Happy Cleaners, an independent film set in the diverse Flushing neighborhood in Queens, New York, is about a Korean American family that owns a struggling dry-cleaning business. It’s an attempt by filmmakers Julian Kim and Peter Lee, both United Methodists, to confront some of the assumptions often made about their community.
Even before the ribbon was cut to officially open Trinity Haven—Indiana’s first residential facility for LGBTQ youth and young adults who are at risk of homelessness—on April 30, two people were living in the house.
“As soon as we announced our opening date, young people began contacting Trinity Haven,” said Leigh Ann Hirschman, a member of Trinity Episcopal Church in Indianapolis and the founding president of Trinity Haven’s board of directors. They knew they would be imminently homeless, she continued, making the real need for such a shelter all the more obvious.
Veteran broadcast journalist Bob Abernethy, who founded the PBS program Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, has died at the age of 93.
He died on May 2 in Brunswick, Maine, his daughter Jane Montgomery Abernethy announced in a Facebook post. She said her father died of natural causes.
Abernethy was a correspondent for NBC News for more than four decades. Working in Washington, Los Angeles, London, and Moscow, he covered the fledgling US space program, Congress, and the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life congregation has chosen internationally renowned architect Daniel Libeskind to design a new building for the site where 11 Jews were gunned down nearly three years ago in the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history.
Libeskind was the unanimous choice of the steering committee as well as of Tree of Life’s board of trustees, and for reasons beyond his architectural qualifications: Libeskind was born to Holocaust survivors living in a homeless shelter in Lodz, Poland, after the war.
Womanist theologian Chanequa Walker-Barnes has joined the faculty of Columbia Theological Seminary as professor of practical theology and pastoral counseling.
In a statement, Millie Snyder, one of the seminary’s board of trustees, said Walker-Barnes’s expertise will help equip seminarians for the work of reconciliation in both the church and the world.
“Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes has woven together the best scholarship in clinical psychology with an incarnational faith grounded in justice and faith,” she said.
A report aiming to tackle racism in the Church of England has recommended dozens of proposals to end decades of inaction, including the requirement that at least one ethnic minority candidate be included in short lists for senior clergy roles.
The church’s antiracism task force was set up last year after Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby told the General Synod there was “no doubt” the Church of England was still “deeply institutionally racist.”
Shortly after US Rep. Mary Miller of Oakland, Illinois, said in a January speech that “Hitler was right” about youth indoctrination, Jewish leaders from the state arranged a Zoom call. They hoped to help her understand the pain caused by the comments she delivered on the steps of the United States Capitol, the day before insurrectionists breached the building.
When the unfamiliar pop-up touting a new feature appeared on Robert P. Jones’s Facebook feed, the CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute posted a screen grab to Twitter.
“Wondering what fb algorithm thinks it knows about me?” Jones mused.
The new Facebook feature? Prayer posts. The function will allow members of Facebook groups to ask for and respond to prayer requests.
On April 8, Celeste Kennel-Shank, the Century’s former news editor and a current contributing editor to the magazine, was named president of the Associated Church Press.
The ACP, founded in 1916 as the Editorial Council of the Religious Press, is a professional organization committed to excellence in religion journalism as a means of supporting “the life of faith and the Christian community.”
Ole Anthony, a small-church pastor and activist who spent years investigating the lifestyles of rich and famous televangelists, died April 16 at the age of 82.
Anthony, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, was the longtime president of the Dallas-based Trinity Foundation Inc., a nonprofit that helped people experiencing homelessness. He also ran a radio show, held Bible studies, and eventually spent years investigating televangelists.