MC News
It’s not as if Robin Roberts doesn’t already know how to build or remodel a church or put an addition on one. He’s overseen more than 170 such projects in and around Dane County since 1981, when he formed his commercial building company, Roberts Construction.
Madison-based InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, one of the largest evangelical organizations in the country, has outgrown its administrative building and will be moving to larger quarters in the city next month. The nonprofit organization currently employs 156 people at 6400 Schroeder Road on the city’s Southwest Side. It has purchased a three-story building two miles away on the city’s West Side, at 635 Science Drive in University Research Park. The newly purchased building, which had sat empty for a couple of years, is being renovated. Mid-May is the tentative move-in goal.
After Chris Hodge retired as principal of Allis Elementary School in Madison in the spring of 2006, she lounged around exactly zero days before throwing herself into her next project. Three months later, she was back educating children, this time as founder of a free after-school academic program at Mt. Zion Baptist Church on the city’s South Side. “Education is a religious calling to me, because I feel God gave me this talent and I need to use it, not just sit around,” said Hodge, 73, who has led the program without pay for nine years.
LOS ANGELES — Wisconsin had just defeated North Carolina in the Sweet 16 when Traevon Jackson began to credit whom he always credits for his achievements: God. If there’s a microphone in his face, then there’s probably a faith-inspired message rolling off his tongue. Not in a fiery, traveling Southern Baptist evangelist manner. But in a way that suggests the gravity of it all. Jackson’s life is governed by a higher power. And he’s not shy about professing that to anyone, including his teammates.
MADISON, Wis. – As the current common council met for the last time Tuesday, members unanimously voted to make discriminating against atheism, and others who do not believe in God, illegal. “This is important because I believe it is only fair that if we protect religion, in all its varieties, we should also protect non-religion from discrimination. It’s only fair,” ordinance sponsor District 18 Alderwoman Anita Weier said.
Liz Drilias was about 3 years old when she came home with a small palm plant from Sunday school at St. Jude the Apostle Parish in Wauwatosa. That day, like today, was Palm Sunday. Though her memory of this event is fuzzy, Liz has been told the plant was in a foam coffee cup of dirt. “I really remember after it was split into four plants and they were around 2 feet tall. I later went to Sunday school at St. Bernard’s, so I’m not sure if any of the other kids at St. Jude still have their plants,” said…
Two Wisconsinites have had an opportunity to spend time with Pope Francis in Rome this week, one a Milwaukee priest facing a deadly illness, the other a farmer there as part of an agricultural delegation.
The outcry over a Wisconsin Amish family ordered by a court to leave their home is fueling a legislative push for a religious exemption from building codes requiring smoke alarms and other modern devices. Republican state Rep. Kathleen Bernier said Wednesday she plans to insert language in the state budget bill to carve out an exemption for “longheld religious beliefs” in the Urban Dwelling Code’s permitting rules on electrical devices and indoor plumbing.
I spent four days at InterVarsity’s Multiethnic Staff Conference in Orlando, meeting with 320 staff members of all ethnicities and hearing stories of reconciliation from campus. Together, we experienced apologies and forgiveness, listening and lament, celebration and hope. As I was flying from Orlando back to Madison—still processing the conference’s content—a young Black man, Tony Robinson, was shot and killed in my home town.
The day after a white Madison police officer fatally shot an unarmed, biracial 19-year-old after an altercation on Madison’s Near East Side, Michael Johnson was worried. Johnson had been in Ferguson, Missouri, last August in the days after a white police officer killed an unarmed black 18-year-old, and the city broke out in heated protests, some of which turned violent and destructive. Johnson, CEO of the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County, said he “kept having these images of Ferguson in my head” on Saturday. “It was the fear of what this city could look like,” Johnson said. But…