Adelle M. Banks joined the Religion News Service staff in 1995 after working for more than 10 years at daily newspapers in the upstate New York communities of Binghamton and Syracuse, The Providence Journal, and the Orlando Sentinel.
Before coming to RNS, she was a full-time religion reporter for six years in Orlando, covered the beat during part of her time in Syracuse and contributed to religion coverage at the other papers. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., Banks was a third-place winner in the Religion Newswriters Association’s Religion Reporter of the Year contest in 2011 and 1998. She also has been honored by Associated Church Press.
(RNS) Four landmark houses of worship in the nation’s capital are competing for preservation cash in a campaign launched Wednesday (April 24) by American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
(RNS) The Rev. Bob Edgar, a Democratic congressman and United Methodist minister who went on to lead the National Council of Churches through a painful series of restructuring cuts, died suddenly Tuesday at age 69.
(RNS) Conservative and liberal religious leaders may not often agree on much, but both are expressing displeasure with the Boy Scouts’ proposal to accept gay members but continue to reject gay leaders.
(RNS) George Beverly Shea, Billy Graham’s soloist on crusade stages for more than half a century, died Tuesday at age 104.
(RNS) With the help of pagans, Jains and people of a range of other faiths, the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions has raised more than $144,000 in two weeks in a desperate bid to overcome a financial crisis.
(RNS) Fifty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. challenged white church leaders to confront racism, an ecumenical network has responded to his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Christian Churches Together in the USA has produced a 20-page document that answers King and includes confessions of church bodies about their silence and slow pace in addressing racial injustice.
(RNS) As Congress appears close to hammering out a new immigration policy, religious leaders — and especially evangelicals — say personal encounters with immigrants have prompted them to advocate for reform.
WASHINGTON (RNS) A White House advisory council of faith leaders is urging the creation of a global fund to address trafficking and a new labeling system to help identify goods that were not created with slave labor.
A who’s who of Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox leaders joined President Obama in the East Room of the White House Friday (April 5) for the Easter Prayer Breakfast.
WASHINGTON (RNS) As he gathered with clergy at the White House Friday, President Obama recounted personal details of his recent Holy Land trip, calling it a chance to experience “the eternal spirit of Easter” and feel closer to Jesus.
