Author: Reporter

Christina Westman dreamed of working with Parkinson’s disease and stroke patients as a music therapist when she started studying at St. Cloud State University. But her schooling was upended in May when administrators at the Minnesota college announced a plan to eliminate its music department as it slashes 42 degree programs and 50 minors. It is part of a wave of program cuts in recent months, as U.S. colleges large and small try to make ends meet. Among their budget challenges: Federal COVID relief money is now gone, operational costs are rising and fewer high school graduates are going...

As a junior at George Washington University, Ty Lindia meets new students every day. But with the shadow of the Israel-Hamas war hanging over the Washington DC, campus, where everyone has a political opinion, each new encounter is fraught. “This idea that I might say the wrong thing kind of scares me,” said Lindia, who studies political science. “You have to tiptoe around politics until one person says something that signifies they lean a certain way on the issue.” He has seen friendships — including some of his own — end over views about the war. In public, he...

It was a year ago when Jomana Siddiqui visited Lebanon, where her father was born, and is now buried. She planned to return there soon; this time, she thought, she would take her two teenage daughters. Instead, Siddiqui, who lives in California, now worries about relatives there. As she watches from afar the violence and the recent escalation in Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Siddiqui thinks about the people she met during her visit, the kindness and generosity she encountered. She thinks about her father’s grave — when, or if, she will get to visit it again....

It was daunting when the Rev. Brandon Thomas Crowley, at age 22, replaced a beloved pastor who had ministered to one of suburban Boston’s most famed Black churches for 24 years. It was more daunting — at times agonizing — to reach the decision six years later, in 2015, that God wanted him to tell his congregation that he was gay. To his relief, most of the worshippers at Myrtle Baptist Church in Newton, Massachusetts, embraced him. Crowley’s career has flourished, and he has now written a book — “Queering the Black Church” — that he hopes can serve...

No woman had ever preached the keynote sermon at the Joint National Baptist Convention, a gathering of four historically Black Baptist denominations representing millions of people. That changed in January when the Rev. Gina Stewart took the convention stage in Memphis, Tennessee, — the Southern city home to Christ Missionary Baptist Church where she serves as senior pastor — and delivered a rousing message, asserting that Jesus not only included women in his ministry, but identified with their suffering. But what happened next put a spotlight on the obstacles women in Christian ministry continue to face as they carve...