I’ll never forget my pastor’s response when I asked about putting a $130 portable ramp in the building where our church meets: “That’s not stewarding tithe well,” he announces without embarrassment. He acts as if he’s making a measured budgetary decision — like he is choosing between two beige paint colors of a similar hue. Except I am the one on eggshells.
Santa Clara University, a Catholic Jesuit university in California’s Bay Area, is among other Jesuit universities celebrating recent union wins, including dining workers at Loyola University Chicago and graduate students at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Rohrer’s resignation as bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s (ELCA) Sierra Pacific Synod, followed months of conflicts that destroyed reputations and livelihoods, permanently severed relationships, and left a church worshipping in a rainy parking lot. Sources within the ELCA told Sojourners that Rohrer’s resignation prompted sadness and denial, anger and celebration.
Scripture is quoted twice in the latest season of Stranger Things, a first for the Netflix original that introduced us to the military experiments happening in the small Midwestern town of Hawkins, Eggo-loving Eleven, and the magic of Steve Harrington’s hair.
Compiling Weekly Wrap is sort of like going on a literary scavenger hunt for meaningful faith angles. And folks, there’s always a faith angle.
Pope Francis said he wants to give women more top-level positions in the Holy See and disclosed that for the first time he would name women to a previously all-male Vatican committee that helps him select the world’s bishops.
I was in elementary school when the first Harry Potter books were published in the United States. At the time, I was a painfully shy and awkward child; I treasured my library card and found solace in the stacks of books I carried home from our local branch. Though I was a prime target for a sensational new children’s book series, my parents — like the rest of our fundamentalist Baptist church — deemed anything about witchcraft inappropriate reading for good Christian children.
I know I’m not alone in feeling exhausted. In 2018, More In Common — a nonprofit that researches what’s driving political polarization — found that two-thirds of Americans share a series of characteristics that make them a part of what they call the “exhausted majority.” This group of people is “fed up with the polarization plaguing American government and society,” feels forgotten in the public discourse, and often has flexible views that don’t fit consistently in the Left/Right binary. Yet, they believe we can still find common ground. Sound familiar?
Above all else, Luhrmann displays Elvis as a man-turned-god who was exhausted trying to make peace with his paradoxes.
State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco)’s bill would classify affordable housing built on religious or private college land as “use by right,” a term for developments that are exempt from local zoning requirements. The bill would make it simpler for religious institutions and private universities to build affordable housing on their property.