Author: Gordon Govier

Growing up as the daughter of a Lutheran pastor in Minnesota, Mary Stumme Froiland frequently was told by her father that someday she too could become a pastor. That was before women could be ordained in the American Lutheran Church. That changed when Froiland was 12 years old, and her father had another message for her.

The Madison Catholic Diocese has reached a tentative agreement with a developer to vacate its headquarters at the Bishop O’Connor Catholic Pastoral Center on the city’s Far West Side and turn the former seminary into rental housing. Under the plan, the diocese will lease the building for 60 years to developer Gary Gorman, whose company will renovate the 232,000-square-foot structure and create 100 to 150 apartments. The diocese will retain ownership of the property.

On a recent Sunday at First United Methodist Church, Seth Schroerlucke gathered a group of 16 parents in a basement room. Nearby, separated by a thin partition, their teenage kids played ice-breaker games. It was time to talk about sex.

If you’re waiting for God to show you a sign, Harold Scott has a few he wants you to see. The 72-year-old Green Bay truck driver pays for billboard space along some of Wisconsin’s major thoroughfares to spread Christian messages to motorists.

(Former Madison resident Belinda Bauman, whose husband Stephan is the president of World Relief, writes of her trip to Congolese refugee camps. Her report was picked up by The Daily Beast.) My journey into the heart of war-torn Eastern Congo began last summer at the suggestion of a trusted friend. To my husband’s credit, he whole-heartedly supported the idea of his wife traveling into a war zone. This, after all, is the man who delivered my Mother’s Day breakfast-in-bed with reading material titled “Congo: The worst place in the world to be a mother”. And I love him for that;…

Unfortunately, there are countless Mikkos—Madisonians who go to bed hungry. And it’s getting worse. You can see it in the dramatic spike in the number of kids eligible for free or reduced-price meals in schools, the burgeoning movement to define poverty as a childhood disease and the numbers of older adults, especially women, relying on food pantries. Read more of this story.

A flurry of bills on reproductive health care, including abortion and contraceptive options, passed the Republican-controlled Wisconsin state Legislature over the past three years. More are expected to pass before the end of the year. Barbara Lyons, executive director of Wisconsin Right to Life, said the pro-life organization is expecting Assembly Bills 216 and 217 to be taken up and passed by the Senate sometime this fall.

Jasmine Warren wept as she crossed the threshold of her new home. She was being given a fresh start through The Road Home Dane County, a nonprofit organization that is trying many new things toa ddress homelessness. Read more of this story.

Children who attend Catholic schools in the Madison Catholic Diocese will no longer be taking field trips to the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery because the facility on the UW-Madison campus conducts research using embryonic stem cells. The diocese announced its decision in a letter Thursday to principals and priests, saying the research runs counter to Catholic teaching on the sacredness of human life.