Monday's News & Ideas - 7/29/2019

A Protestant push for gun reform, deep in the heart of Texas
The Trace: The Rev. Deanna Hollas is being touted as the country’s first minister of gun violence prevention. Sponsored by the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, her role is to provide pastoral care to people who are scared of becoming gun violence victims and to mobilize leaders in Presbyterian churches to enact gun reforms.
Relevant: It’s time for more Christians to address gun violence

Boris Johnson’s confusing and contradictory religious history
The Economist: The new British prime minister’s spiritual antecedents, and his present convictions, are a bundle of contrasts and confusion. In a nutshell, he has Muslim, Jewish and Christian ancestors. He was christened a Catholic by his mother. He was confirmed in the Anglican faith (thus formally lapsing from Catholicism) while attending Eton College.

Symposium: The new court and religion
SCOTUSblog: Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh will likely adopt a free exercise clause that provides robust protection of religion, a change from their predecessors on the court, writes Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC-Berkeley School of Law.

Ebenezer Baptist’s pastor says ministers shouldn’t stay silent on issues of race
AJC: The Rev. Raphael G. Warnock says mass incarceration isn’t just one more manifestation of racism in America. He sees it as the struggle for America’s soul. “I think people of faith, who have moral courage, have to stand up to mass incarceration in the 21st century the way people of faith stood up to slavery in the 19th century through the abolitionist movement and Jim Crow segregation,” Warnock said.

The last days of John Allen Chau
Outside: In the fall of 2018, the 26-year-old American missionary traveled to a remote speck of sand and jungle in the Indian Ocean, attempting to convert one of the planet's last uncontacted tribes to Christianity. The islanders killed him, and Chau was pilloried around the world as a deluded Christian supremacist who deserved to die. Alex Perry pieces together the life and death of a young adventurer driven to extremes by unshakable faith.

The Spark

Native Hawaiians on coverage of Mauna Kea resistance
Native Hawaiians’ resistance to the construction of a massive, cutting-edge telescope on Hawai’i’s Mauna Kea volcano has been portrayed as a battle between science and religion. But Native Hawaiian activists, scholars and scientists say that isn’t the right frame for this story.

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