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[Episcopal News Service] Episcopal, Lutheran and Roman Catholic bishops in Tennessee are calling on Gov. Bill Lee to commute death row inmate Christa Pike’s sentence to life in prison after state authorities this week botched their attempted execution of Pike by lethal injection. Pike, 50, was reportedly in critical condition at a Nashville hospital after surviving the state’s injection of two doses of pentobarbital intended to kill her for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer when Pike was 18. Corrections officials said the drug was administered following prison protocol, but Lee has responded to Pike’s botched execution by stopping the state from carrying out the death penalty for at least the rest of this year. The group of faith leaders, including all three of the state’s Episcopal bishops, said in their Oct. 1 letter to Lee that he should “ensure that the State of Tennessee does not attempt to execute [Pike] again.” “We make this appeal mindful of the horrific murder of Colleen Slemmer and the immeasurable grief endured by her family and those who loved her,” the faith leaders said. “Nothing in our request diminishes the gravity of that crime, the preciousness of Colleen’s life, or the legitimate responsibility of the state to hold those who commit violence accountable. Yet accountability need not require another death.” The letter was signed by West Tennessee Bishop Phoebe Roaf, Tennessee Bishop John Bauerschmidt and East Tennessee Bishop Brian Cole. The three Episcopal leaders were joined by their counterparts with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Southeastern Synod and the Roman Catholic bishops of Memphis, Nashville and Knoxville. “Our churches have long and consistently opposed capital punishment,” they said. “These convictions arise from the heart of our Christian faith. We believe every human being bears the image of God and therefore possesses a dignity that even the most grievous sin cannot erase. We believe in accountability, but we also believe in repentance, redemption, mercy, and the possibility of transformation.” Lee, in halting the one remaining execution scheduled for this year, has called for a third-party investigation into what went wrong with the lethal injection in Pike’s case. Even after the second dose, Pike remained alive and appeared to be snoring. The nature and extent of her injuries have not yet been detailed. A WPLN-TV reporter, Catherine Sweeney, who was among the media witnesses at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, said afterward that “none of it was normal.” “I covered all the executions last year, and most of the ones this year,” Sweeney said. “We haven’t seen anything like it. It went really poorly.” The Episcopal Church first expressed formal opposition to execution at the 1958 General Convention and has called on Episcopalians to urge their state governments to stop the practice. General Convention reaffirmed its opposition in 1979, 1991, 2000, 2015 and 2018, when it called for all death row prisoners to have their sentences reduced. To commute Pike’s sentence to life in prison would “not deny justice,” the Tennessee bishops said in their letter to Lee. “It declares that justice need not become vengeance and that the State of Tennessee can choose restraint, human dignity, and mercy. “As Christian bishops, we believe the Gospel continually calls us beyond cycles of violence and death toward the difficult work of justice, reconciliation, repentance, and life. In that hope, we respectfully ask you to grant clemency.” – David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at [email protected].

Two participants in the coming Leadership Gathering raise questions about The United Methodist Church’s structure, leadership and evangelism that could help frame discussions about the denomination’s future.

World Council of Churches general secretary Rev. Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay received H.E. Ambassador Amira Hanania, a Palestinian diplomat and media veteran who serves as the representative of the Higher Presidential Committee for Church Affairs in Europe. 

World Council of Churches (WCC) general secretary Rev. Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay received H.E. Muneera Naoufal Aldosari, executive director of the King Hamad Global Center for Coexistence and Tolerance, in the Kingdom of Bahrain, on 1 October. Aldosari was accompanied by Ebrahim Anwar Albalooshi, international cooperation specialist.

The World Council of Churches (WCC) and the Geneva Assembly of Churches organised an evening of testimonies in Geneva on 1 October. The special event provide a direct platform for those on the ground who are holding fast to hope and building peace in their daily lives.

The Rev. Lamar Smith worked into his 90s as a United Methodist pastor, touching lives all along the way.

[Episcopal News Service] Episcopal leaders in the Diocese of Texas are joining ecumenical partners and advocates for prisoners’ rights in calling on the state to provide air conditioning in all Texas prisons amid complaints that overheated cells violate the U.S. Constitution. A federal judge recently agreed with the advocates and ecumenical partners. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ruled Sept. 22 that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice must cool all 104 of the prison system’s lockups by the end of 2029 in compliance with Eighth Amendment prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishments. The Texas Newsroom, a public news collaborative, analyzed temperature readings in state prisons that lack air conditioning and found that most regularly reached 90 degrees and some topped 100, even though state regulations require county jails to maintain temperatures of 85 or cooler. Only a third of Texas’ state prisons currently have air conditioning, according to the Texas Tribune. The state has said that compliance with the judge’s order could cost $1.5 billion. St. David’s Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, has been active on this issue. On Sept. 23, a day after the judge’s ruling, the church hosted an evening vigil it had organized with Texas Prisons Community Advocates and the 85 to Stay Alive Campaign. In the afternoon before the vigil, St. David’s also offered its parking lot for an “experiential exhibit,” in which visitors could enter a full-scale replica of an enclosed prison cell and feel the heat that many inmates experience. “The community member can leave, can explore and walk out of the mock cell, but we couldn’t,” Jennifer Toon, a formerly incarcerated Texan, told KVUE-TV in its report about the exhibit. Toon now serves as executive director of Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance and is one of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit contesting inmate living conditions. She recalled how the summer heat felt behind bars. “When I was locked up, experiencing summers in a Texas prison was something that you dreaded,” Toon told the TV station. Now that a federal judge has ordered the state to remedy those conditions, Episcopal leaders are calling on the state to heed the judge’s order. “Every human being deserves dignity, including those who are held in our prisons,” the Rev. Hope Tinsley Benko, St. David’s associate rector, said in one of a series of compiled written statements from faith leaders. “Our faith compels us to prevent the cruelty of needless death and illness in unairconditioned facilities. As Jesus said, I was in prison and you did not visit me, whatever we do the least of these, we do also to him.” The Rev. Jim Harrington, a missioner serving at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Austin, said a society’s prison conditions say a lot about its “religious and moral framework.” “Denying life-threatening air conditioning to prisoners offends our religious beliefs and our moral standards,” Harrington said. And the Rev. Genevieve Razim, rector of All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Austin, compared the Eighth Amendment’s protections to the Scriptures’ Golden Rule, to treat others as you wish to be treated. “Whether you approach this issue as a person of faith or no faith, the extreme heat our fellow human beings inside Texas prisons are being exposed to is wrong,” Razim said in her written statement. – David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at [email protected].

[Religion News Service] In a “State of the Force” address on Sept. 30, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the creation of an Office of Religious Affairs that would elevate “spiritual health at the same level as physical health.” The office, and its director, would report directly to him, Hegseth said, to ensure soldiers have “religious support” in the form of chaplains with religious expertise rather than “secular careerists” and “lawyers.” “Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God, because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual. God is good; evil is not, and America’s military must understand the difference,” Hegseth said during an hour-long talk at a base in Virginia. A memo announcing the establishment of the Office of Religious Affairs said it would “obtain sufficient funding and resources for religious affairs,” and “oversee research, technology, and analytical tools to support and assess spiritual fitness, spiritual readiness, and spiritual resilience” of soldiers. The memo said the creation of the office should not be “construed to compel religious participation or to diminish the free exercise rights of any Service member, civilian employee, or family member of any faith or no faith.” But prominent declarations of Christian faith have been central to Hegseth’s speeches and in his vision of the military. He is a member of a conservative denomination, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, that explicitly advocates for Christians to exert their faith’s influence over the government. Pastor Doug Wilson, one of the founders of the denomination and Hegseth’s pastor, told RNS that while he knows “next to nothing about the scope of the new office,” he has hope it will be a good thing, “considering the source of it.” Hegseth also spearheaded an initiative to bring prayer services to the Pentagon. Shortly after the start of the Iran War, he prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” And he regularly quotes from the Bible, including multiple times on Sept. 30. He cited Psalm 33:12, “blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,” in addition to the passage from Ephesians that calls for believers to “put on the whole armor of God” and Isaiah 6, when the prophet says to God, “Here am I; send me!” Hegseth also claimed that “less than 5% of our force identifies as non-religious.” A 2019 Congressional Research paper on military demographics reported that 2.3% of military troops identified as “atheist or agnostic”; however, an additional 24.4% of the military troops were religiously identified as “other, unclassified or unknown.” According to the Rt. Rev. Ann Ritonia, who serves as the eighth bishop suffragan of Armed Forces and Federal Ministries of the Episcopal Church, the announcement of the new Office of Religious Affairs was met with confusion. “My first reaction is: What is going on? Because this is completely out of the ordinary,” she said. “Nothing like this has been seen before in the military in regards to the Chaplain Corps.” Ritonia said that upon reading the memo describing the new office, she found “really good things,” such as the possibility of helping underfunded chaplaincy programs. She noted concerns about the Armed Forces Chaplain Board being “understaffed” and “not adequately funded,” and celebrated the prospect of efforts to change that. But Ritonia said she also has concerns about the structure of the new office. “My initial assessment is that it violates the chain of command,” she said. “Chaplains have direct access to the Religious Affairs office, is how this reads, rather than going through their chain of command. That can undermine good order and discipline, particularly if a particular religious group has the ear of the director of the Office of Religious Affairs.” “I think it could be very confusing, unless there’s real clarification about the role of the chiefs of chaplains,” she said. The bishop also noted that some of the military chaplains she works with are wary of the new office in part because it is being created under Hegseth. She described the Defense Secretary’s rhetoric as “definitely Christocentric” and argued that at least some of his efforts amount to a “push of fundamentalist Christianity into the military.” “It feels like the free exercise of faith for chaplains has become more important than protecting the free exercise of those they serve,” she said. Franklin Graham, who sits on the Department of Justice’s Religious Liberty Commission, said he thought the new office was “a great idea.” “Unfortunately, not all administrations have treated military chaplains as necessary — but they are some of the most necessary because they are entrusted with caring for the spiritual well-being of our men and women in uniform who put their lives on the line to protect our nation,” Graham told RNS. Americans United for Separation of Church and State denounced the new office. “It’s yet another example of Hegseth abusing the power of his government position to impose his beliefs on others — and worse, it puts the needs of America’s service members second to this administration’s Christian Nationalist agenda,” the organization said in a statement. Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation was more blunt. ‘This is the latest example of a pervasive and pernicious pattern and practice of the elevation of unconstitutional Christian nationalism to a position of total control of technologically the most lethal organization ever created by our species,” said Weinstein, whose nonprofit organization includes 100,000 active-duty military and veterans seeking legal help to resolve religious freedom cases. In June, the Department of Defense announced it was reducing the number of religions it officially recognizes from 211 to 31, the vast majority being various Christian denominations. Excluded were atheists, pagans, humanists and New Age faiths. The U.S. Air Force recently announced that atheists have until Oct. 16 to reclassify their religious affiliations in accordance with the Department of Defense’s new “Religious Affiliation Codes” or risk being automatically reclassified. In its […]

Young Anglicans aged 16 to 25 are invited to apply to the new National Youth Council and help shape the life of the church. Applications close on October 16.

The post Call for applications: National Youth Council appeared first on Anglican Church of Canada.

The 2026 Right Livelihood Award is honoring women and women-led organisations confronting the world’s most entrenched power structures: authoritarian rule, patriarchal violence, and unchecked AI development.