After a panel assembled for the “Just Creation” conference put on by Columbia Theological Seminary and many partners took on the topic of the planet we inhabit on Friday, a second panel was asked later that day to speak about water.
COVID-19 has ravaged the Navajo Nation, killing Native Americans at a faster rate than any other community in the country. According to a report published in early 2021, Native Americans have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic — especially on reservations, where access to basic resources, including food and water, can be limited.
The year was 2009, the place was Yei in what is now South Sudan, the newest country in the world. I was a mission co-worker serving as the first principal of RECONCILE Peace Institute, and our first class of students had arrived. The student body included about 45 church and community leaders from a dozen or more ethnic groups on opposing sides of a two- decades-long civil war. They had come to Yei to take courses in community-based trauma healing, peace studies and conflict transformation.
If you’re looking for a congregation that personifies the spirit of Matthew 25 congregational vitality, you will find one in White Rock Presbyterian Church in White Rock, an unincorporated community of nearly 6,000 people in Los Alamos County in north-central New Mexico.
With nearly all of her trips to see family and friends temporarily on hold during the pandemic, Lucy Janjigian simply lets her fingers — and her imagination — do the walking, straight through every colorful page of the Presbyterian Giving Catalog.
Climate change, according to the rev. abby mohaupt, has made it more difficult for many people, especially the poor, to access six keys to human existence — food, access to water, rest, home, safety and love.
Before a hunger emergency struck Somalia, Hawo Abdi and her husband were successful herders near their country’s border with Kenya.
However, two years of intensive drought parched the land to the point that they could no longer raise the camels, cattle, sheep and goats that supported their pastoralist lifestyle. The country’s civil war added further complications to the situation. As her family faced economic ruin, Abdi’s husband died, and at the time of his death, she was two months pregnant with the couple’s fifth child.
People died and many more became extremely ill in the city’s 5-year-old water crisis that was still making headlines last week as the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance-produced documentary “Flint: The Poisoning of an American City” had its world premiere and opened in a chain of Michigan movie theaters.