In last week’s update, we touched on how white evangelicals followed by Black Protestants are the least likely groups to want to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Concerns about hesitancy have a global reach but assume a far higher profile where vaccination campaigns are in full gear (as in the United States and Israel). To help address questions and misconceptions among Christians and the vaccine, Curtis Chang of Redeeming Babel (a theologian and former pastor at Duke Divinity School) has created a website entitled Christians and the Vaccine with short and informative videos and resources to quell misconceptions and fears. Chang says, “As believers, we cannot allow an influx of negative, and often inaccurate, information to be the reason we stop ourselves from considering being vaccinated. We have designed this website to be a reliable place where those who have questions can find a Biblically rooted answer.”
 
The All Africa Conference of Churches and the African Council of Religious Leaders, the largest and most representative multireligious platform in Africa, which mobilizes faith leaders’ for common action, will hold a two-day virtual meeting “Faith and Science in Conversation” on March 30 and 31 that is open to the public. Africa-based scientists, theologians, and technical teams will be speaking on the pandemic.
 
During international women’s month (March) a number of groups have focused both on the impact of the COVID emergencies on women and specific faith dimensions. A virtual event “Looking Through Gender Lenses at COVID-19's Impact: Religious and Ethical Perspectives” that is co-sponsored by the Joint Learning Initiative, World Faiths Development Dialogue, and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs will be held on March 25 at 12:30 pm EDT. This event will draw on the Religious Responses to COVID-19 project, which has catalogued and analyzed faith responses to the COVID-19 emergencies over the past year. The panel will highlight how religious beliefs have colored and shaped gendered experiences during the crisis.

A recently published article highlights how some Indigenous, tribal, and religious organizations who have survived near-genocide have fared during the pandemic. While the article largely focuses on Indigenous people, it also touches on survivors of other catastrophes like the transatlantic slave trade and the Holocaust, which can make people “postapocalyptic,” and notes that those “who know what it means to lose our world and live might have something to lend to a broader humanity that now faces its own existential crises in the form of disease and climate change.” The author argues that people draw on faith to navigate challenging times and to make sense of the world. Survivors of enslavement, genocide, and colonialism have drawn on traditional teachings to survive during horrific periods, and much is to be learned from them once we collectively face the post-COVID-19 world.