by | Oct 24, 2023 | Uncategorized
The case of prison convert Will Speer shows the significance of ‘peers’ leading ministry behind bars.
Update (October 26, 2023): A few hours before Will Speer’s scheduled execution on Thursday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed his death pending further review of his case. Speer has presented several legal claims, including that his counsel did not provide mitigating evidence.
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The first death row prisoner to help lead a death row ministry in Texas’s Allan B. Polunsky Unit, a state prison with maximum security units, is scheduled to be executed on Thursday, October 26. On Tuesday, Texas denied Will Speer’s application for clemency.
Every morning, Speer leads prayer and worship—sometimes delivering a sermon through prison radio—on death row. Though the men are in solitary confinement for 22 hours of the day, they can still sing together through the walls, said pastor Dana Moore, who has spent years ministering to those on death row in the Polunsky Unit.
In 2021 the Texas Department of Criminal Justice started an 18-month faith-based program for 28 death row inmates who passed an application process. The program became known as the “God Pod,” consisting of classes, worship, and rare fellowship for those normally in solitary confinement.
Speer graduated from the program this year and became the first “inmate coordinator” for the God Pod program, which meant he could teach classes and mentor others in prison despite being on death row.
Speer was convicted of murdering Jerry Collins when he was 16 and was sentenced to life in prison as an adult. Then, a decade later in 2001, he was convicted of murdering a fellow prisoner, Gary Dickerson—he says the murder was to get gang protection in prison—and was sentenced to death.
He argues that mitigating …
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by | Oct 24, 2023 | Uncategorized
The Israel-Hamas war is thousands of miles from my daughter—and on her phone. I can’t keep her from the world’s sorrows.
As we drive to school, the first streaks of pink and orange spill across the horizon. Cars change lanes beside me, and in this madly spinning world—everyone and everything moving—the expansive sky looks still. I turn the radio down and catch my 12-year-old daughter’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
We’re on the way to her middle school, and she’s sitting in the back seat, blissfully unaware of the fresh grief unfurling in the Holy Land on this October morning. It occurs to me that there are only a few letters separating ignorance from innocence. Wanting both to last a little longer, I let the space between my words stretch out. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
I am in a brutal bind. Tell her too little, and she’ll be caught off guard when—not if—she hears of the Israel-Hamas war from some source other than me. Tell her too much, and I needlessly rush her toward the end of childhood.
I fumble forward, words spilling out of my mouth despite my reticence. I tell her about the attacks in Israel this month and the rumors swirling as Israeli troops prepare their response. But I don’t tell her about the grandmother whose murder was livestreamed or that babies were reportedly burnt and beheaded. I don’t tell her that Hamas uses civilian Palestinians as human shields or that, because the Palestinian population skews young, hundreds of children have already died in Israel’s response, and that more will die even if Israel does its best to abide by the laws of war.
I’m telling her this news, I explain, because I want her to be careful—aware of what might be coming next when someone casually hands over their phone and says, Hey, look at this. …
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by | Oct 23, 2023 | Uncategorized
Threatened amid accusations of collaboration with an enemy state, implementation awaits more votes, presidential signature, and judicial review. UOC leader calls it “a struggle against God.”
Ukraine’s parliament overwhelmingly passed a preliminary vote last Thursday for a bill that could ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has close ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, from operating within Ukraine’s borders.
Law 8371 would give Ukrainian authorities power to examine the connection of religious groups in Ukraine to the Russian Federation and to ban those whose leadership is outside of Ukraine. The draft law, approved by a tally of 267–15, with two abstentions, still needs to undergo a second vote, where it may be amended. It would then move to President Volodymyr Zelensky for his approval before it becomes law.
Since the outbreak of full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine, Russian Orthodox priests in Ukraine and around the world have faced accusations of spying and otherwise working to advance Russia’s political interests. Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill, a close ally of the Putin regime, has provided religious justification for the conflict in sermons and public appearances.
“The Russian Orthodox Church’s connection to the Russian Special Services has a very long history,” Oleksandr Kyrylenko, a scholar of religion and Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine, told Religion News Service.
Last month, Bulgaria expelled three of the highest-ranking Russian Orthodox priests in the country. At the same time, the FBI warned Orthodox communities in the US that Russian intelligence services may be using their churches to recruit assets.
Since the 10th century, Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Christians had been part of one church. The Moscow Patriarchate itself began as the Metropolis of Kiev and all Rus, the people who formed the first Russian nation.
The relationship between the …
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by | Oct 23, 2023 | Uncategorized
Jesus’ teachings challenge how we spend when money is tight.
In May, Italy’s government called an emergency meeting over the rising prices of pasta. Italians have also been hit in the pocketbook by high natural gas prices, an expense of boiling water for cooking. In 2022, the Italian government recommended reducing how long home cooks boil pasta water as a thrifty “virtuous action.”
This is just one symptom of the recent surge in prices that makes paying for our daily bread difficult. Inflation has hit around the world, and with it have come different pressures on households. In the United States, the average lifestyle costs more than twice as much as it did in 1990. In Ghana, where inflation may be the highest in Africa, food costs twice as much as it did one year ago. Its last annual inflation figure was over 50 percent per year. Moth and rust, of a sort, have destroyed.
But there are other pressures on consumers to be thrifty, including a sense of responsibility to slow our waste. For example, America tosses about 13 million tons of clothing a year. And although there are hungry people, almost a third of the cultivated land in the world grows crops that will benefit neither humans nor animals. After that, about 14 percent of food is discarded before it even reaches a shop.
In view of our consumption and its costs, slack can feel elusive, and extra can seem outrageous. One response to these tensions of wealth, waste, and need always seems to have the stamp of virtue: thrift.
Thrift is a response to tradeoffs—to the choices we often make between having and eating our cake. It means using less, buying less, or spending less in order to redirect resources. Thrift may be a way of managing a small budget or big expenses, such as making money saved on used clothing …
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by | Oct 23, 2023 | Uncategorized
Some conservative churches that voted to disaffiliate say the denomination has responded by forcing out their pastors and charging them millions to keep their property.
Majority-Korean churches looking for a way out of the United Methodist Church (UMC) fear they’re at risk of losing not only their land but also their leadership; a handful of Korean pastors say they were removed from their conservative congregations after the churches began the process to disaffiliate.
Of the 244 Korean-language UMC churches, more than 100 have begun the disaffiliation process, according to Keihwan Kevin Ryoo, former executive director of the Association of Korean Churches in the United Methodist Church.
That’s more than double the number of churches the denomination expected to leave. At a meeting of Korean American leaders earlier this month, Paul Chang, executive director of the Korean Ministry Plan, had said he expected 40 congregations and 60 pastors to leave. The departures would represent 15–17 percent of all Korean American UMC churches.
Already, 40 churches have successfully left the UMC and joined the new conservative offshoot, the Global Methodist Church (GMC). Ryoo said more are waiting for their annual conferences to approve their disaffiliation vote or are still moving through the process.
Others gave up when they realized their congregation could not afford to pay the property value requested by the annual conference as terms to leave. Multiple congregations say they’ve had their pastors removed by annual conference leadership during the disaffiliation process.
In the Chicago area, pastor Hogun Kim and members of South Suburban Korean United Methodist Church (SSKUMC) were concerned that the leaders of their annual conference—the regional UMC body—had disregarded the denomination’s Book of Discipline by appointing gay clergy in the area.
Northern Illinois …
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