Friday's News & Ideas - 3/27/2020
- Apps helping churches online
- Funerals in a pandemic
- Virtual bar mitzvah
- National Cathedral donates masks
- Worship shouldn’t harm
- Contagion fables
This social network for churches is thriving in the coronavirus pandemic
Vox: In response to the coronavirus, churches are playing catch-up to get themselves online. Some platforms are eager to help.
As coronavirus death toll mounts, faith leaders the world over grapple with funerals
Religion News Service: How do you conduct a funeral in the midst of a global pandemic, when a healing hug is now seen as a potential death sentence?
Becoming a man, virtually*
The New York Times: We couldn’t have guests, but the bar mitzvah ceremony would go on.
National Cathedral donates 5,000 forgotten face masks found stashed in crypt
HuffPost: The church squirreled away thousands of respirator masks 14 years ago.
I refuse to participate in worship that leads to devastation
Sojourners: Donald Trump thought he was offering me a gift. In defiance of immunologists, scientists, and health experts, the president is pushing for an Easter re-opening of our social world, including communal Christian worship.
The Spark
What our contagion fables are really about
In the literature of pestilence, the greatest threat* isn’t the loss of human life but the loss of what makes us human, The New Yorker says.
*access is limited for nonsubscribers
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