An advisory group to U.S. bishops urged the Catholic leaders on Tuesday to avoid making Communion “a tool for division” as debate resurfaces in Catholic circles over whether President Joe Biden’s support for abortion rights should disqualify him from receiving the sacrament.

Gathered in a Baltimore hotel ballroom, the bishops’ conference is scheduled to discuss a draft of a document clarifying the meaning of Holy Communion, a sacrament central to the faith.

The bishops have been divided over how explicitly the document should define the eligibility of prominent Catholics like Biden to receive Communion due to political stances that contradict church teaching.

As a pastor I don’t ask, in this holy space of in between, when death is drawing near, theological questions about personhood or ensoulment. Neither do medical definitions of what marks life’s margins — heartbeats, breath, or brain function — occupy my concern. These are the gray edges of life.

Editor’s note: On Sunday, the Texas Supreme Court temporarily blocked mask mandates in two of the state’s biggest counties, upholding Gov. Gregg Abbott’s executive order prohibiting them. As school begins across the country, some districts in Texas, Florida, and elsewhere are defying mask mandate bans, in some cases risking school funding. Teachers and administrators are preparing for a year of unknowns as the Delta variant rages among the unvaccinated.

Tammy Stallcup has been teaching junior high and middle school choir for 34 years in Texas public schools, primarily in Odessa. Now teaching near Fort Worth, Texas, she begins her 35th year this fall, and wrote this prayer for teachers.

WHEN I WAS 8 years old, in June 1998, three white supremacists lynched James Byrd Jr., a Black man in Jasper, Texas. After offering him a ride in their truck, they beat him, desecrated him, chained him to their vehicle, dragged him to his dismemberment and eventual death, and deposited parts of his body in front of a Black church to be found on Sunday morning. I remember hearing about the murder on the evening news and having a newly personal sense of the geography of racial terror. As a child living in California, I could not locate Jasper on a map, but its name, and Byrd’s, were forever fixed in my mind.

Earlier this year, I realized that my great-grandmother was around that same age when, in May 1918, white supremacists lynched Mary Turner and a dozen other Black people, including the baby they cut out of Turner’s abdomen. I wonder if my great-grandmother, as a child, heard the news, and how it affected her. In her case, the lynchings happened not three states but three hours from where she lived in Georgia. Unlike in Byrd’s case, there were no charges, arrests, trials, or convictions of the known and suspected murderers behind these lynchings. I wonder if and how the killings—and the impunity allowing the lynchers freedom of movement—shaped her sense of the landscape.

In Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, geographer Katherine McKittrick writes that “Black matters are spatial matters.” McKittrick identifies the social production of space—how landscape is not a fixed background but is defined by relationships. Fugitivity, precarity, and possibilities of life and death are mapped realities that follow social relationships.

Gov. Greg Abbott informed the U.S. State Department that Texas will not participate in the refugee resettlement program this fiscal year. The decision comes after more than 40 governors, including several Republicans, have said they would opt in to the federal refugee resettlement program. Resettlement agencies needed written consent from states and local governments by Jan. 21. The deadline was imposed in a September executive order by the Trump Administration that requires written consent from states and local entities before they resettle refugees within their boundaries.

Patrick Murphy's execution was again halted Thursday because Texas death row inmates' final access to spiritual advisors of their faith differs for Christians and Buddhists. Murphy, a 58-year-old Buddhist, is one of two surviving members of the infamous "Texas Seven," a group of escaped prisoners who committed multiple robberies and killed a police officer near Dallas in 2000 during more than a month on the run. Four others have already been executed, one killed himself when police caught up to them in Colorado, and one other remains on death row with Murphy.

San Antonio is about 63 percent Hispanic — the largest majority-Hispanic city in America — 30 percent white and 7 percent black. Helmke suggested the interfaith group ought to look more like the population itself.

The Disaster Recovery Reform Act, also known as H.R. 4460, was approved on Nov. 30 by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and will next move to the House floor for deliberation.

The bill received strong support from both sides of the aisle despite objections that using taxpayer funds to rebuild houses of worship would violate the separation of church and state. Proponents of the measure argue that religious groups, which are often at the forefront of disaster relief efforts, are being unfairly disadvantaged.