Number of female senior pastors doubles in 10 years. One in 10 U.S. churches employs a woman as senior pastor, double the percentage from a decade ago, according to a new survey by the Barna Group. Most of the women—58 percent—work in mainline Protestant churches, such as the United Methodist Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and Episcopal Church. Only 23 percent of male senior pastors are affiliated with mainline churches, the survey said. Barna’s survey found female pastors tend to be more highly educated than their male counterparts, with 77 percent earning a seminary degree, compared to 63 percent of male pastors. But male pastors still rake in larger incomes. The average compensation package for female pastors in 2009 is $45,300, Barna says, while males earn $48,600. Barna conducted the study by interviewing 609 senior pastors and balancing the sample according to the distribution of Protestant churches in the continental United States. The range of sampling error was between 1.8 and 4.1 percentage points, according to Barna.
Winners named to American Jewish Hall of Fame. After more than 209,000 votes from around the world, 18 men and women have been chosen for the new National Museum of American Jewish History’s Hall of Fame. Based on the poll results and input from historians, the winners ranged from celebrities, such as Barbra Streisand and Steven Spielberg, to more Judaism-specific figures, including Rabbis Mordecai Kaplan and Isaac Mayer Wise, who founded the Reconstructionist and Reform movements, respectively. The other honorees include musicians Irving Berlin and Leonard Bernstein; Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis; physicist Albert Einstein; baseball pitcher Sandy Koufax; cosmetics entrepreneur and philanthropist Estee Lauder; activist poet Emma Lazarus; Bible translator Rabbi Isaac Leeser; Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir; polio vaccine inventor Jonas Salk; labor leader Rose Schneiderman; Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer; Hasidic Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson; and Zionist women’s leader Henrietta Szold. Finalists who didn’t make the initial cut included poet Allen Ginsberg; Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; entertainer Bette Midler; choreographer Jerome Robbins; and The Three Stooges.
Meatpackers erred in firing Muslims, commission says. A meatpacking company was wrong to fire more than 200 Muslim employees who walked off the job to protest insufficient breaks during Ramadan last year, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Workers at the JBS Swift & Co. plants in Greeley, Colo., and Grand Island, Neb., had wanted their breaks rescheduled to sunset during the Islamic month of daytime fasting, in order to pray and eat. JBS Swift officials said the company amended its policies to accommodate its Muslim employees—mostly Somali immigrants—during this year’s Ramadan observance. The EEOC ruling may result in the commission or the fired workers suing JBS Swift if a settlement is not reached.
Compiled from Religion News Service