Word: church
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...undoing the excommunication of an unrepentant group that was long considered in schism with Rome is troubling in ecclesiastical terms. The Pope has shaken the foundations of his own Church, apparently without much consultation from those who run its day-to-day affairs (both in Rome and around the world). Indeed, Benedict made an end-run around the famously imposing Vatican bureaucracy, including the key offices of liturgy, doctrine and inter-faith relations that would have wanted to weigh in with their concerns under normal procedures. Several top Curia officials contacted by TIME this week declined comment, and there...
Friends, colleagues, and students gathered beneath the vaulted ceilings of Memorial Church to remember the life of former history professor Angeliki Laiou. The acclaimed scholar of Byzantine history’s penetrating intellect and commanding presence created legions of followers who admired her academic expertise as much as her cosmopolitan sensibilities. “Angeliki Laiou’s family has lost its foundation. Greece has lost one of her most distinguished daughters. The international world of Byzantine studies has lost its most excellent historian,” said history Professor Michael McCormick. “Harvard has lost...
...malaise's most excruciating aspects is regularly overlooked: rural pastors are disappearing even faster than the general population, leaving graying congregations helpless in their time of greatest need. Trace Haythorn, president of the nonprofit Fund for Theological Education (FTE), says fewer than half the rural churches in the U.S. have a full-time seminary-trained pastor; in parts of the Midwest, the figure drops to 1 in 5. "It's a religious crisis, for sure," says Daniel Wolpert, pastor of First Presbyterian in Crookston, Minn., and a partner with the FTE, which supports young ministers and religious teachers...
...pastors disappearing? Mainline churches (as well as some Evangelical) prefer their ministers seminary trained. But the starting salary for debt-burdened seminary grads now runs to $35,000 a year. That can break a poor and aging congregation, says Elizabeth Rickert Dowdy, pastor of the Tar Wallet Baptist Church in Cumberland, Va., who recently helped disband her other church: "When you have a congregation that's historically been able to survive at 20 members and loses 12, they close." And for the first time in American history, the majority of seminarians don't come from rural areas. Shannon Jung...
...Saints' Day in November, when Lutherans recognize the holy who have passed on and their connection to the living, Baker-Trinity notes that the holiday reinforces the web of community that "has always been the rural church's strength." Before the sermon, he gathers the children. There are at least 10--an extraordinary tally for a congregation in this area. The young pastor, with two babies himself, talks softly about a God who never departs. "God is with you wherever you are going," he tells the youngsters. "God never says goodbye to us. Let's pray: O God, thank...