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Drawing on her vocational insights and personal experiences, Episcopal priest, historian, and spiritual director Rhonda Mawhood Lee offers a compassionate vision for understanding and responding faithfully to suicide.

‘Church-state separation ensures we are all free to live as ourselves and believe as we choose, as long as we don’t harm others,’ Rachel Laser of Americans United for Separation of Church and State countered.

This issue of A Public Witness considers some dangerous voices against climate action and then the Christians working to love their neighbors and the Creator by addressing our pressing environmental crisis.

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Videos

Church

'Love that neighbor even when you don’t like ’em,' the former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church said in a conversation with NYT reporter Ruth Graham at The Texas Tribune Festival.

Under the new restructuring plan, called 'regionalization,' the denomination's nine regions will be equal partners with greater freedom to tailor church life to their own customs and traditions.

'I felt like we were kind of misled as a task force in terms of level (of) engagement,' said one member of a reparations task force of the diocese's efforts.

Nation

While organizers claim the government-run church services are for everyone, the March event particularly demonstrated that this was a program crafted by and intended for Catholics.

Pastor Charles McKinzie II of Grace United Methodist Church in Winfield said he is confident the anti-trans law will be overturned, but ‘in the meantime, people are hurting, and people need to know that they are seen.’

In a surprise move, Gov. Kay Ivey commuted the death sentence of Charles “Sonny” Burton — sparing the life of a Muslim during his faith’s holiest time of the year.

World

Netflix released the documentary ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics,’ which seeks to understand how the far right mobilizes faith for political interest.

On a rare solidarity visit, Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III and Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa asserted that Israeli authorities ‘facilitate and enable’ the presence of settlers who have intensified attacks.

The attack has raised fears of a mass exodus of Christians similar to what happened in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the rise of sectarian violence.

Editorials

Editor-in-Chief Brian Kaylor reflects on the call to “never forget” 9/11, as well as the ways we seem to struggle to even remember or acknowledge deaths today.

Now that the trustees at Southwest Baptist University dropped their push for new governing documents, Brian Kaylor offers six next steps that leaders of the school and the Missouri Baptist Convention should take.

Editor-in-Chief Brian Kaylor responds to critics of a Word&Way clergy statement urging Christians to get a COVID-19 vaccine. And Kaylor challenges the anti-vaxxer message of “faith over fear.”

Word&Way Voices

Unless the international community acts decisively and swiftly, Al-Taybeh risks being overrun by Israeli settlers, its lands confiscated, and its people forcibly displaced.

Contributing writer Rodney Kennedy argues that Trump has outdone every shyster who ever told a tall tale, every con artist, every swindler, every unscrupulous insurance salesman, and every crooked televangelist.

The co-founder of the Prayers for Peace Alliance makes the case that Johnnie Moore, the recently appointed chairman of the embattled Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, is getting away with using the Gospel to justify genocide.

E-Newsletter

The Center on Faith & Justice at Georgetown University recently launched a campaign encouraging people to pledge not to shop on Amazon during this Advent season — and A Public Witness is one of the official partners.

This issue of A Public Witness looks at the DoL’s use of religion in its recent propaganda posters that push Christianity as part of a vision of a patriarchal, White nation.

On Veterans Day, we honor and lament the lives lost in violent wars. We cherish the freedoms we have today. We strive to heal those wounded by battles. But we must also pray and work for peace.

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Recent Episodes

Books

“The Church Must Grow or Perish: Robert H. Schuller and the Business of American Christianity” examines Schuller's indelible imprint on the American church.

In “Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry,” Beth Allison Barr traces the history of the role, showing how it both helped and hurt women in conservative Protestant traditions.

In “Latter-Day Saint Theology Among Christian Theologies,” Grant Underwood asks the question: How do the beliefs of Latter-day Saints compare with traditional Christian theology?

In “Safe Church: How to Guard Against Sexism and Abuse in Christian Communities,” Andrew J. Bauman provides an honest look at how misogyny masquerades as biblical truth.