Copy Desk Daily, April 16, 2020

(NCR photo/Teresa Malcolm)

(NCR photo/Teresa Malcolm)

by Teresa Malcolm

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Our team of copy editors reads and posts most of what you see on the websites for National Catholic Reporter, Global Sisters Report and EarthBeat. The Copy Desk Daily highlights recommended news and opinion articles that have crossed our desks on their way to you.

"God always has a plan," says U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams. But theologians who spoke to NCR see his attempt to reassure the American people as crossing both scientific and religious lines: Experts question surgeon general who talks God's 'plan' with pandemic.

Sister advocates at the U.N. are joining humanitarian aid leaders in sounding the warning that COVID-19 threatens devastating impact on world's vulnerable people, in regions already facing conflict and economic hardship. As a Catholic Relief Services official tells GSR, the global reach of the coronavirus crisis is especially alarming: "We're used to having multiple crises at the same time, but not in every country we're operating in."

Sr. Christine Schenk found support in a virtual community of faith during Holy Week. She also saw, in these online interactive gatherings, how women demonstrate what the priesthood of Jesus truly means.

The pandemic is defining human life by absence, writes Sr. Scholasticah Nganda. Perhaps this is a call to walk more closely with Christ, and see how another kind of absence — the empty tomb, our reason for existence — can become a sign of Presence.

US Christian nationalism is far from Christianity, authors argue in Taking America Back for God. Dennis McDaniel reviews the new book by Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, sociologists who castigate the "hollow and deceptive" Christian nationalism that dominates American politics and brought us President Donald Trump.

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