Some Protestants Felt Invisible. Then Came Bishop Budde.; The New York Times, January 26, 2025

Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias, The New York Times; Some Protestants Felt Invisible. Then Came Bishop Budde.

"It was the first Sunday since a fellow Episcopalian, Bishop Mariann E. Budde, delivered a sermon that many observers heard as an echo of passages like the one from Luke. Speaking at a prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washington the day after President Trump’s inauguration, she faced the president and made a direct plea: “Have mercy.”

After the service, Mr. Trump called Bishop Budde a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” in a social media post. His foes immediately hailed her as an icon of the resistance. But for many progressive Christians and their leaders, the confrontation was more than a moment of political catharsis. It was about more than Mr. Trump. It was an eloquent expression of basic Christian theology, expressed in an extraordinarily public forum...

“A plea for mercy, a recognition of the stranger in our midst, is core to the faith,” Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe, the Episcopal Church’s top clerical leader, said in an interview. “It is radical, given the order of the world around us — it is countercultural — but it’s not bound to political ideology.”...

The clergy members addressed it directly in their sermons, too. At Church of the Transfiguration, the associate rector, the Rev. Ted Clarkson, acknowledged to the congregation that aspects of the bishop’s sermon might have been “hard to hear.” But “mercy is truth,” he said, “and I expect a bishop to preach the truth.” (Bishop Budde preached on Sunday at a church in Maryland.)...

Bishop Budde’s message seemed to be resonating beyond the usual audience for Sunday sermons.

Her most recent book, “How We Learn to Be Brave,” was listed as temporarily out of stock on Amazon Friday afternoon. At that time, the book was No. 4 on the site’s list of best-sellers, 11 spots above Vice President JD Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” 

The publisher of Bishop Budde’s book, Avery, an imprint of Penguin Books, was scrambling to reprint “a significant number of books,” said Tracy Behar, Avery’s president and publisher."

Dr. Ruffini: Church leadership needed to shape ‘Ethical AI’; LiCAS News via Vatican News, August 2024

Joan April, Roy Lagarde & Mark Saludes - LiCAS News via Vatican News; Dr. Ruffini: Church leadership needed to shape ‘Ethical AI’

"“The digital world is not a ready-made. It is changing every day. We, we can change it. We can shape it. And we need Catholic communicators to do it, with love and with human intelligence,” said Dr. Ruffini. 

In a recorded speech delivered during the 7th National Catholic Social Communications Convention (NCSCC) in Lipa City, south of Manila, on August 5, the Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication (Vatican News' parent organization, underscored the Church’s responsibility to guide technological advancements with moral clarity and human-centered values.

“So the basic question is not about machines, but about humans, about us. There are and always will be things that a technology cannot replace, like freedom, like the miracle of encounter between people, like the surprise of the unexpected, the conversion, the outburst of ingenuity, the gratuitous love,” he said. 

Organized by the Episcopal Commission on Social Communications (ECSC) of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), the convention aims to explore advancements and risks in AI, offering insights on leveraging the technology for positive impact while addressing potential negative consequences."