Hospital Chaplains Deliver Spiritual Care

Comfort in Crisis

Right from birth, this baby was sick, in trouble. “Her mother immediately asked for prayer and was very optimistic,” Kathie Knehans, then a chaplain at Children’s Mercy Hospital  told me. So Knehans prayed with the family. And even when no family members were present, Knehans, now retired, visited the child and prayed. When the still-hospitalized…

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Christianity Faces Another Tempest

As the world marks the 500th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation in October, lots of Kansas City’s Protestant churches know that today they’re in another major theological upheaval. This one isn’t as violent (yes, the Protestant Reformation turned viciously violent for decades) as the one in 1517, but it may be as…

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(Faith)fully Serving Listeners

Zedek talks with Hill before a show

Virtually every Sunday morning for more than two decades, the Rev. Robert Lee Hill has left his Brookside home before sunrise to make his way to the studios of KCMO radio. The live talk show he co-hosts with Rabbi Michael Zedek and Bill Scholl of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas has also become…

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Calls for Peace, not Pacifism

Drepung Gomang Monks chant a benediction prayer.

It was dark and cold outside Saturday as celebrants filled the venue on Kansas City’s West Side. But this crowd was not gearing up for a party in the final hours of the year; it was instead a predawn gathering at the Rime Buddhist Center for the city’s 31st annual World Peace Meditation. [FLEX-CONTENT] By…

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Resurrecting A Neighborhood

Wallace Hartsfield and his wife outside the youth resource center

As the early Sunday morning service at Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church let out recently, Deacon Roosevelt Hall was happy to explain the large round button pinned to his lapel. “I’m committed,” it read. Yes, Hall said, it was about the 121-year-old congregation’s recently launched building renovation project. But that’s not all Metropolitan’s members are committed…

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