"Our preference is to meet together, to hug one another, to greet one another, to see each other's smiles, but our principles won't let us do that, not yet," said Robert Hendriks, US spokesman for Jehovah's Witnesses.

For the second year, the global denomination of 8.6 million is holding its annual large-scale summer worship conventions online through August. Kingdom halls, where congregants would typically meet twice a week, remain closed across the country. Door-to-door preaching has not resumed.

Hendriks said these decisions were made early on in the pandemic. Congregants continue to solely meet on Zoom. Letter writing and phone calls have replaced door-to-door knocking.

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Vince and Michele Tylor spoke out after reading the story of Wellington woman Jean Sergent-Shadbolt, who received a handwritten letter from a Jehovah's Witness three months to the day after her step-cousin, friend and flatmate died. Continue reading

This week, Aro Valley woman Jean Sergent-Shadbolt spoke out after a hand-delivered, hand-written letter arrived from a Jehovah's Witness, three months to the day since the well-publicised death of her close friend and flatmate Michael Boyes.

After her story was published, Wellington woman Sandra Reid was among those who got in touch to say it was not an isolated incident. Continue reading

Patrick Carroll died in 2012 and his will stated that, in order to inherit, his adult children must attend his funeral and become Catholic within three months of his death.

His children did attend the funeral, but remain active Jehovah's Witnesses.

In the New South Wales Supreme Court earlier this month, Justice Francois Junc ruled Mr Carroll was entitled to have these conditions in his will.

The court heard that Mr Carroll never approved of his children becoming Jehovah's Witness.

His will was not so much about his own beliefs, but was rather about his long standing objection to his children being Jehovah's Witnesses.

He did not raise them as Catholics, and neither he nor they had attended church services when they were young and he did not enrol them in Catholic schools.

But when he split from their mother in 1959, she became a Jehovah's Witness and over the next decade the couple's four children, Robyn, Paulene, Anthony and Susan, were baptised as Jehovah's Witnesses.

His will was written four months before he died, in late 2011.

It was challenged on the basis that its stipulations were uncertain, but Justice Junc rejected this.

The requirements, especially the one that the children be baptised into the Catholic Church, were "not uncertain", the judge ruled.

Mr Carroll's children also argued that the conditions he set were legally impossible and contrary to public policy.

But these grounds also failed.

If the four children had met the stipulated conditions in the will, they would have inherited just over one third of Mr Carroll's estate.

But Justice Junc ordered that this share be divided among the 13 other beneficiaries of Mr Carroll's will, in accordance with its specific instructions.

Sources

• Sydney Morning Herald
• Sunday Telegraph
• Image: The Obamacrat

One involved his being mugged by a hitchhiker to whom he had offered a ride. I think my mom related this tale as a warning against good-natured but borderline foolish benevolence.

The second dealt with him calling my mother his favorite granddaughter named Sheila.

The third was that he converted to Catholicism. I cannot remember the religion from which he shifted.

For some reason, I always saw stories one and two as byproducts of story three, as though his changing religions somehow informed the way he went about all other activities in life.

My mom liked to say her grandfather had the faith of a convert.

She also used this expression to describe my paternal grandfather, who converted from the Baptist faith to the Lutheran church.

The implication was that there was something richer, even holier, about a convert's spirituality, whatever that spirituality may be.

I was always intrigued by this idea of a convert's religious ideology being definably distinct from someone else's. Continue reading.

Brian Harper is a writer, musician and community outreach coordinator for a small business. He has lived and worked in Peru, South Africa, Italy, and the United States.

Source: National Catholic Reporter

Image: Brian Harper Music