April 4, 2006

Brazil offers a major example of the explosive growth of evangelical and Pentecostal churches taking place in the Southern Hemisphere. Reportedly 40 new churches open every week in Rio de Janeiro (and for 50 reales—roughly $23—you can register your new church with the government). Estimates of the number of Pentecostals worldwide vary between 115 million and 400 million. At current growth rates, in 50 years there will be 1 billion Pentecostals.

The reign of terror against rural Alabama churches appears to be over. Three college men—all honor students, and two of them students at a United Methodist school, Birmingham-Southern College—have confessed to setting nine churches on fire.

Birmingham-Southern College has long prided itself on the actions of students who have gone all over the world—and as far away as Mother Teresa’s mission in Calcutta—to perform good deeds as part of the college’s social-service emphasis.

Now the United Methodist–related school in Alabama is dealing with the aftermath of an episode in which students have been accused of burning churches. “I can’t imagine that there won’t be a discussion of its implications, and self-reflection,” said college president David Pollick.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has warned in a television interview that the worldwide Anglican Communion may “rupture” over the issue of homosexuality.

Anglicans have been riven with division since the 2003 election of V. Gene Robinson, who lives openly in a same-sex relationship, as a bishop in the Episcopal Church, and the introduction by a diocese in Canada of a rite for blessing same-sex unions. Many Anglican churches, particularly in Africa, condemned Robinson’s election and several have cut ties with the U.S. church.

In 1980, Marilynne Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping, which won a PEN/Hemingway Award and was made into a movie. She published nonfiction works during the next 24 years, including The Death of Adam and Mother Country, but kept her fans waiting until 2004 for a second novel. Gilead is the memoir of John Ames, a Congregationalist pastor in a small Iowa town who reminisces about his father, a preacher with pacifist convictions, and his grandfather, an abolitionist minister.

If there is a movie that can make you feel optimistic about the possibilities of forming community in America, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is it. In September 2004 Chappelle, an African-American stand-up comic, celebrated his $50 million contract with Comedy Central by throwing a free hip-hop party in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. A crew of musically gifted pals performed for thousands of guests. Many came from his hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio, with Chapelle providing the bus and hotel accommodations.