(RNS) — On top of his duties as the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins takes time to answer letters from Christians trying to reconcile their faith with science. At a conference last week of BioLogos, the nonprofit he founded more than 10 years ago to bridge science and faith, Collins told an audience of 360 scientists, pastors and educators about an email he received recently from a man in Nigeria named Emanuel. Emanuel was raised in a conservative Christian home but was studying to be a nurse and wrestling with whether he could hold on to his faith. Collins told him he didn’t need to abandon his faith in order to understand what he was learning. “I was so grateful for the opportunity to reassure this young man and his friends that there is a wonderful answer to the dilemma they face and to walk them through what that might be,” Collins told the audience assembled in Baltimore for the BioLogos conference. A renowned geneticist, Collins is … [Read more...]

(RNS) — The archives of the late evangelist Billy Graham will be moved from their location in Illinois to the library named after him in North Carolina. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association announced the decision about the transfer of the evangelist’s papers and the association’s archives on Thursday (March 28). “This is part of our continuing consolidation in Billy Graham’s hometown,” said evangelist Franklin Graham, president and CEO of the BGEA and son of Billy Graham. “Some 214,000 people visited the Billy Graham Library here in Charlotte last year alone, and it makes sense for my father’s archives to be housed and maintained here for visiting scholars to conduct research, and for our guests to see when they come visit our ministry headquarters, the Library and my parents’ gravesites.” The Billy Graham Center was dedicated in 1980 at Wheaton College, the older evangelist’s alma mater in the Chicago suburb of Wheaton, Ill. The Billy Graham Center Archives and the … [Read more...]

OMAHA, Neb. (RNS) — Tara Hollis couldn’t see any floodwaters when she first peered out the window at 5 a.m. on the morning of March 14. Cars still were driving by on the road, Hollis said. Half an hour later, water from the Loup River, which runs along the south side of the city into the Platte River, had crept up to the house she shared with her son, her boyfriend and her brother in Columbus, Neb., a city of about 22,000 people west of Omaha. By 9:30 a.m., the 27-year-old and her family were trapped on the second floor of the rental house as the water reached up to four feet on the first floor and the power went out, she said. They would wait another 24 hours to be rescued, hanging colorful towels and an S.O.S. sign outside to make themselves easier to spot. They watched the orange sunset streak across the sky as the fields surrounding the house became an ocean, and their cars disappeared beneath the waves. Trees and huge chunks of ice flowed past, crashing into … [Read more...]

ST. LOUIS (RNS) — Emi Belciak teaches third grade in a tough part of suburban St. Louis, where she says her students are exposed to more violence than any child should be. The school where Belciak teaches is just three miles from the site in Ferguson, Mo., where Michael Brown was killed. Five years have passed, but this part of north St. Louis County hasn’t completely healed. Belciak wanted to do something to help — so she joined a choir. The Community Gospel Choir of St. Louis is dedicated to bridging the black and white communities in a metropolitan area rarely associated with racial harmony. The diverse group aims to break down racial, cultural and economic barriers among its members and the community. The 75-member choir opens its Monday night rehearsals with group prayer. Next, the choir preps for an upcoming performance or refines a new song. The idea is to get the lyrics and music memorized so the choir can improvise in front of an audience, just like a jazz or blues … [Read more...]

(RNS) — Sister Christine Imbali of the Assumption Sisters of Eldoret, in western Kenya, has been working to help low-income women and families end their reliance on her small community of Catholic religious women and other charitable groups. Instead of a charity, she wants to give families in the country’s fifth-largest city the option to be self-sustaining and to contribute an important aspect of a healthy city — nutrition. Her idea: chickens. “You cannot evangelize to people who are hungry, who are dying, who are not getting an education,” Imbali said. In April, she hopes to introduce poultry farming to her families in hopes that social enterprise, as these kinds of helping businesses are known, will take off in Kenya. The notion of do-gooding chickens originated in July of last year at the third Vatican Conference on Impact Investing in Rome. The conference was part of a series intended to “serve as a vital, long-term, global platform around Pope Francis’ vision of ‘placing … [Read more...]

(RNS) — A new survey finds that Americans continue to oppose the idea that small-business owners should be able to refuse products or services to gay or lesbian people due to their religious beliefs. The survey by the Public Religion Research Institute follows up on findings released last week that show strong majorities within all religious groups also support nondiscrimination policies for LGBT Americans. The findings, which are consistent with earlier opinion, suggest that last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission had little effect on notions about so-called service refusals. In that highly publicized case, the justices ruled that a Colorado baker had the right to refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple based on his personal religious objections. PRRI’s latest release shows that about 57 percent of Americans opposed allowing small-business owners to refuse services to LGBT people if it would violate their … [Read more...]