NEWS STORY
RNS-Friendly-Epidemiologist: Meet the Friendly Neighbor Epidemiologist encouraging her fellow Christians to get vaccinated
(RNS) — Baptist epidemiologist Emily Smith started Friendly Neighbor Epidemiologist, a Facebook page, in March 2020 to share information about the novel coronavirus and answer questions she was hearing from her neighbors and friends. Since then, the page, written in Smith’s friendly, informational voice, has grown to more than 96,000 followers. About half are evangelical Christians, she said. By Emily McFarlan Miller. 1,100 words. (category: a)
NEWS STORY
RNS-Tulsa-Reparations: 100 years later, Black church leaders seek reparations for Tulsa massacre
(RNS) — As the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, pauses to mark the massacre of hundreds of Black people in its Greenwood district 100 years ago, African American church leaders are among those saying the time has come to repay as well as to remember. An historic African Methodist Episcopal Church is one of the plaintiffs in a suit filed in September that calls for the city and other defendants to pay reparations to relatives of victims and survivors of the massacre. By Adelle M. Banks. 1,400 words. (category: a)
NEWS STORY
RNS-Moore-Resignation: Russell Moore, Baptist ethicist and Trump critic, to leave ERLC for Christianity Today
NASHVILLE (RNS) — After years of controversy, Southern Baptist ethicist and Never-Trumper Russell Moore has resigned from his denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He’ll join Christianity Today, a major evangelical magazine that also opposed Trump, as a public theologian. By Bob Smietana 830 words. (category: a)
COMMENTARY
RNS-Wallis-Oped: We can’t rebuild the US until we support families
(RNS) — What makes a family able to work and take care of each of its members? That is the moral question that could unite many of us. The capacity for health care, self-care, child care and elder care are all foundational to our lives — and both the new jobs and family plans address all these needs. By Jim Wallis. 1,511 words. (category: k)
COMMENTARY
RNS-Randall-Oped: Protecting the climate is loving our neighbor
(RNS) — We cannot depend on the seesaw of presidential administrations to guide our course on climate change. If we’re not careful, Earth Day 100 (April 2070) could end up marking not success but a memorial for all that could have been done but was not for one weak reason or another. We need to think not from administration to administration, but globally. By Diane Randall. 693 words. (category: k)
COMMENTARY
RNS-Suleiman-Oped: Malcolm X’s moral courage and the challenge of Palestine
(RNS) — It was Malcolm who warned us in his lifetime about the damage being done to the Palestinians, before any other African American leader or civil rights organization. Malcolm reminds us of two historical constants: first, that every era requires people who can fearlessly speak truth to power; and second, that those who do so will inevitably be sidelined during their time. By Omar Suleiman. 794 words. (category: k)
COMMENTARY
RNS-Salkin-Oped: The most radical Jewish thinker of our time has died
(RNS) — Richard Rubenstein — the most iconoclastic, maddening, frustrating, heretical and creative Jewish thinker of his generation — died this past weekend at the age of 97. The story of Rubenstein is the story of a very complicated man who grew up in a working-class Jewish family in New York. By Jeffrey Salkin. 1,147 words. (category: k)