[Anglican Communion News Service] The Most Rev. Marinez Rosa dos Santos Bassotto, primate of the Anglican Episcopal Church in Brazil and bishop of the Amazon, has been appointed chair of the Anglican Communion Environmental Network. The network connects Anglicans worldwide who work on creation care, climate justice and environmental action. Bassotto has focused much of her primacy on addressing environmental issues. She has been an active supporter of the Anglican Communion’s global “Lungs of the Earth” campaign to protect the planet’s ecosystem. Later this month, Bassotto will attend the Anglican Consultative Council as both a member and chair of the Anglican Communion Environmental Network. During the conference, the environmental and the Anglican Communion Peace and Justice Network will issue a joint resolution addressing environmental justice and reconciliation work. Read the entire article here.

[Episcopal News Service] St. Paul’s by-the-Sea Episcopal Church is preparing to file a federal lawsuit against Ocean City, Maryland, to stop the resort town from shutting down its overnight shelter for unhoused people. On both June 8 and 9, the church received citations from the town saying it must pay a fine of $1,000 per day or close the shelter on its property. On both occasions, Ocean City’s director of planning and community development, George M. Bendler, hand-delivered the citations while accompanied by a witness. The Rev. Jill Williams, St. Paul’s by-the-Sea’s rector, told ENS in a June 9 interview that she has no plans to close the shelter or pay the fines. “Today, when [Bendler and his witness] issued the citation, I read them the Gospel – Matthew 25: ‘When I was hungry, you fed me. …Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me.’ The church is very clear where we stand with our ministry to the homeless,” Williams said. St. Paul’s by-the-Sea, which is in the Diocese of Easton, announced its plans to file a lawsuit against the town in a June 8 press release. In May, the town sent a letter demanding that the church close its shelter by June 8. It claimed the shelter’s bunk beds are “consistent with barracks-style living quarters,” which are not permitted within its zoning district. Williams previously told ENS that the bunk beds purchased for the sleeping space were specifically made for overnight shelters. On May 12, St. Paul’s by-the-Sea’s lawyer, Robin R. Cockey, replied to the town’s letter explaining why the church won’t close the shelter or pay any fines. He noted that St. Paul’s by-the-Sea is federally protected under the U.S. Constitution’s free exercise clause and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. These protections “afford the church ample protection against overzealous zoning impositions such as those threatened by Mr. Bendler.” St. Paul’s by-the-Sea’s legal clashes with town officials started last fall when the church began allowing unhoused people to sleep in church-provided tents on its property. The small encampment was made in response to Ocean City and the surrounding Worcester County adopting ordinances in May 2025, making it illegal – punishable by jail time – for people to sleep in public spaces. Earlier this year, the church faced a deadline to remove the tents by April 1, or face fines of up to $5,000 per day. After raising money to hire staff and cover other expenses required to operate as a shelter, St. Paul’s by-the-Sea beat the town’s deadline when it opened “The Shelter by-the-Sea” on March 31. The ministry operates nightly from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Now, about 27 people sleep at the shelter every night. “Every evening our doors open to people who need safety, dignity and hope,” Williams said in the press release. “We believe that serving our neighbors in this way is part of our calling as a church, and we remain committed to that work.” Williams noted to ENS last month that St. Paul’s by-the-Sea is located near the tourist area of Ocean City, which is located on a barrier island off the Atlantic coast. The town’s peak tourism season started Memorial Day in late May and will run through Labor Day in early September. The ministry, which is mostly funded by donations and the congregation, also offers dinner and breakfast, and helps overnight guests access other resources, such as substance abuse programs and affordable housing assistance. Williams told ENS last month that if Ocean City fined St. Paul’s by-the-Sea and the church responded with a federal lawsuit, she’s “100% confident” the parish would win. -Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.

[Episcopal News Service] The Rev. Warren Thomas Swenson is a happily married gay Episcopal priest with an “ordinary” routine. As a former associate priest serving small mission churches in southeast Tennessee, he has preached, presided over the Eucharist, made pastoral visits to homebound and hospitalized parishioners, and led Bible study and Sunday school sessions. Understanding Swenson’s “ordinary” life and career was just what Canadian actor, writer and executive producer Dan Levy needed to create the co-protagonist of his latest sitcom, “Big Mistakes,” for Netflix. In the crime comedy show, which is now streaming, Levy portrays Nicky Dardano, an openly gay pastor of an unspecified Protestant denomination who gets blackmailed into the world of organized crime after his sister steals a diamond tennis necklace. Swenson consulted with writers to create a convincing religious character and settings for the show’s eight-episode first season. “The show is, of course, unconventional and bizarre because it’s a comedy, but Dan and the writers wanted to be as faithful as they can and bring authenticity to depicting a religious life,” Swenson, a doctoral student at the University of Chester’s Department of Theology and Religious Studies in England and an incoming homiletics professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, told Episcopal News Service. “It was fun to see what they did or didn’t use of my commentary, like the aesthetics of the church and the parsonage, or the language the parishioners and Nicky use with each other.” Before he was offered the consultant position, Swenson already was a fan of Levy, who’s best known for co-creating and starring in the critically acclaimed sitcom “Schitt’s Creek” with his father, Eugene Levy. Dan Levy, who is openly gay, portrayed David Rose, one of the first openly pansexual characters depicted on TV. “Like ‘Schitt’s Creek,’ ‘Big Mistakes’ is hysterical and entertaining because it’s character-driven. It’s about people and relationships and families,” Swenson said. “In both shows, there’s an attentiveness and a sincerity with which Dan approaches these topics. His work is so relatable.” In a May 28 interview on ABC’s late-night talk show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” Levy, who grew up in a mixed Jewish and Protestant home, said he wanted a religious consultant for “Big Mistakes” because, to him, depicting religion on screen is “not a funny thing.” “People’s relationships to God, their faith, is something that needs to be respected,” Levy said. “I wanted to authenticate my character’s relationship to his faith in a way that allowed everything around it to be funny. So, it was important, I think, that we had somebody who was able to go through the scripts and say, ‘You would say this. You wouldn’t say this. You would have a relationship to this thing. You wouldn’t participate in this.’” Swenson’s working relationship with Netflix and the “Big Mistakes” production team began in February 2025 after one of Levy’s assistants asked a mutual friend if he knew of a gay clergyperson who’d be open to consulting for the show. Over the course of six months, Swenson, Levy, and the show’s writers gathered regularly via Zoom to review the teleplay of each episode. Swenson provided feedback on how scenes inside the parsonage should be depicted, for example. Minor spoilers follow. In one of the first scenes, a parishioner with no personal or professional boundaries frequently enters the parsonage – Nicky’s house on church property – without knocking first, to ask questions that, according to Nicky, “could have been an email.” “As a clergyperson, you have to really be intentional with setting professional boundaries from the beginning of your new position in a church,” Swenson said. “The work-life balance in vocational ministry is really different from other careers because your work doesn’t regard the clock for pastoral care, like when you have to meet people in their most vulnerable or sorrowful moments. Still, those professional boundaries must always be in place.” Swenson also advised on how, as a clergyperson, Nicky would react to certain situations stemming from working for the mob that would conflict with his faith. In one scene, for example, Nicky is forced to abuse his status as a pastor to convince a rancher to sell “the church” two bulls. The rancher, a devout Christian, insistently donates the bulls instead, quoting James 4:17: “If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.” Like in many other scenes throughout the show, Nicky is visibly uncomfortable and later expresses his internal conflict and frustrations to his sister. Sometimes, the situations Nicky faces are life-threatening, and his responses are one “big mistake” after another. While the correct responses seem obvious to viewers, Swenson said he doesn’t know how he’d respond to the same dangerous hypothetical scenarios. “On one hand, I’m a sinner, so I can’t rule out the possibility of making the same ‘big mistakes’ as Nicky. A part of me wants to say I’d never compromise my sincerely held beliefs or my ethics, but it takes an extraordinary human being – a literal saint – not to compromise their ethics when their life is on the line,” Swenson said. Swenson didn’t write any of the show’s lines, but he said he appreciates the “nuanced” commentary and “genuine insight” on LGBTQ+ issues throughout “Big Mistakes.” Even though Nicky’s congregation accepts that he is gay, he’s not allowed to be in a same-sex relationship. This is an added source of conflict and stress for Nicky, while his secret boyfriend, Tareq, pressures him to “come out of the closet” so they can date publicly. In one scene, Tareq asks Nicky, “Why is it that religion has such a problem with two people who are in love with each other?” Nicky replies, “Because God is perfect, but the people who interpret him are not.” “That’s exactly the kind of perfect window into the soul of a gay clergyperson – someone of immense faith whose identity is at odds

[Episcopal News Service] Mexico, Canada and the United States will host the 2026 FIFA World Cup June 11-19. The quadrennial soccer championship is expected to attract millions of spectators across 104 matches played throughout North America. All three host countries are increasing security in an effort to prevent crime during the 48-team tournament, including human trafficking, theft, prostitution, disappearances and violence. Anglican leaders, including Archbishop of Mexico Alba Sally Sue Hernández García, expressed concerns over World Cup security during the United Society Partners in the Gospel’s “For Christ is our Peace” conference June 2-4 in Hoddesdon, England.  “The situation is very difficult, with challenges including the presence of drug cartels, forced disappearances, violence against girls and women, the exclusion of Indigenous communities and armed attacks to seize territory from communities that have been displaced from their lands, among others,” Hernández García said during a conference session, where she was a guest speaker.  For instance, Azteca Stadium in Mexico City, which will host the opening match between Mexico and South Africa, sits on land the Mexican government expropriated from the Santa Úrsula Coapa, an Indigenous community, in 1962. In the area surrounding the stadium, many people live in poverty, and the community frequently experiences water shortages. The stadium’s owner, multimedia conglomerate Televisa, exacerbated the water shortage in 2018 when it privatized a community well for the stadium’s use as its infrastructure was expanded to add new shopping and leisure centers ahead of the World Cup. Even though the cartels, which are active in the other two Mexican host cities, Monterrey and Guadalajara, are supposedly scaling back their activities during the World Cup, the government isn’t relying on potential truces. The country is deploying nearly 100,000 security personnel to tourist zones, airports and transit hubs across the three host cities, according to news reports. Mexico will host 13 matches. “As we get caught up in football fever at the World Cup in North America this summer, we must remember the lives being impacted by the situation in Mexico,” Rev. Duncan Dormor, the USPG’s general secretary, said. “It is almost always the poor who suffer the most, and it is within these communities that the Anglican Church of Mexico is standing up, speaking out, and taking action to address issues of deep injustice, conflict, and violence.” Tournament planners in Canada, which will also host 13 matches, are using federal, provincial and local resources in host cities Toronto and Vancouver to focus on extensive crowd management, airspace defense and infrastructure protection. Security plans are the most extensive in the United States, which will host 78 matches across 11 cities, including the final in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Unauthorized drones, illegal border crossings and bomb threats are among the country’s biggest concerns in advance of the World Cup. The United States has tightened entry restrictions, including travel bans and visa restrictions on some of the 48 countries sending teams, leaving many ticket holders unable to watch their teams play in person and scrambling to resell their tickets, according to news reports.  The USPG, an Anglican agency, partners with churches worldwide “in God’s mission to rethink mission, energize the church and champion justice.” During the annual conference, delegates and guest speakers from the Anglican Communion reflect theologically and practically on the relationship between justice, peace and conflict through keynote addresses, workshops, panel discussions, Bible study and worship. Jude Lal Fernando, director of the Trinity Centre for Post-Conflict Justice in Dublin, Ireland, lamented that World Cup security concerns are being prioritized over the basic needs of communities, like food security. “When space for peace and dialogue decreases, the space for violence and oppression increases, especially for women and children,” Fernando said. Hernández García echoed a similar sentiment. “While the World Cup will generate passion and some economic activity, there will be no profound changes or answers to the true needs of the Mexican people,” she said.

[Lambeth Palace] Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally hosted a debate on June 5 in the House of Lords, urging peers to take note of artificial intelligence’s impact on human relationships and wider society. Hailing AI as a “remarkable product of human creativity” that has led to “extraordinary discoveries and breakthroughs,” Mullally also stressed the importance of protecting human relationships, connections, creativity, democracy and Earth. Calling on AI companies to adopt a “pro-human” approach, Mullally argued for implementing a theological, philosophical and spiritual framework to inform how people create, control and use AI. The goal, she said, would be to use AI to serve humanity, rather than diminish it. Read Mullally’s entire speech here.

[Religion News Service] Within a red binder, each of its typewritten pages encased in a plastic sleeve, sits an early draft of the famous letter written by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as he was held in a jail in Birmingham, Alabama. Ten pages that once were considered for the 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” were discovered in March by a graduate student concluding an internship by examining papers donated to the African American Episcopal Historical Collection, a joint venture of the Virginia Theological Seminary and the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church. The draft was found in the papers of Bishop John M. Burgess, the first African American to serve as an Episcopal diocesan bishop, and his wife, Esther. The papers, donated by the daughters of the couple that was active in the Civil Rights Movement, are housed at the seminary near Washington, D.C. “I screamed, but I also wept,” said Riley Temple, the collection’s growth specialist, of seeing the letter, with its yellowed pages, for the first time. He views it as a part of the “big year” of 1963 that featured a list of changes and challenges, including the desegregation of the University of Alabama, the March on Washington and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. “The civil rights revolution had been going on for quite some time when this letter was written, but intellectually and academically, I see the 1963 letter as being a beginning of a scholarship that informed the Civil Rights Movement,” said Temple, who joined other archives staffers in an interview at the seminary’s Bishop Payne Library. King’s letter was sent to white clergy — he referred to them as “my Christian and Jewish brothers” — who had questioned the urgency and the need for the Birmingham campaign of sit-ins and boycotts he had led as the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was jailed for organizing a nonviolent demonstration on Good Friday in the Alabama city that year. After checking with experts of the Civil Rights Movement and historical documents, staffers of the seminary’s archives determined that the document described as an 11-page typeset — though its last page is missing — was one of several versions of what became one of King’s most well-known writings. In it he declared: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” Those words are included in the recently discovered version as well as the final published version. A staffer at Swann Auction Galleries in New York estimated that the document discovered is worth $15,000 to $25,000. The auction house’s sale of another 11-page typeset sold in what that employee described as “a fluke” for $185,000 in 2021. A 13-page version sold for $40,000 in 2017. But the one housed at VTS is not for sale, said seminary archivist Denton Waits, and archive staffers plan to seek advice from conservationists about the best ways to preserve the draft letter and make its contents available for the public to view. The single-spaced document found in Virginia was part of a multistep process that began with King writing thoughts in newspaper margins. His notes would eventually be written into a full letter of more than 6,000 words published in a pamphlet of the American Friends Service Committee, a group founded by the Quakers, and included in King’s book “Why We Can’t Wait.” Archives assistant Kayla Floyd compared the document from the Burgesses’ papers with other drafts, such as a digital version on the University of Alabama’s website, and the final version of the letter to see variations in wording, quotations and punctuation. “I think the majority of the message is the same, line by line is the same,” she said. “However, there are certain sections where things are kind of pieced differently.” For example, a reference to English preacher and author John Bunyan in the final version — “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience”— is not in the draft version that was among the papers belonging to the Burgesses. It was added in a paragraph where King embraces being described as an extremist and says, before and after the Bunyan reference, that reformers Martin Luther and Abraham Lincoln could share that descriptor. In the final version, the letter says, “as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.” In the version now located at the seminary, it refers to the theologian by saying, “as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.” Floyd, who said she was particularly grateful to tell her grandfather, who is in his 90s, about the found draft, pointed to another language change in the section where King discusses laws that are just or unjust. “Where it talks about, ‘It gives the segregated a false sense of inferiority’ — that’s the quote in ours — in the University of Alabama version, it’s quoted as ‘It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority, and the segregated a false sense of inferiority,’” she said. With the discovery of the letter itself and its differences from other versions, archives staffers have received requests for it to be shared with students taking ethics and biblical studies at the seminary. “They have said that they would like to have it brought in as examples of text criticism for their classes,” Waits said. As archive staff members have reviewed different drafts, they have also noticed that the University of Alabama draft was addressed to seven clergy, while the one held by the Burgesses includes eight addressees. Two leaders to whom the letter was addressed in those two drafts were Episcopal bishops who had graduated from VTS. Waits is conducting historical research, and Floyd is doing contextual analysis for a joint article comparing different drafts of King’s letter. How the

[Episcopal News Service] A 17-year-old Episcopalian from Mississippi, who is completing a year of study abroad in Italy, has led an effort at his adopted church in Genoa to preserve the memory of 18 American airmen and 93 Genoese who died 82 years ago in a U.S. bombing mission. Jack DuPont of Waveland, a small city on the Gulf of Mexico, has been living with host families in Genoa since last September and attending a local school there, an experience sponsored by Rotary International. While immersing himself in Italian culture — he arrived not knowing the language but has picked up enough to communicate — DuPont also began attending worship services at Church of the Holy Ghost, an English-speaking congregation that is part of the Church of England. The church has a range of ministries supporting immigrants and students like DuPont. “I’ve had an amazing experience,” DuPont, who returns to Mississippi at the end of this month, told Episcopal News Service in a phone interview. “The amount of opportunities that have come from this experience is just unbelievable.” One of those opportunities was the service of remembrance hosted by the Church of the Holy Ghost on June 3. The focal point of the service was a Book of Remembrance that DuPont helped assemble, featuring letters and tributes to those who died in an ill-fated U.S. mission over Genoa on June 4, 1944. DuPont arranged for several Episcopal leaders, as well as elected officials, to contribute written reflections to the book, which also includes photos of many of the people who died and information about their lives. “We prayed for peace,” DuPont said of the memorial service. “We prayed for those soldiers who did make the ultimate sacrifice for their country. We prayed for the Italian victims and all the victims of the bombings over Genoa during the Second World War.” Genoa, as an Italian port city and industrial hub, was a frequent target for Allied bombing during World War II. The raid on June 4, 1944, one of dozens, may have been impaired by bad weather, according to DuPont’s research. If rail lines and factories were the mission’s target, many civilians in Genoa were the unintended casualties, and German forces were able to shoot down two of the American planes, killing 18. The following year, Genoa was liberated from the Germans, not by the Allied forces but by a homegrown resistance movement. The Rt. Rev. Ann Ritonia, The Episcopal Church’s bishop suffragan for Armed Forces and Federal Ministries, was among those who contributed to the Book of Remembrance. “We honor their memory best not only through remembrance, but through our renewed commitment to reconciliation, compassion, and justice in a divided world,” Ritonia wrote. “May God grant us the courage to seek peace where there is conflict and to uphold the dignity of every human life.” DuPont said he was inspired to develop this project by the upcoming 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the United States. The purpose of the Genoa memorial service and the Book of Remembrance, however, was not to glorify one nation’s war dead, but to acknowledge the human cost of war and pray for a better future. “The main message was that of peace, which is something that in our world today we cannot remind each other enough of,” he said. – David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.

[Episcopal News Service] All dioceses in The Episcopal Church regularly rely on the 1979 Book of Common Prayer to structure their worship services. The bishop of the Diocese of Dallas wants his diocese’s congregations to refrain from using any other liturgical text, at least on Sundays. Last month, Bishop Robert Price issued new guidance for Sunday liturgies in his diocese, based in Texas’ third-largest city. Effective Trinity Sunday, May 31. Price’s guidance specifically insisted on the use of “liturgies contained in the memorialized 1979 Book of Common Prayer,” and he advised congregations not to incorporate several other commonly used supplemental liturgical resources, including the church’s “expansive language” versions of Holy Eucharist Rite II and the collection of liturgies known as Enriching Our Worship. Those supplemental liturgies have been authorized for use throughout The Episcopal Church without the need to get permission from a bishop, a fact that Price acknowledged when he released revised guidance on June 2. “I am unable to prohibit the use of these prayers on Sunday mornings,” Price wrote in his latest letter to the diocese. “Nevertheless, the underlying reason for the original prohibition remains unchanged: the desire that our diocese pray together as one body using the memorialized 1979 Book of Common Prayer, thereby deepening our union in Christ.” Out of that “pastoral concern,” Price said he is asking clergy “to refrain from the use of the expansive-language versions of the Book of Common Prayer as an act of gracious restraint, sacrificial love, and fellowship with their sisters and brothers in Christ.” It isn’t clear how many of the more than 60 congregations in the Diocese of Dallas have regularly used expansive-language liturgies, though the bishop’s changing guidance has required at least one congregation to adjust. Church of the Transfiguration has used those supplemental liturgies for the past eight years. The supplemental liturgies “were intended to lessen the dependence on masculine pronouns for God, which can diminish our spiritual imaginations, and also introduce some changes to the Nicene Creed to foster ecumenical relationships,” the Rev. Casey Shobe, Transfiguration’s rector, said in a May 28 message to the congregation about Price’s initial prohibition. “As we begin this next chapter, we will abide by the bishop’s direction.” When Episcopal News Service reached Shobe by phone on June 3, he said he and other church leaders were still digesting the latest guidance from Price before deciding which liturgies to use in Transfiguration’s Sunday services. “We are certainly grateful for the acknowledgment of General Convention’s authority in the matter and grateful for the bishop’s leadership and humility in this,” Shobe told ENS. “We will take seriously his request … while also thinking very carefully about how much the expansive-language rites have meant for the parish in these last eight years.” Price has not said whether he specifically objects to the church’s yearslong development and authorization of expansive-language liturgies. In a written response to ENS’s questions, he did not comment on those liturgies. Rather, he indicated that asking all congregations to use the 1979 Book of Common Prayer on Sundays is a way to promote unity in a diverse diocese. “While a symbolic gesture, I believe that symbols matter,” Price told ENS. “We have a theological diversity in the Diocese of Dallas that no longer exists in many dioceses, and I am asking everyone to sacrifice their preferences in order to build mutual charity. To be honest, I am somewhat bemused that asking Episcopalians to use the 1979 BCP on Sunday mornings is perceived as being in any way radical or oppressive.” If not radical or oppressive, Price’s guidance appears to be unusual. The Rev. Ruth Meyers, a prominent scholar of the church’s liturgical history, told ENS that some bishops had forbidden the use of such supplemental liturgies while those liturgies were still being developed, but since they were fully authorized by General Convention in 2018  she was unaware of a bishop openly discouraging their use. Meyers, a longtime General Convention deputy and a retired Church Divinity School of the Pacific liturgics professor, also questioned whether a call for “unity” justified exclusive use of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. “The unity would be at the churchwide level, not at the diocese level,” Meyers said, since it is up to General Convention to determine what liturgies are authorized for use in the church’s dioceses and congregations. Price, in his statement to ENS, said the inspiration for the new guidance dates to the time before he was elected bishop when he was meeting with local leaders. “Building greater trust and collegiality amongst the clergy and parishes of the diocese was identified as a key priority of the new bishop, and I have sought to facilitate that healing and deeper unity in ways great and small since my consecration,” he said. “As a part of that effort, I have put forward pastoral guidance that seeks to bring all of us together.” The bishop’s new guidance follows decades of debate within The Episcopal Church and across the Anglican Communion about the role that “common prayer” plays in Anglican unity. Meyers underscored that the consensus over time has shifted away from a unified text in favor of a set of shared principles, approaches and structures in Anglican and Episcopal liturgies. The Book of Common Prayer was first published in 1549 for use in the Church of England, and in subsequent centuries, it became the primary liturgical text for Anglicans worldwide in the provinces of what is now known as the Anglican Communion. In 1958, the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops acknowledged that independent liturgical revisions in those autonomous provinces, including The Episcopal Church, had made it harder to agree on one single text. In response, the Lambeth Conference called attention “to those features in the Books of Common Prayer which are essential to the safeguarding of our unity: i.e., the use of the Canonical Scriptures and the Creeds, Holy Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Communion, and the

[World Council of Churches] The World Council of Churches Young People in the Ecumenical Movement will host its second online gathering on June 10 via Zoom. Young ecumenists worldwide are invited to meet, share experiences and strengthen relationships across regions. Building on the momentum of the first virtual gathering held in 2025, the 90-minute event will provide opportunities for informal conversation and mutual learning through regional breakout groups. Participants will also receive an introduction to the YPEM Global Collective and its ongoing efforts to connect and empower young people within the ecumenical movement. Read the entire article here.

[Episcopal News Service] The Episcopal Church is kicking off its “Vote Faithfully” voter engagement efforts for the 2026 midterm elections with a series of online events to educate Episcopalians on nonpartisan ways they and their congregations can support civic participation in their communities. The half-hour networking calls on Zoom, organized by the church’s Public Policy and Witness team, are scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Eastern on June 4, July 2, Aug. 6, Sept. 3, Oct. 1 and Nov. 5. Registration is available here. The first call, on June 4, will feature Chief Legal Officer Kent Anker and a discussion of IRS rules for nonpartisan advocacy by religious organizations. Other calls will offer guidance on a range of topics, including voter registration efforts and election awareness campaigns, in which Episcopal congregations can serve as trusted sources for reliable information, said Allison Duvall, senior manager of church relations and engagement. Duvall, in an interview with Episcopal News Service, noted that the upcoming 250th birthday of the United States — marking the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 — also has relevance for The Episcopal Church, which was founded in the same era when Anglicans in the newly independent states broke away from the Church of England. “One of the most important ways we can show a healthy patriotism is by helping our neighbors exercise their democratic right to vote,” Duvall said. The church’s online networking series is just one of the ways that Episcopal leaders are encouraging greater involvement in the democratic process. For several years, the Washington, D.C.-based Office of Government Relations has compiled, updated and expanded a selection of voter engagement resources that can be tailored to local efforts across the country. “We recognize election engagement as an act of Christian stewardship and a tangible way to love our neighbors,” the Office of Government Relations says on its election engagement webpage. “Our mandate to care for God’s world and people compels us, morally and spiritually, to vote – and to help ensure voting access for others.” The guidance includes ways to register to vote, find polling places, request an absentee ballot and volunteer as a poll worker. Congregations also have a variety of options for getting involved, including assisting in voter registration efforts, offering childcare on Election Day, organizing rides to the polls, educating voters about new state election procedures and combatting disinformation about elections. “A lot of the resources we’ve pulled together we’ve done in partnership with other faith organizations,” such as Interfaith America, Alan Yarborough, director of government relations, told ENS. By “leveraging the church as a trusted voice,” Episcopalians can share basic information in their communities with greater confidence. “Accuracy in information is just so critical,” Yarborough said. The Office of Government Relations, through its Episcopal Public Policy Network, also has been vocal in rallying Episcopalians to the cause of greater voter access, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in an April 2026 ruling that all but removed protections against racial gerrymandering of congressional districts. “To bolster democracy in the United States, we in The Episcopal Church call for an expansion of voter registration, protection of voter eligibility and making the voting processes more accessible,” the EPPN said in an action alert after the Supreme Court ruling. “We oppose efforts that undermine democratic processes, including legislation like the SAVE America Act, which would limit access to the polls by implementing overly restrictive voter ID requirements, thus disenfranchising millions of eligible voters.” The action alert and the church’s election engagement resources include a summary of the history of The Episcopal Church’s positions on voting rights, as adopted by General Convention and Executive Council. “To some extent, this is work that’s been going on for generations,” Yarborough said, adding that The Episcopal Church is not alone. “There are many examples of faith organizations that do this well.” – David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.