HALLE, Germany (AP) — Several shots were fired Wednesday (Oct. 9) in the eastern German city of Halle, leaving two people dead as the suspected assailants fled, police said. The exact target of the attack was not clear, since it took place near both a synagogue and a kebab shop, local media and witnesses said. Police said in a tweet that the suspects fled in a car, and soon after, authorities reported that one person had been arrested. They gave no information about the arrested person or reasons why they thought the attack could have been carried out by more than one person. Officers were out in force across the city hunting down the suspects and urged residents to stay at home or indoors. The railway station in Halle, a city of 240,000, was closed down as a precaution. Police gave no details about the target, or targets, of the attack. Pictures from the scene showed a body lying in the street behind a police cordon. News agency dpa reported the body was lying opposite a … [Read more...]

(RNS) — As a white evangelical Christian from a rural town in Georgia, I grew up around people who looked like me, thought like me and worshipped like me. The media I consumed typically depicted foreign-born people as the bad guys — criminals, terrorists, people to fear. Then, in 2013, after seminary, I moved with my wife to Clarkston, a community outside Atlanta that has welcomed thousands of refugees. It turned our world upside down in the best way possible. Clarkston put us face-to-face with people from far-flung countries who had overcome traumatic displacement and were rebuilding their lives. They looked different from us and cherished different faiths, but their stories were fundamentally human. In showing me the world through their eyes, they freed me from my fear. That freedom brought so many good things into my life. It allowed me to forge some of my closest friendships; today my best friends are people from Iraq, Afghanistan, Bhutan and Congo. It deepened my Christian … [Read more...]

(RNS) — More than 90 Christian leaders are calling for a National Day of Prayer this Sunday (Oct. 13) “for the truth to be revealed through the impeachment inquiry” into whether President Donald Trump solicited help from a foreign government for his 2020 reelection campaign. That call comes from leaders affiliated with Red Letter Christians, a justice-focused Christian movement that held a revival over the weekend in Goldsboro, North Carolina. It also includes praying for members of Congress and inviting them to worship services while home Sunday in their congressional districts. “For the sake of our nation’s integrity and the most vulnerable in our society, we call on fellow Christians to support the current impeachment inquiry. Now is the time to shine the light of truth,” according to the statement released Tuesday by Red Letter Christians. “Please join us in praying that the truth will be revealed and set us all free.” Its signers include Red Letter Christians … [Read more...]

DENVER, Colorado (RNS) — The Evolving Faith 2019 conference, the second annual gathering of progressive Christians (most of them with evangelical backgrounds), opened this weekend with a song-prayer, offered by Melaney Gleeson-Lyall, a member of the Musqueam and Snawnawas indigenous people groups located near Vancouver. “We are all one, one heart, one mind, one spirit,” Gleeson-Lyall said to the nearly 2,500 people gathered for Evolving Faith 2019 at the University of Denver’s Ritchie Center hockey arena, before breaking into the Musqueam tribe’s language, accompanied by her drum. The brainchild of two Christian authors and bloggers, Sarah Bessey and the late Rachel Held Evans, Evolving Faith is aimed at “wanderers, wonderers, and spiritual refugees,” according to its website, though most of the weekend’s attendees had come to hear refugees specifically from traditional (mostly white) evangelicalism discuss how to remake its image. In practice that meant making “inclusion” an … [Read more...]

(RNS) — The American Academy of Religion has published a broad set of guidelines outlining what every undergraduate student should know about religion. The three-year effort by members of the AAR, the century-old association of scholars, is an attempt to provide a baseline for religious literacy in hopes of challenging undergraduates at two- and four-year colleges to better understand belief systems and worldviews different from their own. The AAR identified the rise of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, as well as the increasing number of people with no formal religious affiliation, as reasons for undertaking the project. It follows on a similar project in 2010, in which the AAR provided guidelines for grades K-12. “As the learned society that established the study of religion as a field we felt our obligation and responsibility to provide some grounding in these guidelines,” said Alice Hunt, AAR’s executive director. But since the AAR can’t tell colleges and universities … [Read more...]