Wyoming Tribune Eagle

The United Methodist Church lost one-fourth of its U.S. churches in a recent schism, with conservatives departing over disputes on sexuality and theology. Now the question is whether the church can avert a similar outcome elsewhere in the world, where about half its members live. The question is particularly acute in Africa, home to the vast majority of United Methodists outside the U.S. Most of its bishops favor staying; other voices are calling for regional conferences to disaffiliate. At an upcoming meeting in North Carolina, delegates will tackle various proposals. Options include repealing the church’s ban on same-sex marriage, creating more autonomy for regional conferences to set such rules, and making it easier for international churches to leave the denomination.

Elevated by Pope Francis to the top hierarchy of the Catholic Church, Cardinal Álvaro Ramazzini has kept up his unflinching focus on the poor, the Indigenous and the migrant in Central America. That has garnered him great affection from the marginalized and many threats of violence, including rumors of an arrest warrant, as his native Guatemala struggles through political turmoil and remains a hotspot of migration to the United States. Of more than 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide, there are only 128 cardinal electors like Ramazzini, charged with serving the pope as his counselors in governing the church, and electing the next one. That hasn't stopped Ramazzini's frontline ministry for social justice, from remote parishes in his diocese to traditional Easter processions.

If you’ve spent a lonely night at home eating chocolates and/or ice cream, you shouldn’t feel guilty. That’s because loneliness can cause an intense desire for sugary foods, a new study found.

The coffee that picked you up this morning is 600,000 years old. Researchers have found that the world's most popular type of coffee, known as arabica, emerged hundreds of thousands of years ago through natural crossbreeding of two other coffee species. Using genes from coffee plants around the world, scientists built a coffee plant family tree to better understand where it came from and how to better protect it from disease and climate change. These wild coffee plants originated in Ethiopia but are thought to have been first roasted and brewed primarily in Yemen starting in the 1400s. The research was published Monday in the journal Nature Genetics.