Escalating violence against civilians in Sudan’s disputed South Kordofan State is leading to a major humanitarian catastrophe with an estimated 300,000 people besieged, cut off from relief aid, and unable to escape fighting, according to a number of aid agencies and witnesses in the region.

A review of church sex abuse guidelines will top the agenda when the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops meet in Seattle June 15-17. But no major changes have been proposed, according to church leaders, even after several recent reports have raised questions about the rules’ power to remove abusive priests.

“What’s become evident, as our commission has been meeting, is that everyone looks at Middle Governing Bodies from a very different lens,” said the Rev. Tod Bolsinger, moderator of the Middle Governing Bodies Commission.

The eight presidents of the World Council of Churches, in their annual Pentecost message, write that this holy day “offers a new opportunity to each church community and to each of us” to celebrate “the advent and gift of the Holy Spirit, to renew our trust in the Spirit’s power.”

Islam is part of a modern, changing Germany and necessary to develop a vibrant society, President Christian Wulff said in a panel discussion June 2 at the ecumenical gathering called the Kirchentag.

Wearing a monk’s robe, Abbot Justin Brown climbed into the witness box June 6 and said the only people who ever opposed his abbey’s bid to sell handmade caskets were funeral insiders who stood to lose their statewide monopoly.

By any account, the journey to get to this island village (pop. 400) in remote southeast Alaska and its hardy Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) congregation of 22 members is an adventure.

At the their meeting here last month, members of Self-Development of People’s National Committee heard from three activists working for justice and community development in the bruised city.

Salvadoran and U.S. human rights groups are applauding indictments and arrest warrants issued by a Spanish judge in the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, the clerics’ housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter at El Salvador’s Central American University.

After just an hour of deliberation, jurors on June 7 unanimously found two members of a faith-healing church guilty of felony criminal mistreatment for not seeking medical care for their daughter.