Adelle M. Banks

"Joanne was a brilliant and accomplished musician, a wonderful advocate for the arts, and a dear friend to everyone in our organization," said the account of Fred Rogers Productions on Twitter.

The National Day of Prayer, like most events amid the coronavirus, will have a different look this year as it is marked on May 7.

With issues of access and technical ability among some congregants, and a pandemic that has closed their church doors and scattered congregations, African Americans have been scrambling to sustain crucial connections to their houses of worship.

Across the country, black clergy say the coronavirus is touching — and sometimes taking — the faithful who until a month ago were accustomed to meeting weekly in their pews. Some are mourning losses in the highest echelons of their denomination. Others are counting the dead, sick and unemployed.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a civil rights leader who worked closely with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and prayed at President Barack Obama's first inauguration, died on March 27. Lowery was 98.

A couple of weeks ago, Religion Communication Congress executive Shirley Struchen thought plans were set for the once-a-decade conference she had helped organize, just as she had two times before.

Paula White, a Pentecostal preacher and longtime adviser to President Donald Trump, has been tapped to head the White House's Faith and Opportunity Initiative, a successor to previous administrations' faith-based office that coordinates outreach to religious communities.

On the same day that a prominent woman urged greater inclusion of female leaders in Religions for Peace, delegates to the 10th World Assembly of the interreligious global organization elected their first woman secretary-general.

In no state in the U.S. does even one-quarter of the population say abortion should be illegal in all cases, a new survey shows.

As the nation marks the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of Africans in Virginia — and Alabama has its bicentennial — a walk through Montgomery's streets reveals the legacy of slavery in America.

A who's who of black history figures worshiped and spoke at Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church — including abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth — when it was at earlier locations after its founding in 1796 or at its current neo-Gothic site on 137th Street in Harlem.

Trump administration officials announced a new alliance with U.S. partners focused on religious freedom.

Leaders from three Abrahamic faiths shared their own stories of experiencing religious violence in the past year.

China, Iran and other countries that the U.S. considers the most egregious religious liberty violators aren’t invited to the State Department’s second summit on religious freedom this week.

The U.S. ambassador on religious freedom issues defended the State Department's second summit on global religious liberty against critics who say the first summit failed to accomplish much.

Fifty percent of practicing Christians say the history of American slavery continues to significantly affect the African American community today, a Barna study shows.

A genealogical association has launched a new website detailing the family histories of slaves who were sold to keep Catholic-run Georgetown University from bankruptcy in the 1800s.

A new Southern Baptist Convention report on sex abuse, filled with the voices of survivors, acknowledges numerous ways the denomination has failed to protect members of its churches.

Southern Baptists hope to take steps at their upcoming annual meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, to address continuing reports of sexual abuse in their denomination.

Felicia Sanders told her story while sitting in a theater at Museum of the Bible, where a new documentary about the Mother Emanuel shootings was screened May 14. Hers was one of many accounts told in person, on the screen and in a roundtable interview with reporters before the film showed to a crowd that included members of the media and those directly affected by the shooting.