Retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said apartheid had left South Africans suffering from “self-hate” which is partly to blame for the country’s vicious crime rate and road carnage.
“Apartheid damaged us all. Not a single one of us has escaped,” said Tutu on Aug. 11 during a book launch at Stellenbosch University’s Institute for Advanced Study near Cape Town.
The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate said the nation was no longer surprised by statistics of violent crime, murder, rape as “when you suffer from self hate you project it to others who look like you.”
As for the nation’s high …
For Chris Stevenson, faith isn’t just personal ― it’s national.
Stevenson, 41, first became interested in the intersection of faith and public life while studying civics in college.
A few decades later, he says, he had a revelation of sorts. “There was one great story that remains to be told by a professional museum: The indispensability of faith in America’s history.”
Thus the idea to found a National Museum of American Religion in Washington, DC, was born.
But Stevenson, a business manager for an air traffic organization in Northern Virginia, has found that turning his dream into reality is an …
A call to mission might not be the first thing that comes to a Presbyterian’s mind when thinking about Germany. Grand cathedrals, or perhaps the start of the Reformation, might be more common images.
But much mission work in a place with such a strong church background?
This past March, a group of eight students and one faculty member from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary had the opportunity to visit Germany through the World Mission Initiative, a fellowship of Presbyterians dedicated to developing mission vision, nurturing missionary vocation and cultivating missional congregations.
In a historical gathering on Aug. 10, representatives of the Alliance of Presbyterian and Reformed Churches of Latin America (AIPRAL) and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church met for the first time in the headquarters of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Guatemala, with the expressed purpose of strengthening the ecumenical bonds between both bodies.
“We have visited the Catholic Bishops Conference of Guatemala and we were received by Monsignor Rodolfo Valenzuela, Secretary for Ecumenism, and Monsignor Oscar Julio Vián Morales, who we encouraged to continue working in unity with the Protestant churches in this country,” said the Rev. Germán Zijlstra, executive secretary of AIPRAL.
With less than a month left until the adoption of a new constitution, Nepal’s religious minorities ― Christians, Muslims and Buddhists ― have started a campaign against religious discrimination.
The Inter-Religious Secularism Protection Movement (IRSPM) is asking the communist-led coalition government to allow churches, mosques, monasteries and other non-Hindu institutions to be registered as religious bodies and waive the taxes they have to pay as they are still regarded as personal properties.
More than 250 colleges, universities and seminaries have submitted plans to the White House for yearlong interfaith service projects in response to a campaign launched by the Obama administration.
Joshua DuBois, director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, said officials had hoped for 100 participants.
As anyone who’s ever been to a church potluck knows, food that looks good can taste terrible. The same can be said for our lives, said Kim Hammond, speaking Aug. 11 at the New Church Development Conference here.
Hammond, a Christian Reformed Church minister and pastor at Community Christian Church in Chicago, asked conference attendees if they could taste God in their lives.
Each year on Sept. 21 the World Council of Churches calls churches and parishes to observe the International Day of Prayer for Peace.
Australia’s Christian leaders are praising a court injunction to prevent asylum seekers being deported as part of the federal government’s “Malaysian solution” to people trafficking. One Melbourne church has offered to care for 13 unaccompanied children.
The government wants to trade 800 asylum seekers who arrived by boat for 4,000 confirmed refugees in Malaysia. The first of the 4,000 refugees arrived in Australia on Aug. 12.
Already, 266 people have sought asylum in Australia in the past 10 days ― 50 of them unaccompanied minors. Melbourne’s Crossway Baptist Church has offered to care for 13 of them. Pastor Dale Stevenson …
Women, long considered the dominant pew dwellers in the nation’s churches, have shown a dramatic drop in attendance in the last two decades, a new survey shows.
Since 1991, the percentage of women attending church during a typical week has decreased by 11 percentage points to 44 percent, the Barna Group reported recently.
Sunday school and volunteering among women also has diminished. Two decades ago, half of all women read the Bible in a typical week ― other than at religious events. Now 40 percent do.