“I did not think this would happen in my lifetime,” Baptist scholar Elizabeth Newman said of the election of an American as pope. Newman, a theologian and ethicist who serves as co-chair of the Baptist-Catholic dialogues convened by Baptist World…
Dividing lines at Catholic Conclave may be different than you expect
The process of choosing a successor for the late Pope Francis will certainly include maneuvering by conservative and progressive elements in the Catholic Church, but with little if any of the zero-sum scheming common among bitterly divided U.S. denominations, Vatican…
Burning down the church
Just prior to the 2008 presidential election, 52% of American adults attended worship. As the 2024 election approached, only 31% of the white American population was regularly in church, a decline of 21 percentage points. In 2008, 68% of 18-…
She was the only Baptist and only woman fraternal delegate at a Vatican synod
For two weeks in October, Elizabeth Newman served as the only woman and only Baptist representative to the Vatican’s international Synod on Synodality. One of the many lessons the ethicist and theologian learned in Rome was how to explain to…