Presbyterians for Earth Care has joined a growing list of Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) groups calling for a speedy divestment from companies that contribute to the production of the two major greenhouse gasses, carbon dioxide and methane.
Some Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) partners who traveled to the United Nations Climate Change Conference are reacting to an agreement reached by world leaders and reflecting on their time spent there.
A group of Presbyterians has been joining global leaders and activists at the 26th gathering of the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, also known as COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland.
In the fall of 2015, mission co-worker Nadia Ayoub was attending a conference with colleagues in Budapest when the city’s Keleti train station became the epicenter of the refugee crisis overwhelming Europe. She could not forget the images of children sleeping on cardboard, families with not enough to eat and the pervasive fear of what would happen next.
At that moment she felt a strong call to work with refugees.
The history of the Roma (Romani) and Sinti people in Europe is filled with discrimination and bias. That’s why mission co-workers Burkhard Paetzold, Al Smith, and the coordinator for the Middle East and Europe, Luciano Kovacs, helped plan and participate in a conference in Budapest recently, to reflect on the Churches’ history, relationship and interaction with the Roma. The conference was organized by the Churches’ Commission for Migrants in Europe (CCME).
When I was a child in East Germany in the 1950s, oranges were hard to get. This was still the case when we had our own young children in the 1970s and 1980s. But in all those years one of the special things about Christmas was that we were able to buy oranges! We labeled them “Christmas quota oranges” and they came from Cuba. We rather loved them for their juicy sweetness even though they had a leathery surface and chewy flesh inside. And we learned later those oranges were originally a variety not meant for eating, but for juice production.
In the shadow of what many consider the worst refugee camp in Europe is a beacon of hope, operated mostly by volunteers, a group called Lesvos Solidarity.
The Greek island of Lesvos, just off the coast of Turkey, has become an important stop for migrants fleeing from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Africa. The Moria Refugee Camp was built as a temporary shelter for 3,000. Today it shelters more than 13,000 people living in terrible conditions while their asylum cases are being processed.
This summer, Burkhard Paetzold, a mission co-worker and regional liaison for western and central Europe, joined about 100,000 other Protestants from across the globe for one of the world’s most unique gatherings, the German Protestant Kirchentag.
