Thursday's News & Ideas - 6/30/2022
- NOLA clergy investigated
- UMC plan update
- Learning from tragedy
- Student counters anti-gay pastor
- Purity culture’s global impact
- Dick’s CEO follows conscience
FBI opens sweeping probe of clergy sex abuse in New Orleans
Associated Press: The FBI has opened a widening investigation into sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans going back decades, a rare federal foray into such cases looking specifically at whether priests took children across state lines to molest them.
What happened to United Methodists’ proposal to split the denomination?
Religion News Service: Before United Methodists could vote on a widely endorsed plan, traditionalists launched a new denomination and several representatives of centrist and progressive groups revoked their support for it.
Pastor uses experience from West Explosion to guide Uvalde through tragedy
KWTX: John Crowder, senior pastor at First Baptist Church of West, says the deadly 2013 explosion is teaching communities, like Uvalde, how to heal and overcome. Ever since the explosion, which killed 15 people and left the small town leveled, Crowder has been studying disasters and how to guide people through them.
Student brings community together to counter pastor who called for death of all gay people*
Idaho State Journal: Lizzy Duke-Moe, a Boise High School graduate, was spurred into action last week to counter a local Baptist pastor who called for the death of all gay people. Duke-Moe organized a workshop to bring LGBTQ+ youth and their allies and supporters together with local clergy “to show hate is never the way in religion,” she said.
The impact of Christian purity culture is still being felt — including in Britain
The Conversation: In the 1990s and 2000s, a Christian movement now known as “purity culture” reached its height. Purity culture was most significant in America, and it has gradually faded from cultural prominence. Its impact, though, is global and ongoing.
The Spark
Dick’s Sporting Goods followed its conscience on guns — and it paid off
“I don’t want to be part of the story anymore,” Dick’s CEO Ed Stack told his top executives days after the school shooting in Parkland. And with those words, Stack, a gun owner and gun rights supporter, set in motion a series of corporate actions that may serve as a model for other CEOs trying to balance their personal conscience and corporate interests, says Harvard Business School.
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