In the News

When the 86-year-old Thich Nhat Hanh was introduced to his audience in Copley Square on Sunday afternoon, he began by saying nothing for 25 minutes. Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk who is an internationally respected peace activist and author, was in Boston as part of a US tour.

Right after college Adrian Robbins-Cole became an investment banker. Twenty years ago he changed course and was ordained into the Episcopal Church. In September, Robbins-Cole assumed the role of rector at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley. St. Andrew’s is the largest of the three churches…

It’s a problem that just about everyone who has walked through Cambridge shares: finding a public bathroom around Harvard Square. Now, a loose coalition of churches, homelessness organizations, and businesses have launched a campaign called Advocates for a Common Toilet, in an effort to get a…

The Parish of the Messiah has announced that some of the proceeds from its spring fundraising drive resulted in the purchase and donation of five copies of the Episcopal “Book of Common Prayer” to the Protestant chaplaincy at Newton-Wellesley Hospital. Before the parish’s donation, no copies of the…

Digging and more digging had turned the cramped backyard of a centuries-old North End home into a hole-pocked jumble of back-filled earth that most tourists passed without a glance on their way to Old North Church. But this blemish behind the 18th-century Clough House proved to be a blessing for…

The Parish of the Messiah, 1900 Commonwealth Ave., Auburndale, recently welcomed Tinka Perry, the Episcopal Relief & Development’s Diocese of Massachusetts coordinator, as a guest speaker at a Sunday morning service.

Local and state campaigns to increase Massachusetts’ eight dollar an hour minimum wage are under way even as U.S. Rep. John Tierney pushes for Congress to pass his proposal to boost the federal minimum wage. The Salem Democrat on Friday said he is co-sponsoring a bill to boost the federal wage from…

When employees at the Marlborough Senior Center looked around a few years ago, they realized that the people who were showing up for the “blue plate special’’ lunches on Mondays and the weekly cribbage games did not look like the community outside its doors. “We knew our community is comprised of…

Growing up the son of a foreign services officer, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church assistant rector, the Rev. Oliver Jones, 59, has led an eclectic life — and that is a good thing both for him and his flock, since he is an ordained Lutheran minister. “The Mass will always seem the same really, whether…

She graduated from all-female Bryn Mawr College in 1995, where she came out as a lesbian and also as a woman called to the priesthood. After college, she graduated from Harvard Divinity School, married her girlfriend, became an Episcopal priest, changed her name — and changed her gender.