most of it using public funds, ends up reviving industries that don’t help the poor or the environment.

Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington who criticized President Donald Trump after he held a Bible aloft during a photo op in front St. John’s Church near the White House in June, says she will call upon “higher angels of our nature” in her prayer before the Democratic National Convention.

A quarter century after Israeli spies, a Canadian activist, and a Syrian rabbi smuggled nine rare medieval Jewish manuscripts out of Damascus, an Israeli court decided the books will remain under the National Library’s custodianship for their preservation.

Baptist disaster relief volunteers are responding in Iowa after a powerful derecho storm hit last week, leaving hundreds of thousands without power, hundreds homeless, and a mess of trees and debris.

A conservative South Korean pastor who has been a bitter critic of the country’s president has tested positive for the coronavirus, health authorities said Monday (Aug. 17), two days after he participated in an anti-government protest in Seoul that drew thousands.

Jerry Young, president of the National Baptist Convention, USA — the largest Black Baptist denomination in the country — will give the benediction for Monday’s Democratic National Convention session.

Zimbabwe is embroiled in an economic and political crisis marked by human rights abuses, said the country’s Roman Catholic bishops, who were then criticized by the government as “evil” and trying to promote genocide.

Baptists in the eastern European nation of Belarus request prayers as the nation’s streets fill with protesters upset at presidential election results largely deemed fraudulent.