Kansas City
Forty miles north of Kansas City is the small town of Gover, home to the Benedictine abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus. There, thousands of people—mostly Catholics—lined up over the Memorial Day holiday to view the body of the African American foundress, Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, who died in 2019. Her un-embalmed body was exhumed in preparation for reinterment and was found to be exceptionally well preserved and without odor. Visitors (numbering more than 15,000 a day) were allowed to touch, even kiss, the dead body of the woman who founded the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles, in 1995 when she was 70 years old.
Los Angeles
“At least a third of the 12 Roman Catholic dioceses in California have either filed for bankruptcy or are contemplating doing so to deal with an influx of lawsuits filed by survivors of childhood sexual abuse after a state law opened a three-year window in which cases were exempted from age limits. More than 3,000 lawsuits have been filed against the Catholic Church in California under a 2019 state law that allowed alleged victims to sue up to the age of 40. Advocates have been stunned by the number of cases that surfaced during the window, which closed at the end of December.” (from Religion News Service)
Ft. Worth
Drama continued at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, a Southern Baptist school, as the trustees gathered for an emergency Zoom meeting. They were responding to demands by some trustees to investigate charges by two board members against current and former institutional leaders. In response, the board voted to “publish the audited financials as one comprehensive report for the fiscal years 2003-2022 and examples of presidential expenses as generated by the task force review.” The seminary’s current enrollment has fallen to levels not seen since World War II.
Little Rock
A resolution passed by a unanimous vote in the Arkansas House of Representatives includes a strong statement in support of Jewish ties to Judea and Samaria. The resolution passed on April 6 calls on Arkansas to enter into strategic partnerships with Israel and build upon a Memorandum of Understanding then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed with the Israel Innovation Authority in 2022. It is part of a movement among some states, including Florida in 2012, South Carolina in 2018 and Texas in 2023, to offer a modern legal background to justify Jewish rights in those areas, referring either to the League of Nations or the United Nations, or both. Arkansas’s resolution goes a step further by skipping over references to modern international law and taking for granted the natural right of Jews to Judea and Samaria.
Knoxville
According to the Cooperative Election Study (CES), the one religious group most likely to be active politically is atheists. Which has led columnist Terry Mattingly to draw his own conclusion: “Here’s what I believe to be the emerging narrative of the next several decades: the rise of atheism and their unbelievably high level of political engagement in recent electoral politics.” He points out that the CES, a Harvard University-based, national, professional survey by independent scholars, reports that atheists (as a category of religion) rank as first in four of the six categories of political activities and high in the remaining two.
