Jurors swiftly convicted an abortion opponent of murder Friday for shooting to death one of the only doctors to offer late-term abortions in the U.S., a killing the gunman claimed was justified to save the lives of unborn children, the Associated Press reports.

The jury deliberated for just 37 minutes before finding Scott Roeder, 51, of Kansas City, Mo., guilty of premeditated, first-degree murder for putting a gun to the forehead of Dr. George Tiller on May 31 and pulling the trigger.

Defense attorney Mark Rudy described his case as helpless and hopeless.

"I've never seen anyone lay himself out as much as Mr. Roeder did," Rudy said after the verdict, referring to his client's confessions.

Roeder faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years when he is sentenced March 9. Prosecutor Nola Foulston said she would pursue a so-called "Hard 50" sentence, which would require Roeder to serve at least 50 years before he can be considered for parole.

Tiller's widow, Jeanne, and the rest of the family quickly exited the courtroom after the verdict. In a statement, Jeanne Tiller said "once again, a Sedgwick County jury has reached a just verdict."

The family said it wanted Tiller to be "remembered for his legacy of service to women, the help he provided for those who needed it and the love and happiness he provided us as a husband, father and grandfather."

Roeder had confessed publicly before the trial and admitted again on the witness stand that he shot Tiller in the foyer of the Wichita church where the doctor was serving as an usher. He testified he felt the lives of unborn children were in "immediate danger" because of Tiller.

Read the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (62)
        

As if in response to BankStreet's comment to Pattycakers 2K10 earlier Friday, Pope Benedict XVI has urged church tribunals to work harder to encourage couples to stay married and not resort to granting annulments "at all costs."

An annulment is the process by which the church effectively declares that a marriage never took place. Many Catholics seek them so they can remarry in the church and continued to receive Communion.

Benedict told members of the Roman Rota, the Vatican tribunal that decides marriage annulments, that they shouldn't confuse "pastoral charity" in granting annulments with their need to uphold church law, the Associated Press reports.

The Vatican's concern largely is directed at the United States, which in 2006 had more annulment cases launched than the rest of the world combined.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
        

Days after flying a planeload of supplies and Scientologists to Haiti, John Travolta spoke about how faith in the controversial religion helped his family to deal with the death last year of his 16-year-old son, Jett.

"We work hard every day with our church on healing," Travolta told the Associated Press, though he did not mention Scientology by name. "And Kelly and I and Ella have all been working very hard and they've been helping us," he said, referring to himself, wife Kelly Preston and their daughter.

Asked by AP writer Rob Merrill what gave him the strength to return to his movie career, Travolta said, "Once you get yourself stable, then you're able to reach out again, you know, and I think this whole year every day we've been working on stabilizing ourselves and it's been successful so far."

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
        

The judge in the trial of a man accused of murdering an abortion doctor dealt the defense a major setback Thursday, ruling that the jury cannot consider a lesser charge of manslaughter, the Associated Press reports.

The ruling came hours after Scott Roeder took the stand in his own defense and admitted killing Dr. George Tiller, saying he acted to save the lives of unborn children.

Roeder's attorneys had hoped to win a lesser conviction of voluntary manslaughter, which requires them to show their client had an unreasonable but honest belief that deadly force was justified. The charge carries a considerably lighter sentence than murder.

Roeder testified that he considered elaborate schemes to stop the doctor, including chopping off his hands, crashing a car into him or sneaking into his home to kill him.

But in the end, Roeder told jurors, the easiest way was to walk into Tiller's church, put a gun to the man's forehead and pull the trigger.

Testifying as the lone defense witness, Roeder calmly explained what he admitted publicly months ago — that he killed Tiller to save unborn children.

"Those children were in immediate danger if someone did not stop George Tiller," Roeder said as the jury watched attentively but without a hint of surprise.

"They were going to continue to die," he said. "The babies were going to continue to die."

Read the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 12:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Does God cause earthquakes? What is the Jewish response to natural disasters?

Following the devastaton in Haiti, Baltimore Jewish Times executive editor Phil Jacobs puts the questions to local rabbis – and finds some common themes among the different branches of Judaism.

Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, executive vice president emeritus of the Orthodox Union and former spiritual leader of Baltimore’s Congregation Shomrei Emunah, advises Jews to set aside the question of whether or why God allows earthquakes to in favor of what God requires in response. The answer, he says: “see, feel, act.”

Rabbi Elissa Sachs-Kohen of Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, a Reform synagogue, tells Jacobs she doesn’t think that God “does things like earthquakes and plagues and illnesses.”

“I don’t believe that if we prayed hard enough, there would not have been an earthquake,” she says. “But I do believe that through learning our Jewish tradition, we learn of responsibility for one another. Those who have skills that are useful should be employing those skills in a helpful way.”

Rabbi Steve Schwartz of Beth El Congregation in Pikesville, a Conservative synagogue, says supernatural explanations for natural disasters are unnecessary.

“The rules and laws of physics are set up, and the world moves along, and God is not intervening in history on a regular basis and deciding that such-and-such a person should be saved or such-and-such a person should be punished,” he says. “We know why earthquakes happen. Plates shift—it’s not a big mystery."

Schwartz, too, speaks of the “Jewish response.”

“So many people are going to respond, ‘What do they need my $10 for?’ Or, ‘My $10 won’t make a difference.’ The Jewish response is, absolutely not. You don’t go there. You assume that you are the only who can take care of it. Never assume your little actions won’t take care of it. Our traditions teach us that the smallest contributions are a big deal.”

Read the story at jewishtimes.com.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
        

Months after threatening to oppose the health care overhaul over abortion – and one week after the election of a 41st Republican senator cost the Democrats their filibuster-proof majority, casting passage into doubt – Catholic bishops now are urging Congress against dropping the project.

“The health care debate, with all its political and ideological conflict, seems to have lost its central moral focus and policy priority, which is to ensure that affordable, quality, life-giving care is available to all,” Cardinal Daniel DiDinardo and bishops William F. Murphy and John Wester, writing on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, say in a letter sent to members of Congress this week. “Now is not the time to abandon this task, but rather to set aside partisan divisions and special interest pressures to find ways to enact genuine reform. Although political contexts have changed, the moral and policy failure that leaves tens of millions of our sisters and brothers without access to health care still remains.”

The bishops have advocated consistently for broadening access to health care, but oppose abortion. In November, the conference took an active role in lobbying for an amendment to the House version of the health care overhaul to prohibit taxpayer subsidies for insurance plans that cover the procedure.

Read the bishops’ letter.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)
        

A Jewish cemetery in eastern France was desecrated Wednesday, with at least 18 gravestones marked with swastikas and overturned, the Associated Press reports.

The desecration in a Strasbourg cemetery came on the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the detah camp at Auschwitz, now observed internationally as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

France's main Jewish organization, CRIF, said at least 18 tombstones at the Cronenbourg cemetery were found Wednesday marked with swastikas and 13 of them were overturned. The CRIF's Marc Knobel said the inscription "juden raus" (Jews out) was found on one tomb.

A statement from the office of President Nicolas Sarkozy said he "firmly condemns this unbearable act, the expression of odious racism." It asked that those responsible be quickly identified and their acts "treated with the severity called for."

France is home to western Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim populations, and there are occasional attacks on their schools, cemeteries or places of worship, the AP reports.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

On the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday denounced the "horror" of the Shoah and the "unprecedented cruelty of the extermination camps created by Nazi Germany."

The German-born pontiff, who has drawn criticism from Jewish leaders for moving wartime Pope Pius XII closer to sainthood, made his remarks at the conclusion of his weekly audience. The Vatican press office provides the translation:

Today we celebrate "Holocaust Remembrance Day," to recall all the victims of those crimes, and especially the planned annihilation of the Jews, and to honour those who, at the risk of their own lives, protected the persecuted and sought to oppose the murderous insanity. Deeply moved, our thoughts go to the countless victims of that blind racial and religious hatred, who suffered deportation, imprisonment and death in those abhorrent and inhuman places.

May the memory of those events and in particular the drama of the Shoah which struck the Jewish people, arouse ever greater respect for the dignity of each person, so that all mankind may feel itself to be one large family. May omnipotent God illuminate hearts and minds, that such tragedies never happen again.

After a period of relative harmony during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, Catholic-Jewish relations have been strained under Benedict.

Benedict sparked outrage among some Jewish groups by signing a decree on Pius' heroic virtues, paving the way for him to be beatified once a miracle attributed to his intercession is confirmed.

In the view of some Jews and historians, Pius, who was pope from 1939-1958, was largely silent on the Holocaust and could have done more to prevent the deaths of 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

The Vatican says Pius used quiet diplomacy to try to save Jews and that speaking out more forcefully would have resulted in more deaths. It said last month the decree on his heroic virtues wasn't so much a historical assessment of his pontificate as a confirmation that he had led a deeply Christian life.

Jewish leaders had asked the pope to put the beatification on hold until archives on Pius' pontificate are opened to outside scholars. The Vatican has said those archives won't be catalogued and ready until 2014 at the earliest.

Benedict has also aroused Jewish concerns with his decision last year to lift the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop as part of an effort to reconcile with the conservative Society of Saint Puis X, and his approval of a prayer for the conversion of the Jews in the Latin Mass on Good Friday.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)
        

Pope John Paul II whipped himself with a belt and slept on the floor as acts of penitence and to bring him closer to Christian perfection, according to a new book by the Polish prelate spearheading his sainthood case, the Associated Press reports.

The book "Why He's a Saint" also includes previously unpublished speeches and documents written by John Paul, including one 1989 signed memo in which he said he would resign if he became incapacitated, AP reporter Nicole Winfield writes.

The book also reported for the first time that John Paul forgave his would-be assassin in the ambulance on the way to the hospital moments after he was shot on May 13, 1981, in St. Peter's Square. And it reported that he initially thought his attacker was a member of the Italian terrorist organization the Red Brigades.

The book was written by Monsignor Slawomir Oder, the postulator, or main promoter, for John Paul's canonization cause and was released Tuesday. It was based on the testimony of the 114 witnesses and boxes of documentation Oder gathered on John Paul's life to support the case.

At a news conference Tuesday, Oder defended John Paul's practice of self-mortification, which some faithful use to remind them of the suffering of Jesus on the cross.

"It's an instrument of Christian perfection," Oder said, responding to questions about how such a practice could be condoned considering Catholic teaching holds that the human body is a gift from God.

In the book, Oder wrote that John Paul frequently denied himself food — especially during the holy season of Lent — and "frequently spent the night on the bare floor," messing up his bed in the morning so he wouldn't draw attention to his act of penitence.

"But it wasn't limited to this. As some members of his close entourage in Poland and in the Vatican were able to hear with their own ears, John Paul flagellated himself. In his armoire, amid all the vestments and hanging on a hanger, was a belt which he used as a whip and which he always brought to Castel Gandolfo," the papal retreat where John Paul vacationed each summer.

While there had long been rumors that John Paul practiced self-mortification, the book provides the first confirmation and concludes John Paul did so as an example of his faith.

Read the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

John Travolta has piloted a jetliner carrying relief supplies, doctors and ministers from the Church of Scientology into Port-au-Prince, the Associated Press reports.

"We have the ability to actually help make a difference in the situation in Haiti and I just can't see not using this plane to help," the 55-year-old actor said. He compared the mission to efforts following Hurricane Katrina: "We were there right away, with this airplane, because you know we have the ability and the means to do this so I think you have responsibility on some level to do that."

The flight Tuesday comes as aid groups have been desperate to fly their own planes into the over-stressed airport, the Associated Press reports. U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said Tuesday that at least 800 planes with relief items are on a waiting list for the airport, which can handle only about 130 flights a day due to a lack of space to park planes as they unload.

The aid group Doctors Without Borders has complained that the flight scheduling priorities of U.S. military controllers running the airport delayed the arrival of field hospitals, resulting in some deaths.

Travolta and Preston returned to Florida as soon as their supplies and passengers were unloaded.

Read the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 2:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

We posted on Monday about the "pledge campaign" launched by the National Jewish Democratic Council in what it described as an attempt to rid politics of Holocaust rhetoric and anti-Semitic language. The NJDC cited the use of Holocaust imagery by Republicans and conservatives in arguing against the Democrats' efforts to overhaul health care.

We now have a response from Republican Jewish Coalition executive director Matt Brooks:

NJDC's "campaign" doesn't pass the laugh test. First, if they were serious about keeping inappropriate Holocaust references out of political campaigns, they would have reached out to their counterparts on the Republican side - the RJC - to do it on an evenhanded, non-partisan basis. After all, the RJC is on record denouncing the misuse of Holocaust language and imagery on either side of the political aisle.

Second, the language of the pledge statement includes a distorted and partisan account of the recent history of Holocaust references in politics. The NJDC conveniently forgot to include in its account the remarks of Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) who likened our health care system to the Holocaust, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's reference to swastikas at town hall meetings, and Rep. Brian Baird's (D-WA) reference to town hall protesters as "brownshirts" last summer. Grayson's remarks were so egregious that he was admonished publicly by the Anti-Defamation League.

And in eight years of vile Holocaust comparisons aimed at President Bush, we almost never heard leading Democrats or the NJDC speak out against the use of those words and images, whether at demonstrations, online at DailyKos and Huffington Post, or by Democratic elected officials. "Bushitler" was used as a sitting President's name in public forums; where was the NJDC's outrage then?

Democrats are running scared after recent Republican victories and polls that show that the American people don't want ObamaCare, don't want more stimulus packages, and don't approve of how Obama, Reid, and Pelosi are handling the serious problems America faces. The NJDC is trying to divert attention from the administration's missteps on foreign policy, national security, and the economy. Jewish voters won't be fooled by such cheap and desperate tactics.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

After a season in which Republicans and at least one Democrat invoked Nazis and the Holocaust to characterize political opponents in the health debate, a national Jewish Democratic organization has launched a "pledge campaign" to demand that candidates condemn and refrain from "abusive Holocaust rhetoric and anti-Semitic language."

The National Jewish Democratic Council is starting with candidates in the Illinois election for U.S. Senate, but organization officials say they plan to expand around the country in the coming weeks.

"In the current toxic political environment, an increasing number of voices have employed inappropriate Holocaust and outright anti-Semitic rhetoric to score political points," Ira N. Forman, chief executive officer of the council, said in a statement. "At an official House Republican press conference before 'Tea Party' activists in November, for example, political rhetoric opposing health insurance reform invoked disgusting Holocaust imagery and outright anti-Semitism. Top political leaders including House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) and House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-IN) stood before a crowd that held a banner displaying a stack of dead bodies at Dachau, titled 'National Socialist Health Care Plan, Dachau, Germany - 1945.' Yet another sign suggested that 'Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds' [sic].

"This is just one of many vile examples that rabbinic movements and other national organizations have taken a stand against. This is not a partisan issue and such speech is simply not acceptable to the Jewish community. Republican and Democratic candidates alike must disavow such rhetoric. Starting in Illinois and expanding around the country, NJDC will call upon candidates for federal office in 2010 to pledge to renounce anti-Semitic and abusive Holocaust language by any supporter."

The NJDC release does not mention Rep. Brian Baird, the Washington state Democrat who described outbursts by critics of Democratic health care legislation at town hall meetings last summer as “close to Brown Shirt tactics.”

Or, for that matter, perhaps the most notorious example by a prominent figure, the lengthy bit by Rush Limbaugh last year comparing “the Democrat Party of today and the Nazi Party in German.”

“Well, the Nazis were against big business,” Limbaugh said. “They hated big business and, of course, we all know that they were opposed to Jewish capitalism. They were insanely, irrationally against pollution. They were for two years of mandatory voluntary service to Germany. They had a whole bunch of make-work projects to keep people working, one of which was the Autobahn.”

At the time, Jewish Democrats pressured Cantor, the House minority whip, who had said that the GOP needs Limbaugh, to repudiate Limbaugh's comments.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 2:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
        

A French parliamentary panel will recommend a ban on face-covering Muslim veils in public areas from hospitals to schools but will stop short of pressing for the garb to be outlawed in the street, the Associated Press reports.

The 32-member panel's report due Tuesday culminates a six-month inquiry into the wearing of all-encompassing veils that began after President Nicolas Sarkozy said in June that they are "not welcome" on French territory, AP reporter Elaine Ganley writes.

Andre Gerin, a Communist lawmaker who heads the multiparty panel, said the report contains a "multitude of proposals" to ban such garb in places like schools, hospitals and other public buildings, but not private buildings or on the street. He said the proposals would cover "domains that concern everyday society," a phrase that would seem to include public transportation, although he did not mention that specifically.

Gerin stressed the need to move "progressively" toward a law banning the attire in the streets and to work "hand in hand" with Muslim leaders and associations.

Critics of the veils call them a gateway to extremism, an insult to gender equality and an offense to France's secular system. A 2004 French law bans Muslim headscarves from classrooms.

Muslim religious leaders have warned that a law banning face-covering attire in the streets could stigmatize Muslims and drive some to extremism. They were joined last week by Roman Catholic and Jewish leaders who said they consider such a drastic step unnecessary.

France has Western Europe's largest Muslim population, estimated at some 5 million. Only a tiny minority of Muslim women wear such attire, usually a "niqab" pinned across the face to cover all but the eyes.

Read the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

The Roman Catholic primate of Belgium has likened homosexuality to an eating disorder, Radio Netherlands Worldwide reports.

"Homosexuality is not the same as normal sex in the same way that anorexia is not a normal appetite," Monsignor André-Joseph Léonard, the archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, told a Belgian television station, according to RNW. He added that he would "never call anorexia patients abnormal."

As bishop of Namen in Belgium, RNW reports, Léonard provoked controversy when he called homosexuality abnormal. Pope Benedict XVI named him archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels last week, making him primate of Belgium.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (154)
        

Musicians, dancers and dramatists will gather at the Miracle Temple Seventh-day Adventist Church in Baltimore on Saturday to raise funds for the Adventist Development Relief Agency in Haiti. Scheduled to attend is the Rev. Dr. Barry Black, the chaplain of the U.S. Senate and a Baltimore native.

The event, sponsored by the church and the Pray at the Pump Movement, is scheduled for 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday at the church at 120 S. Glen Rock Road in Baltimore. The congregation is home to several Haitians.

Pray at the Pump Movement founder Rocky Twyman, a musician himself, is challenging musicians in the area and throughout the country to organize similar fundraisers in the coming weeks and months.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
        

The Associated Press has an interesting story about Grant Desme, the Friday Oakland Athletics prospect who announced Friday he is leaving baseball for the priesthood -- after hitting .315, knocking in 27 and clouting a league-leading 11 home runs in 27 games in the Class-A Arizona Fall League.

The story by AP baseball writer Ben Walker begins:

As a top prospect for the Oakland Athletics, outfielder Grant Desme might've gotten the call every minor leaguer wants this spring.

Instead, he believed he had another, higher calling.

Desme announced Friday that he was leaving baseball to enter the priesthood, walking away after a breakout season in which he became MVP of the Arizona Fall League.

"I was doing well at ball. But I really had to get down to the bottom of things," the 23-year-old Desme said. "I wasn't at peace with where I was at."

A lifelong Catholic, Desme thought about becoming a priest for about a year and a half. He kept his path quiet within the sports world, and he startled the A's on Thursday night when he told them he planned to enter a seminary this summer.

General manager Billy Beane "was understanding and supportive," Desme said, but the decision "sort of knocked him off his horse." After the talk, Desme felt "a great amount of peace."

"I love the game, but I aspire to higher things," he said. "I know I have no regrets."

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

The decision of a Michigan manufacturer to remove coded references to New Testament verses from the rifle sights that it sells to U.S Marines and Army for use in Iraq and Afghanistan is winning praise from Muslims and Atheists.

Trijicon, which has a $660 million contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marines, has long inscribed its products with codes such as 2COR4:6, an apparent reference to a passage from the Second Letter of Paul to the Corinthians: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ"

Military officials said they were unaware of the inscriptions when they were revealed this week by ABC News.

"This is a serious concern to me and the other commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Gen. David Petraeus, chief of U.S. Central Command. In a statement issued by CENTCOM, Petraeus said "cultural and religious sensitivities are important considerations in the conduct of military operations."

Trijicon announced that it would remove the codes.

American Atheists President Ed Buckner, who had warned that Islamic extremists could take advantage of what he called "a major blunder that seriously risks efforts to reach out to people in Muslim countries threatened by groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda," praised the decision to remove them.

"By eliminating these 'Christian crusader' references, we are no longer handing al Qaeda and other Islamic religious fanatics a priceless propaganda vehicle," he said.

Added Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council for American-Islamic Relations: “This is a responsible move by Trijicon that will help reduce or eliminate a potential danger to our nation's military."

Kathleen Johnson, military director for American Atheists, wondered why this issue even came up.

"The military has strict rules in place to prohibit actions that make it appear as if US Forces are proselytizing or are crusading against the Muslim faith" said Johnson. "There were apparently no controls or oversight here, as tens of thousands of these 'Christian rifle sights' were being sold at public expense and distributed in theaters of operation."

She called for more explicit regulations, including a requirement that any materials purchased by the Department of Defense be "religion-free and neutral," and demanded that senior leaders within the military ensure the imprinted bible citations are removed.

"We cannot have a situation where individual commanders elect to keep the imprinted bible citations and the only way to prevent that is to make leaders accountable for compliance," she said.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)
        

Oklahoma Muslims want a meeting with their senator after he spoke in favor of profiling Muslims and Middle Easterners as a security measure.

“I for one, I know it’s not politically correct to say it, but I belief in racial and ethnic profiling,” Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, said Thursday during a Senate Armed Service Committee review of the Fort Hood shootings. “I think if you’re looking at people getting on an airplane, and you have X amount of resources to get into it, you need to get at the targets. …

“When you hear that not all Middle Easterners or Muslims between the ages of 20 and 35 are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims or Middle Easterners between the ages of 20 and 35, that’s by and large true.”

The Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on Inhofe Friday to meet with representatives of the state’s Muslim community to discuss the comments. CAIR says FBI statistics who that the “vast majority” of terror attacks on American soil have not been committed by Muslims.

“It is disturbing to hear a member of the United States Senate suggest that entire religious and ethnic groups should automatically be considered terror suspects,” said Razi Hashmi, executive director of CAIR-OK. “Our nation’s leaders have a duty not to exacerbate the growing anti-Muslim sentiment in American society.

“By painting all Muslims and Middle Easterners as suspects, Senator Inhofe does a disservice to our nation and to its tradition of racial and religious diversity.”

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)
        

A Michigan defense contractor will voluntarily stop stamping references to Bible verses on combat rifle sights made for the U.S. military, the Associated Press reports.

In a statement released Thursday, Trijicon of Wixom, Mich., says it is also providing to the armed forces free of charge modification kits to remove the Scripture citations from the telescoping sights already in use. Through multimillion dollar contracts, the Marine Corps and Army have bought more than 300,000 Trijicon sights.

The references to Bible passages raised concerns that the citations break a government rule that bars proselytizing by American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are predominantly Muslim countries.

A spokesman for U.S. Central Command initially said the Trijicon sights didn't violate the ban and compared the citations on the sights to the "In God We Trust" inscription printed on U.S. currency.

On Thursday, however, Army Gen. David Petraeus, Central Command's top officer, called the practice "disturbing."

"This is a serious concern to me and the other commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan," Petraeus told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In a statement issued later by the command, Petraeus said that "cultural and religious sensitivities are important considerations in the conduct of military operations."

Read the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
        

The Stone Songs concert series at New Hope Community Church in Pikesville, the congregation pastored by friend and In Good Faith contributor Jason Poling, will be hosting a fundraiser for Haiti Saturday evening.

Headlining the show at the historic Stone Chapel in Garrison Forest is singer/songwriter L.J. Booth, with local Doug Alan Wilcox opening. The address is 18 stone Chapel Lane, just off Reisterstown Road in Pikesville. Doors open for a wine and cheese reception at 7 p.m., with the performance beginning at 8.

Tickets are $20; all proceeds will benefit the work in Haiti of World Relief, the Baltimore-based relief and development agency of the National Association of Evangelicals. Information, tickets and more on the Stone Songs series are available at www.stonesongs.org.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

A teenage airplane passenger using a Jewish prayer object caused a misunderstanding that led the captain to divert a Kentucky-bound flight to Philadelphia and prompted a visit from a bomb squad, the Associated Press reports.

A 17-year-old boy on US Airways Express Flight 3079 from New York to Louisville was using tefillin, a set of small boxes containing biblical passages that are attached to leather straps, said Philadelphia police Lt. Frank Vanore.

When used in prayer, one box is strapped to the arm while the other box is placed on the head.

"It's something that the average person is not going to see very often, if ever," FBI spokesman J.J. Klaver said.

Read the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

The release of the Turkish man who shot the pope in 1981 has unsettled Turks who remember him for another crime — the killing of journalist Abdi Ipekci, whose calls for tolerance still resonate in a divided nation, Associated Press writer Christopher Torchia writes from Istanbul:

The world knows Mehmet Ali Agca for his attempt on Pope John Paul II, a brazen assault in the midst of throngs of the devout in Rome that has not been explained to the satisfaction of prosecutors. But his emergence after decades in jail had a deeper impact in Turkey, troubled by a dark past and concerns about impunity, conspiracy and freedom of expression.

Agca was convicted of the fatal shooting of Ipekci, chief editor of Milliyet newspaper, outside his apartment building in Istanbul on Feb. 1, 1979. Yet suspicions that he acted for a wider right-wing network never advanced beyond speculation in a country where many believe a "deep state," renegade gangs with links to security forces, targeted perceived enemies.

Those suspicions about opaque power interests revived when Agca, 52, was released Monday. A black SUV with tinted windows ferried him to the luxury Sheraton hotel in Ankara, and he was escorted by men in suits, some with thick mustaches of a style worn by the now-defunct Gray Wolves, a rightist militant group to which Agca was once linked.

In a statement released Wednesday, Agca declared his innocence, saluted Ipekci's family as "noble and respected" and said he "had no connection with official or unofficial circles in Turkey other than a handful of ultra-nationalists."

Agca's claims this week that he is the Messiah fueled old theories that he is indeed mentally ill, or is trying to stoke curiosity and diversion in order to collect as high a price as possible for selling his story.

His lawyer, Gokay Gultekin, said Agca was resting in Istanbul on Wednesday. He apologized for a reported incident in which armed associates of Agca threatened journalists on a highway while traveling with him from the capital.

Read the rest of the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Americans are more than twice as likely to express prejudice against Muslims than they are against Christians, Jews or Buddhists, according to a report to be released Thursday by the Gallup World Religion Survey. While nearly two-thirds of Americans say they have little or no knowledge of Islam, a majority say they have an unfavorable view of the faith.

Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll breaks down the results:

Just over half of Americans said they felt no prejudice against Muslims. However, 43 percent acknowledged at least "a little" prejudice against Muslims, a significantly higher percentage than for the other four faiths in the survey.

About 18 percent of respondents said they had some level of prejudice against Christians, while the figure was 15 percent toward Jews and 14 percent toward Buddhists.

Asked about knowledge of Islam, 63 percent of Americans say they have "very little" or "none at all." A large majority of respondents believe most Muslims want peace. Yet, 53 percent of Americans say their opinion of the faith is "not too favorable" or "not favorable at all." By comparison, 25 percent of Americans say they have unfavorable views of Judaism, while 7 percent say they have "some" or "a great deal" of prejudice toward Jews.

Personally knowing a Muslim is not linked to a lower level of prejudice, although not knowing a Muslim is related to the greatest level of bias. The authors of the report say this finding underscores the need for better education on what Islam teaches.

"What really seems to impact one's perception of a group much more than knowing an individual is having a positive opinion of that group's distinguishing characteristic, which in this case is their faith," said Dalia Mogahed, senior analyst and executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. "That one person being nice enough could simply be explained as that person being an exception."

Respondents who say they attend religious services more than once a week are significantly more likely to have a favorable view of Muslims. Mogahed said people who are more religious generally consider prejudice a moral evil and often have respect for the devout of other faiths.

Researchers also found a link between prejudice against Jews and Muslims. Americans who acknowledged "a great deal" of bias toward Jews were much more likely to feel the same about Muslims. The survey results could not explain why the two prejudices are linked. Mogahed said bias against both groups should be tracked and studied together to understand the dynamic.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, a vocal critic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, said Wednesday that the State Department has lifted a five-year ban that has prevented him from entering the United States.

"The decision brings to an end a dark period in American politics that saw security considerations invoked to block critical debate through a policy of exclusion and baseless allegation,” the Oxford University professor said in a statement published by Reuters.

"Under the Bush administration, academics and intellectuals were frequently excluded on the false pretext of security. Today's decision reflects the Obama administration's willingness to reopen the United States to the rest of the world, and to permit critical debate."

The Swiss-born Ramadan, a grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, was to begin teaching at the University of Notre Dame in the fall of 2004 when the Department of Homeland Security revoked his visa. Officials cited a donation he made to the Swiss-based Association de Secours Palestinien, which the Bush administration said provided funds to Hamas.

Ramadan has said he was unaware of any connections between ASP and terrorism. In his statement, he said the reasons given for the ban "were nothing more than a pretence to prohibit me from speaking critically about American government policy on American soil."

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging his exclusion on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and the PEN American Center.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said Wednesday that it welcomed the order signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to reverse the ban.

“We welcome this move by the Obama administration to permit a respected scholar and voice for religious moderation to enter our country,” CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad said in a statement. “This is a step toward beginning to repair the damage to our image among Muslims worldwide.”

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 1:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)
        

Weeks after Baltimore approved a first-in-the-nation ordinance that required faith-based pregnancy resource centers to post signs making clear that they don’t provide help with abortions, the state’s Catholic bishops have issued a statement calling for support for women facing crisis pregnancies.

“Set Out in Haste: Serving Women, Serving Life,” released by Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien of Baltimore, Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl of Washington and Bishop W. Francis Malooly of Wilmington, Del., to coincide with the opening of Maryland’s legislative session and the 37th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, has been sent to the state’s nearly 280 Catholic parishes.

How often does a woman face an unplanned pregnancy convinced there is little hope for a positive outcome to her circumstances? She may be rejected by her family, abandoned by the baby’s father, overwhelmed by the news she has received, unsure of where to find support, anxious about her education, career or future, or facing a combination of those forces. That is where we as a Christian people come in. Among the most powerful testimonies to the culture of life is our outreach to pregnant women in need.

This outreach can take a number of forms, but its most direct is through the work of pregnancy resource centers. In Maryland, nearly 40 of these centers together serve about 30,000 women a year. They offer emotional support, childbirth and parenting classes, adoption assistance, infant and maternity clothes, formula, diapers, and help accessing public and private assistance programs. These services are offered free of charge and out of deep love and respect for both the expectant mother and her unborn child.

We appeal to you now for your public support in defending the pregnancy centers’ compassionate outreach. Sadly, these charities are the target of a campaign by NARAL Pro-Choice Maryland and Planned Parenthood of Maryland to discredit their good work simply because it affirms life. Pregnancy resource centers have been singled out for unwarranted regulation three times in two years, and this harassment is expected to continue.

The bishops cite the Baltimore ordinance, signed last month by Mayor Sheila Dixon, a similar measure introduced last year in Montgomery County, and a bill in the Maryland legislature in 2008 that would have required such centers to tell clients that they are not required to provide “factually accurate information."

The bishops write:

At a time when many in the “pro-choice” movement claim to seek common ground on abortion, these proposals demonstrate a baffling and aggressive impetus in quite the opposite direction. They are particularly abhorrent because they mandate compelled speech only for those centers that are pro-life and only because they are pro-life, in complete disregard of the respected and valuable assistance pregnant women receive from them. The message these proposals send is disturbing: Failure to provide abortion or contraception, even when based on deeply-held moral beliefs, is an activity that merits regulation and, if necessary, punishment.

There is a critical need for offering alternatives to abortion. While the abortion rate declined 9 percent nationally between 2000 and 2005, the abortion rate in Maryland rose 8 percent in the same period. Our state’s abortion rate is now 38 percent higher than the national rate, with more than one-in-four Maryland pregnancies ending in abortion. There were 37,590 abortions performed here in 2005 – about 103 per day. To even consider targeting centers that help women choose life is unconscionable in light of these tragic statistics, which represent an even more tragic reality.

The complete statement follows, below:

Set Out in Haste: Serving Women, Serving Life

A Statement from the Bishops of Maryland

January 2010

Mary had just accepted the call to bear the Son of God when she “set out and travelled to the hill country in haste” (1) to the house of her cousin Elizabeth, who was also with child. The Blessed Mother “remained with her about three months” (2) to minister to the needs of her vulnerable cousin.

From the moment of Christ’s incarnation, God called his people to a faith that defies the obstacles of ordinary human circumstances. Mary’s immediate impulse to reach out to Elizabeth, particularly in the wake of her own courageous acceptance of motherhood, remains a powerful example for us.

How often does a woman face an unplanned pregnancy convinced there is little hope for a positive outcome to her circumstances? She may be rejected by her family, abandoned by the baby’s father, overwhelmed by the news she has received, unsure of where to find support, anxious about her education, career or future, or facing a combination of those forces. That is where we as a Christian people come in. Among the most powerful testimonies to the culture of life is our outreach to pregnant women in need.

This outreach can take a number of forms, but its most direct is through the work of pregnancy resource centers. In Maryland, nearly 40 of these centers together serve about 30,000 women a year. They offer emotional support, childbirth and parenting classes, adoption assistance, infant and maternity clothes, formula, diapers, and help accessing public and private assistance programs. These services are offered free of charge and out of deep love and respect for both the expectant mother and her unborn child.

We appeal to you now for your public support in defending the pregnancy centers’ compassionate outreach. Sadly, these charities are the target of a campaign by NARAL Pro-Choice Maryland and Planned Parenthood of Maryland to discredit their good work simply because it affirms life. Pregnancy resource centers have been singled out for unwarranted regulation three times in two years, and this harassment is expected to continue.

The first bill targeting pro-life pregnancy centers was introduced in 2008 in the state legislature, and would have required them to tell clients that they are not required to provide “factually accurate information.” (3) Failing there, abortion rights groups marketed similar bills at the local level. In November the Baltimore City Council passed a bill requiring pro-life pregnancy centers to post a sign listing services they do not provide (abortion and contraception) or face a daily fine. (4) The Montgomery County Council is reviewing a regulation that requires pro-life centers to tell clients that the information provided is not intended to be medical advice and that women should see another provider before proceeding on a “course of action regarding… pregnancy.” Failure to comply would include a fine of up to $750 per day.(5)

At a time when many in the “pro-choice” movement claim to seek common ground on abortion, these proposals demonstrate a baffling and aggressive impetus in quite the opposite direction. They are particularly abhorrent because they mandate compelled speech only for those centers that are pro-life and only because they are pro-life, in complete disregard of the respected and valuable assistance pregnant women receive from them. The message these proposals send is disturbing: Failure to provide abortion or contraception, even when based on deeply-held moral beliefs, is an activity that merits regulation and, if necessary, punishment.

There is a critical need for offering alternatives to abortion. While the abortion rate declined 9 percent nationally between 2000 and 2005, the abortion rate in Maryland rose 8 percent in the same period. Our state’s abortion rate is now 38 percent higher than the national rate, with more than one-in-four Maryland pregnancies ending in abortion. There were 37,590 abortions performed here in 2005 – about 103 per day. (6) To even consider targeting centers that help women choose life is unconscionable in light of these tragic statistics, which represent an even more tragic reality.

Those numbers, sadly, come as little surprise because our state is home to one of the most permissive abortion laws in the country, having in 1992 approved a state version of the Freedom of Choice Act. Maryland has no parental consent law, no meaningful parental notification law, no informed consent law, no mandatory waiting period, no regulation of abortion clinics as surgical facilities, and no abortion reporting requirement. What’s more, about $2.5 million of state taxpayer dollars are used on average every year to pay for Medicaid abortions and, in some cases, abortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy.

Justice and charity are both necessary to achieve the common good and build a moral society. (7) For many years we have spoken out against Maryland’s permissive abortion law as a violation of the justice that requires the protection of human life from conception until natural death. Now, in the proposals harassing pregnancy centers, lawmakers are considering passing legislation that curtails the right and duty of our Christian faithful to exercise charity that conforms to an authentic understanding of the dignity of the human person. This is unacceptable.

Your help is needed to stand up for pregnant women in need and for the organizations that provide them with free, compassionate, life-affirming services. Here’s how you can “set out in haste” to serve pregnant women in need:

• Stay informed on proposals that target pregnancy centers, and contact lawmakers. Visit www.mdcathcon.org, and click on “Catholic Advocacy Network” to receive e-mail updates.

• Contact the respect life office in your diocese to learn how to get involved in local pro-life work:
o Archdiocese of Baltimore: 410-547-5537
o Archdiocese of Washington: 301-853-4555
o Diocese of Wilmington:302-655-9624

• Attend Catholic Lobby Night in Annapolis on Monday, February 15 and urge state lawmakers to support pregnant women and pregnancy centers. Visit www.mdcathcon.org or call 410-269-1155/301-261-1979 to register. (register online here)

It can be difficult to remain hopeful when we consider these threats to human life and Christian charity. But our trust, like Mary’s, remains in the Lord. We know that if we “set out in haste” to do His will, as she did, her song will also be ours: “The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is His name.” (8)

Most Rev. Edwin F. O'Brien
Archbishop of Baltimore

Most Rev. Donald W. Wuerl
Archbishop of Washington

Most Rev. W. Francis Malooly
Bishop of Wilmington

(1) Luke 1:39.
(2) Luke 1:56.
(3) Maryland Senate Bill 690/House Bill 1146, 2008.
(4) Baltimore City Bill 09-0406.
(5) Montgomery County Board of Health regulation proposal for “Limited-Service Pregnancy Centers,” 2009.
(6) The Alan Guttmacher Institute, State Facts About Abortion: Maryland, January 2008.
(7) Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, Paragraph 28, 2005.
(8) Luke 1:49.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders will lead an interfaith vigil next week against violence in the city, the Archdiocese of Baltimore announced.

The vigil, sponsored by the Baltimore Interfaith Coalition, will also include prayers and a collection for Haiti.

“Haiti is in the midst of what we call a natural disaster, but here in Baltimore, violence perpetuates what we could call an unnatural disaster,” Auxiliary Bishop Denis J. Madden, urban vicar of the Archdiocese of Baltimore and co-chair of the coalition, said in a statement. “Violence in Baltimore keeps our city from reaching its potential and limits our ability to focus on the poverty of places like Haiti.”

In a joint letter to area clergy this month, Madden and Bishop Douglas I. Miles of Koinonia Baptist Church, said “We have the opportunity to make a profound statement … that people of faith will not sit idly while violence destroys our neighborhoods.”

The Baltimore Interfaith Coalition, formed after a meeting last spring between local faith leaders and Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, has announced plans to “mobilize faith communities through joint service projects that promote healing and hope to those who are affected by violence.”

“This is the first time since the Civil Rights Movement that Baltimore has seen an interfaith movement of this scale,” Miles said.

The interfaith vigil is scheduled for 7 p.m. Jan. 25 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

The Church of England might not be ready to celebrate openly gay clergy, but Anglican bishops are poised to consider whether to extend the rights and benefits now afforded to married priests’ spouses to same-sex partners.

The proposal is to be debated by bishops and senior clergy next month at the church’s general synod. The Telegraph of London has a story:

Traditionalists have expressed strong opposition to the move, which they claim would give official recognition to homosexual relationships.

They warn that affording equal treatment to heterosexual and homosexual couples would undermine the Church's teaching on marriage.

At present, the Church bars clergy from being in active gay relationships, although it bowed to pressure to allow them to enter civil partnerships on the condition that they are celibate.

Liberals believe that the motion, to be unveiled this week, could be a major breakthrough in securing rights for gay clergy.

It calls on the Archbishops' Council, chaired by Dr. Rowan Williams, to introduce changes that would "provide for pension benefits to be paid to the surviving civil partners of deceased clergy on the same basis as they are currently paid to surviving spouses.”

The 2003 consecration of an openly gay Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire brought long-simmering divisions over homosexuality within the Anglican Communion out into the open. Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, warned the Episcopal Church last month against consenting to the consecration of Mary Glasspool, a lesbian Maryland priest elected bishop suffragan by the Diocese of Los Angeles.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 3:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
        

An atheist group is objecting to coded references to New Testament passages that a Michigan manufacturer is inscribing on rifle sights it provides to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Trijicon has a $660 million contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marines, and other contracts with the Army. ABC News reported Monday that the manufacturer, founded by a Christian, had long marked its products with what ABC News called “secret ‘Jesus’ Bible codes:”

One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

Other references include citations from the books of Revelation, Matthew and John dealing with Jesus as "the light of the world." John 8:12, referred to on the gun sights as JN8:12, reads, "Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the sights sold to the U.S. military. Tom Munson, director of sales and marketing for Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan, said the inscriptions "have always been there" and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them. Munson said the issue was being raised by a group that is "not Christian." The company has said the practice began under its founder, Glyn Bindon, a devout Christian from South Africa who was killed in a 2003 plane crash.

American Atheists President Ed Buckner warned that Islamic extremists could take advantage of what he called "a major blunder that seriously risks efforts to reach out to people in Muslim countries threatened by groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda."

"Part of the U.S. message abroad should emphasize the core American value of secular government and respect for individual religious liberty – and instead the U.S. military is promoting Christianity, literally with the barrel of a gun. We call on President Barack Obama to repudiate this effort immediately."

Kathleen Johnson, Vice President and Military Director for American Atheists, said that the religious inscriptions "clearly violate the First Amendment and the U.S. Constitution, as well as armed forces regulations against promoting sectarian religion."

"We are not going to enjoy much success in trying to achieve 'nation building' and self-sufficiency for democratic governments in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan if our troops are seen as modern-day 'Crusaders' out to impose Christian fundamentalism," she said. "These rifle sights should be phased out of use as quickly as possible. The mission of the U.S. military cannot include proselytizing for Christianity or any other religion."

Army and Marine spokespersons told ABC News that their services were unaware of the markings. But Michael Weinstein, a former Air Force attorney now with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said that members of his group on active duty spoke of commanders who referred to weapons with the sights as “spiritually transformed firearms of Jesus Christ.”

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (28)
        

The Turk who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981 was released from prison on Monday after more than 29 years behind bars and proclaimed that he was a messenger of God and that the world will end in this century, the Associated Press reports.

Mehmet Ali Agca, 52, waved to journalists as he left the prison in a convoy of several vehicles, according to AP writer Suzan Fraser. Turkish authorities plan to monitor him closely because of long-standing questions about his mental health. Agca's hair was gray and he wore a blue sweatshirt.

Agca shot John Paul on May 13, 1981, as the pope rode in an open car in St. Peter's Square. The pontiff was hit in the abdomen, left hand and right arm, but the bullets missed vital organs. John Paul met with Agca in Italy's Rebibbia prison in 1983 and forgave him for the shooting.

Following his release, he sat calmly between two plainclothes policemen in the backseat of a sedan that took him to a military hospital. There, doctors concluded that he was unfit for compulsory military service because of "severe anti-social personality disorder," said his lawyer, Yilmaz Abosoglu.

In the statement distributed by Abosoglu outside the prison in Sincan on the outskirts of Ankara, the Turkish capital, Agca declared: "I proclaim the end of the world. All the world will be destroyed in this century. Every human being will die in this century."

He ended the long, rambling text by signing off as "the Christ eternal," in keeping with past outbursts and claims that he was the Messiah.

Read the rest of the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Three senior staff members of a Carroll County-based aid organization were pulled alive from the wreckage of their hotel in Haiti after spending more than 50 hours trapped in rubble, Baltimore Sun colleague Scott Calvert reports.

"We're ecstatic. That all of them were found alive in the rubble is just miraculous," Douglas Bright, vice president of IMA World Health in New Windsor, told Calvert. The story continues:

The three are IMA president Richard Santos, vice president of international programs Sarla Chand and IMA Haiti program manager Ann Varghese, who lives in Baltimore. When the earthquake struck Tuesday, the three had just concluded a meeting at the Hotel Montana in the capital Port-au-Prince. The hotel collapsed and IMA had received no word from its staff members.

Bright said he learned close to midnight Thursday that Santos and Chand had been found alive. Subsequent reports brought news that Varghese was safe. In addition, Bright said the people they were meeting with at the hotel, including a former IMA board member, were rescued.

ABC News reported that Santos and another victim rescued from Hotel Montana, Jim Gulley, pulled out the only snacks they had with them during the ordeal -- Orbitz gum and a Tootsie Roll lollipop.

Five Haitian employees of IMA were still missing, however, including a doctor who ran the organization's local office. None of the Haitian staff members attended the meeting; they worked out of a small building in Petionville outside the capital.

Read the rest of the story at baltimoresun.com.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Following are links to organizations that are accepting donations for relief of the people of Haiti after the earthquake Tuesday that has devastated the Caribbean nation of 9 million.

American Friends Service Committee

American Jewish World Service

American Red Cross

American Refugee Committee

CARE

Caritas

Catholic Relief Services

Doctors Without Borders

Episcopal Relief & Development

Habitat for Humanity

IMA World Health

International Committee of the Red Cross

International Orthodox Christian Charities

IMA World Health

International Relief and Development

International Rescue Committee

Islamic Relief Worldwide

Lutheran World Relief

Mercy Corps

Muslim Hands

Oxfam America

Presbyterian Disaster Assistance

Salvation Army

UNICEF

World Food Programme

World Relief

The organizations above are all well known, long established and reputable. Over at the Consuming Interests blog, Baltimore Sun colleague Andrea Walker writes of an FBI warning against fundraising scams.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)
        

Want to help with relief efforts in Haiti but not sure what to do? Want tips to avoid relief-effort scams? What is the best use of your time and resources? Want to discuss relief efforts or the disaster, in general? Join us on In Good Faith at 2 p.m., when we'll have guests including Doug Lent, a representative from the Central Maryland Chapter of the American Red Cross, to answer your questions.

Starting at 1:45 p.m., you can return to this post to enter the chat. You can also leave comments, questions and concerns ahead of time by leaving a comment on this post.

Posted by Carla Correa at 1:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)
Categories: International
        

The Rev. Jason Poling is pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville.

It’s been said that if you give an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters an infinite amount of time they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. Then again, this scenario may explain the genesis of the blogosphere.

There’s a basic principle to keeping blogs healthy: Don’t feed the trolls. Every blog has them, the people who delight in vituperative attacks on others (known as “flaming”), obnoxiously long screeds, and monopolizing the virtual conversation. But if you engage the actual content of his remarks, you will find yourself sucked into a black hole of back-and-forth posts involving bad logic, worse grammar and endless frustration. It’s a lot like arguing with a four-year-old: the minute you start, you’ve lost, because in doing so you have effectively declared that a rational adult ought to seriously debate the merits of sleeping under all of the blankets in the closet sorted first by color then by texture.

But there is a remedy: the universal shorthand “Dude, STFU” which translates to “Kindly be quiet.” This treatment, which only works if applied sparingly, essentially declares: “What you are saying makes absolutely no sense. Nothing good will come of discussing it with you. You’re annoying everyone on this blog. So cut it out.” Such an approach steadfastly and resolutely refuses to reason with the unreasonable, to join a battle of wits with the unarmed, to punch the tar baby.

Much the same principle applies to the outlying voices in our media landscape. There may have been some gaps in my seminary education, for I cannot begin to fathom how I might evaluate Pat Robertson’s claim that the entire nation of Haiti in the course of its battle for independence made a pact with the devil. What would be the text of such a pact? Would everyone in the nation need to agree to it? Every adult? A majority, or perhaps a super-majority? Would it need to be signed in blood? The mind boggles.

In much the same way, I have difficulty finding handles with which I might begin to grapple with other ideas promoted by Robertson: that Hurricane Katrina constituted an exercise of God’s wrath against New Orleans for its wickedness, or that 9/11 happened when God withdrew his protection from America when some obscure ACLU lawsuit was filed somewhere that morning and he decided he had simply had enough.

But I think maybe I’m not supposed to. That would be a relief, because I have absolutely no interest in feeding this troll. I don’t want to begin to engage his statements because I do not want to effectively declare that a rational adult ought to seriously debate whether a particular nation’s misfortunes derive from a binding contract with the Prince of Darkness executed over 200 years ago. I certainly do not want to engage these ideas when that nation’s capital lies in ruins with tens of thousands of its citizens, if not more, lying dead in the wake of a massive earthquake.

No, all I really want to say to Pat Robertson is, “Dude, STFU.”

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (128)
        

A high-level delegation of Roman Catholic bishops has criticized Israeli policies in Arab sectors of Jerusalem and called for more contacts between ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, the Associated Press reports.

The group says violence, insecurity, home demolitions, the route of Israel's West Bank separation barrier and other policies threaten peace prospects.

The group of eight bishops from North America and Europe issued a statement at the end of its annual visit on Thursday. It says Israel's policies also endanger the dwindling Christian presence in the Holy Land.

The bishops called for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel and said a lack of dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians undermines the hopes for peace.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Former Baltimore Sun religion writer John Rivera, now at Catholic Relief Services, passes along this note this morning from Karel Zelenka, CRS country representative for Haiti. The Baltimore based-organization has about 300 staff in the Caribbean nation, and is sending more specialists, supplies and money to respond to the earthquake.

We are all accounted for except for two staff. They are probably fine, but out of phone reach close to Gonaives. We have a terrible problem with communications – only incoming calls. We tried to organize this morning and contact UN, OFDA and Caritas. We might be running out of supplies ourselves – water and food. Holly [Inuretta, regional technical advisor for emergencies for Latin America and the Caribbean, who is traveling to Haiti from the Dominican Republic] should load a car with supplies. No organized rescue efforts yet – all done by individuals with bare hands. Damage incredible all around, but our offices seem fine. Some major buildings are gone – the hotel Montana, the National Palace etc. All AA flights canceled until this weekend. UN has only 4 helicopters, two were seen early this morning doing surveys, otherwise no movement of any rescue vehicles / people. Most in a shock. …On radio stations only wild music. People have been screaming and praying all over the place throughout the night. It is a disaster of the century, we should be prepared for thousands and thousands of dead and injured.

When I was covering the Caribbean from 2002 to 2005, Haiti was my favorite country to visit, for the people, the culture, the music, the art, the food -- it's a welcoming and fascinating place. I've been sending e-mail to check on friends and contacts.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Catholicism, Charity, International
        

Pope Benedict XVI has forgiven the woman who knocked him down at the beginning of the Christmas Eve Mass at St. Peter's Basilica, the Vatican announced Wednesday.

In a statememt, Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said the pope had a brief private audience with 25-year-old Susanna Maiolo and her family after his weekly general audience on Wednesday.

Lombardi said Maiolo "expressed her sorrrow for what happened" while the pope "wanted to show his forgiveness, and his friendly concern and good wishes for her health."

Maiolo climbed over a security barrier to reach Benedict as he entered St. Peter's Basilica Dec. 24 for the Christmas Eve Mass, and pulled the pope down as she was tackled by security. Benedict was unhurt, but a French cardinal fell and broke a hip in the fracas.

Maiolo, who reportedly has a history of mental problems, is being treated at a clinic outside Rome, the Associated Press reports. She attempted to accost Benedict at the Christmas Eve Mass in 2008 as well.

Lombardi said the Vatican continues to investigate the incident.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Pope Benedict XVI should be welcomed when he visits Rome's main synagogue, but he should halt moves to beatify wartime pontiff Pius XII, a former chief rabbi of Israel said Tuesday, the Associated Press reports.

Israel Meir Lau, a Holocaust survivor and now chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, said Benedict's synagogue visit Sunday would be "appreciated and blessed." But in an interview with Italy's Sky TG24 television, he said he was "surprised" by Benedict's decision last month to move the controversial World War II-era pope closer to sainthood.

Benedict sparked outrage among some Jewish groups by signing a decree on Pius' heroic virtues, paving the way for him to be beatified once a miracle attributed to his intercession is confirmed.

Some Jews and historians have argued that Pius, pope from 1939-1958, was largely silent on the Holocaust and should have done more to prevent the deaths of 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.

The Vatican insists Pius used quiet diplomacy to try to save Jews and that speaking out more forcefully would have resulted in more deaths.

It said last month the decree on his heroic virtues wasn't so much a historical assessment of his pontificate as a confirmation that he had led a deeply Christian life.

In the past, Jewish leaders had asked the pope to put the beatification on hold until archives on Pius' pontificate are opened to outside scholars. The Vatican has said those archives won't be catalogued and ready until 2014 at the earliest.

In the interview broadcast Tuesday, Lau said Benedict should halt the process for this generation, saying that beatifying Pius would offend Holocaust survivors.

Lau urged the pope "not to take the next step for the beatification of Pius XII, not in this generation," adding this would "hurt the feelings of those Holocaust survivors who are still alive."

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Shaukat Malik is a Muslim-American Certified Public Accountant from Potomac. A native of Pakistan, he arrived in the United States in 1980.

We cannot name one country with Islamic laws that is a functioning democracy or a benchmark for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness except Turkey.

Muslim majority countries such as Pakistan have a history of thousands of years of customs and folklore shared with India that already plays havoc with the largely uneducated population in the rural areas. Unofficial patriarchal village juries made up of illiterate villagers will hand out and execute primitive punishments along the lines of a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye. Add to this outdated Islamic laws and punishments for, for example, adultery, blasphemy and women’s rights and you have created a living hell for women and minorities.

Because of the Islamization in Pakistan, carried out behind the veil of training Mujahedeen to fight the Soviet infidel, Pakistan has a large number of Madrassas and religious charities that share and support Saudi Arabia’s brand of Orthodox Islam. This was on display during the Lal-Masjid standoff against the Pakistan army in July 2007. These Madrassas and charities openly support the Taliban and al Qaida. It is interesting to note that a majority of the terrorists in prison have received their training in Pakistan.

The recent unrest in Malaysia over the use of the name “Allah” by Christians when referring to God has more to do with fear over losing members of the congregation to the Christian church than to Muslim sensibilities. Separate Sharia laws for Muslims, who make up 60 percent of the population, could open doors for al Qaida types to make inroads into Malaysia’s Muslim population.

The conflict in interpretation between the bible and the Quran over the holy trinity and the oneness of God as stated in the Quran is exploited by Muslim clerics to foment prejudice against Christians. It is clearly stated in the Quran that there is no compulsion in religion and that there must be complete freedom of religion. Muslims Jews and Christians are all children of Abraham and people of the book. A believing Muslim must submit to the will of God. It is God’s will that decides our religion at birth.

Christians freely practiced their religion during Muslim rule in Jerusalem. Muslims have always respected freedom of religion. A bit of history will confirm this. After a brief and bloodless siege, Muslims seized control of Jerusalem from the Byzantines in February 638. Caliph Omar Ibn al-Khattab accepted the city's surrender from Patriarch Sophronius in person. Omar was shown the great Church of the Holy Sepulcher and offered a place to pray in it, but he refused. He knew that if he prayed in the church, it would set a precedent that would lead to the building's transformation into a mosque. He instead prayed on the steps outside, allowing the church to remain a Christian holy place.

Christians and Jews have used the name Allah to refer to God, especially in Arabia. When we say Allah we are referring to the same one God, notwithstanding the trinity of God argument put forward by Muslim clerics.
I quote from the Quran:

029.046
YUSUFALI: And dispute ye not with the People of the Book, except with means better (than mere disputation), unless it be with those of them who inflict wrong (and injury): but say, "We believe in the revelation which has come down to us and in that which came down to you; Our Allah and your Allah is one; and it is to Him we bow (in Islam)."
PICKTHAL: And argue not with the People of the Scripture unless it be in (a way) that is better, save with such of them as do wrong; and say: We believe in that which hath been revealed unto us and revealed unto you; our Allah and your Allah is One, and unto Him we surrender.
SHAKIR: And do not dispute with the followers of the Book except by what is best, except those of them who act unjustly, and say: We believe in that which has been revealed to us and revealed to you, and our Allah and your Allah is One, and to Him do we submit.

It is ridiculous for any Muslim to claim a certain name to God as exclusively theirs. The Muslim majority in Malaysia is using religion to subdue the Christian minority. One solution is to have universal laws for all citizens in Malaysia that confirms complete freedom of religion, and not separate Sharia laws for Muslims.

Imagine the United States or Europe without freedom of religion, and Christianity enforced by the state. I think the Muslims of Europe and the United States, with populations of 37 million and more than 6 million, respectively, would find life a living hell. The same is true for minorities living in Muslim majority countries where Sharia laws are part of the constitution and enforced by the state.

Incorporating religious laws in a country’s constitution, no matter what the religion, will generally lead to religious persecution of the minorities. By invoking religious laws when writing any state's constitution, we can never create a vibrant society or culture that is inclusive and welcoming to all.

In a theocratic state only one group of people, for example mullahs in Iran, will end up with complete and absolute control over everything. A theocratic state is a recipe for disaster. Iran and Saudi Arabia are basically fascist states. Either you are with the mullahs or they are against you. Oil-rich theocratic states like Saudi Arabia and Iran provide the funding and lifeline that all terrorist organizations need to foster their agenda of establishing a theocratic caliphate by uniting all Muslims under their banner.

A country with Islamic laws as part of its constitution can easily be transformed into a one-party dictatorship, as is the case in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Such is the power of religion that in Iran protesters against the current government for alleged election rigging publicly profess their allegiance to Imam Khomeni their supreme leader.

Theocratic states where religion becomes the rallying cry can easily lose rationality when faced with difficult decisions. Emotionalism and anger overrides all reasonable analysis and arguments. This is why we fear Iran’s nuclear bomb.

We should never forget that fifteen out of the nineteen 9/11 killers were from Saudi Arabia. This is a scary statistic. Osama Bin Laden is a product of Saudi Arabia’s theocratic dictatorship. He founded his al Qaida network after being deported from Saudi Arabia.

Islamic/Sharia laws are the rallying cry for extremists. In every Muslim country that has Islamic laws, extremists find it easy to organize, using the argument that the government of the day is not enforcing these laws in the true spirit of Islam.

The preamble to the al Qaida constitution can be interpreted as follows: “To set up a theocratic Muslim state with a Caliphate whose laws are based on the Sharia laws as stated in the Quran and unite the entire Muslim world under this state and to fight the infidels (read: Christians and Jews).”

Armed with this message, organizations like the Taliban and al Qaida can claim divine sanction from God to pursue their struggle. By labeling Israel and the West as enemies of Islam, they are able to easily recruit large numbers of fighters among economically disadvantaged populations in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world.

It is ironic that al Qaida and the Taliban, who share Saudi Arabia’s religious ideology and method of punishments, have fashioned their flags after that of Saudi Arabia. By doing this they are symbolically holding themselves out as the true guardians of Mecca, Medina and the Kabbah, which are currently under Saudi Arabia’s control. An average Muslim identifies Saudi Arabia and its flag with the annual pilgrimage of Hajj. Performing the Hajj is one of the pillars of Islam: “Every able-bodied Muslim is obliged to make the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime if he or she can afford it.”

An uneducated Muslim can be easily taken in by this symbolism.

The al Qaida murderers are very cunning when it comes to playing psychological wars. The flag bears a very important prayer or saying for Muslims:

"There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah."

This prayer or saying is uttered by Muslims when embracing Islam and also when carrying the body of the deceased for burial.

Similar Flags are used in the background of beheadings and news conferences of al Qaida and the Taliban. When masked al Qaida men cut off heads of hostages, they display this prayer on thier masks and also display it on the wall behind them. Display of this very important Islamic prayer is intended to insinuate a sanction from God for their Heinous and barbaric acts.

Sharia laws, like the Ten Commandments, are given to humanity by God in order to create a just and fair society. Every Muslim believes that God is all-knowing and all-powerful. God would never wish these laws to violate inherent rights that God has given to every human being, namely the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The holy Quran is intended to be for all times, and hence its guidelines as provided by God must be reevaluated and reinterpreted in the context of the times we are living in. One cannot freeze all laws in the context that existed during prophet’s life more than 1,400 years ago. If the Prophet Muhammad were alive today, he would no doubt have a website with an e-mail address!

Much of Sharia law is man’s interpretation of laws that were given to Prophet Mohammed in the holy Quran. Some of these laws were given in response to issues that confronted people living in Arabia 1,400 years ago. There were many orphans and widows after wars and laws with respect to polygamy, et cetera, responded to the situation on hand.

Crafty clerics using self-serving translations and made-up sayings of the prophet have sanctioned themselves up to four wives and convinced the women to go along with this practice They have event prescribed a dress code to restrict and control women.
They equate their act of marrying more than one to that of the holy prophet, conveniently forgetting that the Prophet Muhammad’s marriages were in the context of his role as God’s messenger on earth to spread the word of God and to form political alliances. In fact, the Quran clearly states that since it is impossible for any man to treat two women equally in his relationship with them, he should only marry one.

Punishments such as cutting of heads for murder, hands and limbs for theft, stoning for adultery, et cetera, are out of step with today’s world. If Islam is a religion for all times, then for it to be applicable and relevant as God’s word for a just and fair society, it must be adapted to modern times. A crime of adultery is not a crime against the state but against one’s immediate family, yet in some countries the punishment is stoning to death.

To facilitate this transition, what should be done?

The western media and press must present Muslims in a positive light by not referring to terrorists as Muslims or Islamist fascists. These people cannot call themselves Muslims by simply displaying banners and shouting slogans of “God is great” while cutting off heads and murdering people. This is tantamount to referring to Nazis in Germany as Christian Nazis. Why not just call them terrorists and subtract Muslim from their respective names? This should not be difficult.

Economic development and education programs must be instituted in Muslim-majority countries, and dictators and despots, who create the environment for extremist behavior, should be phased out through elections.

Relgious parties organized on the basis of religion that support terrorism must be treated as enemies of the state and disbanded. This step should be taken in every Muslim-majority country and will go a long way towards neutralizing extremist groups, especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Muslim-majority countries must break the linkage of Islamic or Sharia laws with terrorism by amending their constitutions and embracing complete freedom of religion along Turkish lines. This necessary act will deny the extremists and terrorists their reason for existing and over time marginalize them as nothing more than the thugs they are.

Pakistan must be encouraged to repeal its Hadood ordinance that clearly violates the rights of women and minorities and was cunningly imposed on the people of Pakistan through a fake referendum by a military dictator. Today, especially after all the murder and mayhem committed by the Taliban, Pakistan is ready for such a change. The Supreme Court of Pakistan should take a lead and remove these draconian laws from the statute.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference should adopt the Turkish model of moderate Islam that provides for freedom of religion as a benchmark for all its member states. The United Nations can support the OIC in this regard.

The constitution of most Muslim-majority countries contains a clause that no law shall be in violation of Islamic laws as laid down in the Quran, making Islamic laws superior to laws made by an act of parliament. This clause should be replaced by a statement that no law will be included in the constitution that violates the divine human rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness given to every human being by God, and that these rights include the freedoms of speech and religion. In summary, we are accepting that God’s law is supreme without the complications of confrontation.

We must educate our children in schools about the Muslim religion and its shared history and roots with Jews and Christians as children of Abraham. The fact that the Quran shares the prophets and stories with the Old and New testaments must be taught to schoolchildren to reduce prejudice, and vice-versa in Muslim majority countries.

There must be an international focus on education in Muslim majority countries to teach tolerance of other religions and shun extremists. Children must be taught that the Quran shares its stories and its prophets with the Old and New testaments and God’s will in determining someone’s faith. Islam’s overriding principle is to submit to the will of God.

The organization for Islamic countries must convince Saudi Arabia to embrace a moderate form of Islam, as has been in done in Turkey, that can then become a benchmark for the rest of the Muslim world.

The West and the United States must encourage Israel and the Palestinians to settle their dispute. Arab countries must accept the reality of Israel as God’s will and recognize Israel. In turn, Israel, by reaching a settlement with the Palestinians, can become an economic power in the Middle East and develop a large market for its goods and services. This will take away a major recruitment tool for religious extremists that have been successfully used in every Muslim majority country.

Iran has been around for thousands of years and is not going to go away. Iran’s largest trading partner is Europe, with over one-third of its exports going to Iran each year, in addition to its trade with China and Russia and Turkey. Sanctions against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons will not work. Israel should sit down with the Iranian leadership to iron out their disputes. Iran’s one-party system is under strain and will yield to international pressure for adopting a moderate brand of Islam. A moderate Iran with nuclear weapons – if we cannot stop them – is a safer bet then a theocratic Iran.

Islam does not ban family planning. Family planning must be encouraged to reduce childbirths among poor parents whose children end up becoming a burden on family and society. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, many of the Madrassa children are a product of poor family planning. Unwanted and surplus, many have ended up becoming human bombs after brainwashing by evil clerics. There is some merit in China’s one-child policy. Space on earth and resources are limited. It is simple commonsense.

Europe went through the Inquisition, and after centuries of persecution of millions learned to embrace complete freedom of religion. The word Muslim means “One who submits to God.” For Muslims everywhere, the simple message is to accept God’s decision as to why someone belongs to a certain religion or is an atheist and to accept them as God’s people.

Jews and Christians as people of the books should reciprocate this sentiment in equal measure.

The founders of this great country were blessed by God to come up with the idea of inherent rights for all human beings namely the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Muslim countries should look for guidelines provided by the U.S. Constitution that is indeed Sharia compliant and use it as a template for their respective constitutions and defeat terrorists with the power of the written word.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)
        

Miep Gies, the office secretary who defied Nazi occupiers to hide Anne Frank and her family for two years and saved the teenager's diary not, has died, the Associated Press reports. She was 100.

Gies' Web site reported that she died Monday after a brief illness, according to the AP. The report was confirmed by museum spokeswoman Maatje Mostar, but she gave no details. The British Broadcasting Corp. said she died in a nursing home after suffering a fall last month.

Gies was the last of the few non-Jews who supplied food, books and good cheer to the secret annex behind the canal warehouse where Anne, her parents, sister and four other Jews hid for 25 months during World War II.

After the apartment was raided by the German police, Gies gathered up Anne's scattered notebooks and papers and locked them in a drawer for her return after the war. The diary, which Anne Frank was given on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life in hiding from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944.

Gies refused to read the papers, saying even a teenager's privacy was sacred. Later, she said if she had read them she would have had to burn them because they incriminated the "helpers."

Anne Frank died of typhus at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, just two weeks before the camp was liberated. Gies gave the diary to Anne's father Otto, the only survivor, who published it in 1947.

After the diary was published, Gies tirelessly promoted causes of tolerance. She brushed aside the accolades for helping hide the Frank family as more than she deserved — as if, she said, she had tried to save all the Jews of occupied Holland.

"This is very unfair. So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work," she wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press days before her 100th birthday last February.

Read the rest of the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

Faith leaders and local officials are planning to call for “rapid reform of the broken immigration system” Tuesday in Baltimore as Congress returns to Washington, Casa de Maryland’s Tania Del Angel tells us.

Expected at the 1 p.m. event at the St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Church are representatives of the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s Immigration Coalition, the Central Maryland Ecumenical Council, CASA de Maryland, the Baltimore City Council and the Baltimore Hispanic Commission. The event is to be followed by similar events in Washington and Virginia.

“People in our parishes, in our city, and in the broader Maryland community are suffering the ravages of a broken immigration system,” The Rev. Richard T. Lawrence, pastor of St. Vincent de Paul, said in a statement. “Families in crisis affect the fabric of an entire community and we call on legislators to meet this crisis head-on with reform!”

Lawrence’s church was chosen for its history. The oldest continuously operating parish church in Baltimore, it was founded by Irish immigrants in the 1840s and has served subsequent waves of immigrants from Italy, Poland and all over the world.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
        

Over at The Baltimore Jewish Times, executive editor Phil Jacobs has written a nice remembrance of Rabbi Murray Saltzman.

The longtime senior rabbi of Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, a civil rights marcher alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who became a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, died last week at 80.

Jacobs writes:

For Jewish Times staff, he was more often than not our go to rabbi when questions came up of ethics, social justice or even for perspective on how government sometimes interacts with of Judaism.

He was on our speed dial for spiritual, social and ethical direction and comment.

There was always time to stop in his Park Heights Avenue office, take a break from the craziness of a day, and go away with knowledge and perspective.
They just don’t make many Rabbi Saltzmans any longer.

President Gerald R. Ford appointed him to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In 1983, he was fired from that commission for speaking out against President Ronald Reagan’s administration’s civil rights policies.

It is no irony that Baltimore Hebrew Congregation is the place where in recent memory, Orthodox and Reform teens have come together to discuss their differences and similarities. It’s no irony that Baltimore Hebrew opened itself up to people of color to worship, to congregants of diversity to worship.

It’s all no coincidence.

It is the legacy of a great man, Rabbi Murray Saltzman.

Read the rest at jewishtimes.com.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Pope Benedict XVI denounced the failure of world leaders to agree to a new climate change treaty in Copenhagen last month, saying Monday that world peace depends on safeguarding God's creation, the Associated Press reports.

He issued the admonition in a speech to ambassadors accredited to the Vatican, an annual appointment during which the pontiff reflects on issues the Vatican wants to highlight to the diplomatic corps, AP reporter Nicole Winfield writes.

Benedict has been dubbed the "green pope" for his increasingly vocal concern about protect the environment, an issue he has reflected on in encyclicals, during foreign trips and most recently in his annual peace message. Under Benedict's watch, the Vatican has installed photovoltaic cells on its main auditorium to convert sunlight into electricity and has joined a reforestation project aimed at offsetting its CO2 emissions.

For the pontiff, it's a moral issue: Church teaching holds that man must respect creation because it's destined for the benefit of humanity's future.

In his speech, the pontiff criticized the "economic and political resistance" to fighting environmental degradation that was exemplified in the negotiations to draft a new climate treaty at last month's summit in Copenhagen.

Officials from 193 countries met at the summit, which ended Dec. 19 having failed to produce a successor treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. It produced instead a nonbinding accord that included few concrete steps to combat global warming.

The Copenhagen summit did set up the first significant program of ensuring aid to help poorer nations cope with the effects of a changing climate. But while the accord urged deeper cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming, it did nothing to demand them.

"I trust that in the course of this year ... it will be possible to reach an agreement for effectively dealing with this question," Benedict said.

Read the rest of the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Catholicism, International, People, Politics
        

Members of a Virginia church are the latest to vote to leave the country's largest Lutheran denomination over its policy to allow gay clergy, the Associated Press reports.

The Rev. Mark Graham, pastor of St. John Lutheran in Roanoke, told the AP that church members voted 350-104 Sunday to break away from the national Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Church rules required a two-thirds majority for reaffiliation.

The votes comes after ELCA delegates lifted a ban last year that had prohibited sexually active gay and lesbian pastors from serving as clergy. The new policy, expected to take effect in April, will allow such individuals to lead ELCA churches as long as they can show that they are in committed, lifelong relationships.

Sunday's vote affirmed a ballot held in September that called for St. John to join the smaller Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ, the AP reports.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)
        

The Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore has removed a Laurel pastor from ministry while it investigates allegations against him of sexual misconduct during the 1980s, the archdiocese said on Sunday.

The Rev. John Wielebski, 62, pastor at Resurrection of Our Lord Church, has denied all of the allegations, the archdiocese said. The archdiocese revoked his faculties to function as a priest in December.

The misconduct is alleged to have occurred while Wielebski at St. Dominic Church in Baltimore, where he was assigned from 1985 to 1988, and Monsignor Clare J. O’Dwyer Retreat House in Sparks, where he was assigned from 1988 to 1991.

The archdiocese was investigating an allegation Wielebski had sexually abused a minor when it learned of additional allegations of sexual misconduct involving two young men, the archdiocese said.

The archdiocese said it had been cooperating with civil authorities. As part of that cooperation, the archdiocese said, it had delayed disclosing the allegations until Sunday, when representatives of the archdiocese met with parishioners and staff at Resurrection of Our Lord Church to inform them of the allegations and to answer questions.

Ordained a priest of the Order of the Most Holy Trinity in 1978, Wielebski joined the Archdiocese of Baltimore in 1988. He had been assigned to Resurrection of Our Lord since 1999.

In addition to Resurrection of Our Lord, St. Dominic and the O’Dwyer retreat house, he worked at St. Patrick in Cumberland from 1991 to 1996 and at Sacred Heart in Glyndon from 1996 to 1999.

Before joining the archdiocese, Wielebski was assigned to Holy Trinity Monastery in Pikesville from 1981 to 1983, Redeemer House Shelter in Baltimore from 1983 to 1984, and St. Bernard in Baltimore from 1984 to 1985. He was an intern at Sacred Heart in Glyndon from 1974 to 1978.

The archdiocese said it was working with the parish and staff at Resurrection of Our Lord to provide pastoral care, and counseling assistance had been offered to all those affected.

The archdiocese urged anyone with knowledge of child sexual abuse to report it immediately to civil authorities. If clergy or other church personnel are suspected, the archdiocese asked that they also call the archdiocesan Office of Child and Youth Protection at 1-866-417-7469.

The archdiocese asked anyone with information relevant to Wielebski to call the Office of Child and Youth Protection at 410-547-5599.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 7:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (44)
        

Firebombs were thrown at two more churches in Malaysia early Sunday and another church was splashed with black paint, the latest in a series of assaults on Christian houses of worship following a court decision allowing non-Muslims to use "Allah" to refer to God, the Associated Press reports.

Hundreds of worshippers whose parish church was partly gutted in a firebomb attack last week gathered at a makeshift prayer hall for their Sunday service and called for national unity and an end to violence, AP reporter Eileen Ng writes.

On Sunday, a Molotov cocktail was hurled at the All Saints Church in Taiping town in central Perak state early in the morning before it had opened, said state police chief Zulkifli Abdullah. He told the AP that the building was not damaged but police found burn marks on the wall.

A broken kerosene bottle with an unlit wick was found early Sunday inside the compound of the St. Louis Catholic church, also in Taiping, said the Rev. David Lourdes. He said it appeared to be a failed attack.

In southern Malacca state, the outer wall of the Malacca Baptist Church was splashed with black paint, police said.

Four other churches were hit by gasoline bombs on Friday and Saturday. All except the Metro Tabernacle, whose parishioners moved their services, suffered little damage, and no one was hurt. The other three held normal services Sunday.

The unprecedented attacks have set off a wave of disquiet among Malaysia's minority Christians and strained their ties with the majority Malay Muslims.

The dispute is over a Dec. 31 High Court decision that overturned a government order banning non-Muslims from using the word "Allah" in their prayers and literature. The court was ruling on a petition by Malaysia's Roman Catholic Church, whose main publication, the Herald, uses the word "Allah" in its Malay-language edition. The government has appealed the verdict.

About 9 percent of Malaysia's 28 million people are Christian, most of whom are ethnic Chinese or Indian. Muslims make 60 percent of the population and most of them are ethnic Malays.

On Sunday, men, women and children from the Metro Tabernacle parish assembled in the cavernous, 1,800-seat meeting hall of the Malaysian Chinese Association party for the service. They lifted their hands and sang "We put all our faith in you," and "You are the God of love and peace" during the Sunday service.

"My wife was worried, but we want to be here to support the church," said Michael Chew, 40, who came to the service with two children, aged 1 and 6.

The service was in English, as are most Christian services in mainland Malaysia, though some are in Chinese and Tamil languages. Such services do not use the word "Allah." Only the Malay-language prayers for indigenous tribespeople in the remote states of Sabah and Sarawak use "Allah," as they have for decades.

Rev. Hermen Shastri, general secretary of the Council of Churches of Malaysia, said Christians won't be intimidated by the attacks, describing them as the work of extremist minority among Muslims.

"What is clear is that it is done by extremist groups. It does not reflect the majority Muslims in the country. We all have to stand together to stamp out terror perpetuated by these extremist groups," he said.

The government contends that making Allah synonymous with God may confuse Muslims and ultimately mislead them into converting to Christianity.

Still, government leaders and many Muslims have condemned the firebombings, saying it is un-Islamic to attack places of worship.

Prime Minister Najib Razak visited the Metro Tabernacle church late Saturday and announced a grant of 500,000 ringgit ($147,000) for rebuilding it at a new location, a major concession in a country where permission is rarely given for building new churches or temples.

The Allah ban is unusual in the Muslim world. The Arabic word is commonly used by Christians to describe God in such countries as Egypt, Syria and Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

The gunman who shot and wounded Pope John Paul II says he will begin considering book, film and television documentary offers after his release from a Turkish prison later this month, the Associated Press reports.

Mehmet Ali Agca said in a statement to the AP that he would like to travel to the Vatican and meet Pope Benedict XVI, though he has not yet set a date for the visit.

His written response to questions was relayed to the AP by his lawyer Saturday.

Agca shot John Paul in St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981. The pope met with Agca in an Italian prison in 1983 and forgave him.

Agca served 19 years in an Italian prison for the attack and is nearing the end of a 10-year sentence for killing a Turkish journalist in 1979. He will be released Jan. 18.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

With an abortion rights supporter in the White House, the March for Life is planning to add Lafayette Park to its itinerary for the 37th annual event this month.

Organizers of the March for Life, which annually draws at least tens of thousands of demonstrators to the National Mall on the anniversary of 1973 Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade, say they have secured a permit for 3,000 marchers for a first-ever flashlight vigil in the park across the street from the White House on the evening before the main event Jan. 22.

“Because the March for Life … is on the Mall at a long distance from the White House, it is necessary to bring the Life Principles to the President of the United States,” reads the agenda for this year’s event.

The main event remains the march itself, during which participants are encouraged to visit their congressmen and senators. The March for Life Fund, meanwhile, will send letters describing the Life Principles to Obama, the chief justice and associate justices of the Supreme Court, and every member of the House and Senate.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
        

Efforts by a Rockville man to get President Obama and Rush Limbaugh have caught the attention of the conservative radio personality.

Rocky Twyman, founder of the Pray at the Pump Movement, a band of "prayer warriors" who traveled the country a couple of years ago to beseech God to bring down the cost of gasoline, had called on the vacationing Obama to visit Limbaugh in the Honolulu hospital to which he was admitted after experiencing chest pains.

On his show Thursday, Limbaugh played a clip of Twyman describing his desire for an Obama-Limbaugh meeting, and then expressed relief it didn’t happen.

Now, it's interesting that this guy says he hoped Obama showed up at the hospital to say hello. I've gotta tell you something, folks. I wasn't even gonna mention this. I'm a little queasy about mentioning it now. But I was hoping he wouldn't. I had as much stress over that as I had over trying to figure out what the chest pains were, 'cause I kept expecting the door of the hospital room to open and the Secret Service guy to come in and say, "The president would like to come in and say hi." And you can't turn that down. Kathryn [Rogers, Limbaugh’s fiancée] said, "Don't worry, that's never going to happen." And then a male nurse came in and started joking, unknowing that I was even thinking that, his name is Ray I think and he said, "By the way, a couple Secret Service agents are out there surveying the place, looks like Obama might want to come by for lunch." I said, "Oh no! No, no, no." And he started laughing. He was just kidding. Can you imagine if that had happened?

Can you imagine if that had happened? I might have had a real heart attack. Kathryn said, "Don't worry, that's not going to happen. They're not going to come over here, not going to act like you even exist, they won't do that." But here's Rocky Twyman out there actually suggesting that President Obama and I stop fighting. Not President Obama and the Republicans, not President Obama and Mitch McConnell or President Obama and John Boehner. No. President Obama and Rush Limbaugh.

I had an enjoyable breakfast with Twyman Friday morning. The 61-year-old Seventh-day Adventist expressed disappointment at Obama for missing what he said would have been “a truly great teachable moment” and at Limbaugh for speaking so dismissively of the idea.

In a statement, he said the “prayer warriors” of the Pray at the Pump Movement “firmly believe in the text of the Bible that calls upon us to love our enemies.”

If Obama had only been able to drop some of his political pride and follow the example of the Bible, we might have been able to usher in a true spirit of bi-partisanship as we start 2010. When people have ailments like Limbaugh, they need to feel compassion and PAPM thinks that health of a person should transcend all the party infighting. …

PAPM believes that the fighting between these two powerful men who influence Americans is greatly hindering progressive legislation from passing the Congress. Making peace and showing compassion for Limbaugh's health might have aided in the passage of the controversial healthcare bill. The Bible says a soft answer turns away wrath.

Twyman said he was planning an ecumenical prayer service to ask for an end to the animosities between Obama and Limbaugh “so that we can start a glorious revolution of peace in our lifetime.”

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (38)
        

More than 1,000 unreleased recordings of lectures by L. Ron Hubbard and reams of corresponding writings have been unveiled in the culmination of a 25-year project to locate, restore and transcribe lost pieces of the Scientology founder's work, the Associated Press reports.

Though sure to be derided by the church's many critics, AP writer Matt Sedensky writes, its followers say the materials amount to an opportunity to deepen understanding of the religion and to release the last known unpublished Hubbard works dealing with Scientology and Dianetics.

"It would be like discovering that Buddha, unbeknownst to anybody, had sat down and wrote down the entirety of his discoveries and it could be verified that he wrote it," Tommy Davis, the church's top spokesman, told Sedensky.

The new materials were announced in a New Year's celebration at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles that was broadcast to churches around the world last week and include 1,020 lectures and hundreds of corresponding booklets from courses and other sessions with Scientology ministers from 1953 to 1961. They include discussions of how Hubbard arrived at the principles of Dianetics and his research on everything from decision-making to personal responsibility.

They were recovered through a painstaking hunt that led members to find tapes and papers in a basement in Wichita, Kan., a storage trailer in Phoenix, and a garage in Oakland, Calif., among other places. Some of the materials were believed to have been lost.

"We've been able to restore lectures we literally never thought would be heard again," Davis said.

The release marks the third and final batch of Hubbard works to be distributed as part of the decades-long project initiated by Hubbard himself but carried out after his 1986 death by the church's current leader, David Miscavige. Releases in 2005 and 2007 included updated versions of 18 basic Scientology books to correct transcriptional errors, as well as hundreds of other lectures given by Hubbard.

"It's so huge for our religion having these materials. It's really a renaissance," said Davis. "It's as if it's a rediscovery of our own scriptures and what they hold and what they mean."

All the materials -- contained on 970 compact discs and corresponding booklets in 57 binders -- are being shipped out of a Los Angeles warehouse to Scientology churches worldwide. Unlike writings related to upper-level coursework, they are not considered confidential; they are available to those outside the church and members of all levels.

They're also available for sale to members for about $7,500, a price likely to raise some eyebrows, though the church insists no one will be denied access to the materials simply because they don't have the money.

Read the rest of the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

Attackers fire-bombed a Malaysian church and tried to set another ablaze Friday amid a growing conflict over the use of the word "Allah" by non-Muslims, the Associated Press reports.

The attacks sharply escalated tensions in the Muslim-majority country ahead of planned protests later Friday against a Kuala Lumpur High Court verdict which struck down a 3-year-old ban on non-Muslims using "Allah" in their literature, according to the AP.

The Dec. 31 court decision incensed many Muslims, who see it as a threat to their religion. Hateful comments and threats against Christians have been posted widely on the Internet, but this is the first time the controversy has turned destructive.

The ruling was on a petition by the Herald, the main publication of Malaysia's Roman Catholic Church, which uses the word Allah in its Malay-language edition.

Only the first floor office in the three-story Metro Tabernacle Church was destroyed in the pre-dawn blaze, said Kevin Ang, a spokesman for the Protestant church. The worship areas on the upper two floors were undamaged and there were no injuries.

He quoted a witness as saying she saw three or four men on a motorcycle break the main glass front of the church and throw a gasoline bomb inside. The church occupies a corner plot in a row of shops in Desa Melawati, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur.

Separately, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the compound of a Roman Catholic church before dawn Friday but caused no damage or injuries, said the Rev. Lawrence Andrew, the editor of the Herald.

Andrew said most churches have employed extra security guards amid the protest threats. "Most churches are taking precautions. They are aware it may just blow up," he said.

The government has appealed the court verdict and the High Court has suspended its decision's implementation until the appeal is heard.

Muslims argue that "Allah" is exclusive to Islam, and its use by Christians would confuse Muslims and tempt them to convert to Christianity.

Kuala Lumpur police Chief Mohamad Sabtu Osman told The Associated Press that it was premature to link the attacks on the churches to the protests over the lifting of the Allah ban.

"We are still investigating," he said. He also urged Muslims not to participate in the planned protests, adding that police would be stationed at mosques to monitor the situation.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Pope Benedict XVI kissed babies and shook the outstretched hands of faithful in St. Peter's Basilica as he walked up an aisle widened for security following the Christmas Eve scare when a woman scrambled over a barrier and knocked him down, the Associated Press reports.

Benedict celebrated Mass to mark Epiphany, the Jan. 6 holy day commonly referred to as the feast of the Three Kings, or Magi, during the last main public ceremony of the Vatican's holiday season.

As the pope, wearing gold colored vestments, a long, lacy cassock and red shoes, made his way to the main altar, he strode up the central aisle, widened by about 1.5 meters (5 feet) as part of heightened security precautions that were put in place after a young woman climbed over a barrier during his entrance procession on the night of Dec. 24, when the basilica was packed with thousands of people for Christmas Eve Mass.

The woman, who has a history of psychological problems, grabbed the pope's vestments, pulling him down to the marble floor. The 82-year-old pope was shaken but unhurt. An elderly French cardinal who fell during the commotion broke his hip. The Italian-Swiss woman is being treated at a psychiatric clinic near Rome while the Vatican investigates.

The extra space in the aisle was achieved by pushing back the red-curtained barriers at the ends of the rows where the faithful sit by about 30 inches (75 centimeters) on either side. The measure gives pope's security detail more space to maneuver.

But while the measure widens the gap between the pontiff and the public, Benedict seemed determined to give his flock the message that he intends to keep in contact with them.

Arriving and leaving the basilica, he moved to the left and right of the aisle to shake some of the many outstretched hands. At one point he patted a baby on the head, then kissed the infant and the hand of the woman holding the child.

Benedict smiled broadly as he moved his hand in blessing or waved to the faithful, who pass through metal detectors before attending public ceremonies at the Vatican.

During the Mass, a long line of faithful came up to the pope and kneeled before him to receive the Communion wafer. They could only approach the central altar after security personnel let them pass.

Read the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
        

A decades-long dispute between Hare Krishnas and the Los Angeles International Airport over soliciting donations appears to be nearing a resolution, as the California Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday over whether the airport is a public place, the Associated Press reports.

The International Society for Krishna Consciousness of California argues that the airport is much like a public park, and should therefore be open to solicitors.

California's other major airports are supporting Los Angeles' position that airports are private property. Such a finding would support a ban on solicitations, which airport officials say are security risks and impede travelers.

The Hare Krishna group sued in 1997, but the case goes back to 1974 when the religious organization first began soliciting donations at the airport commonly referred to as LAX.

Since then, airport officials complain that numerous other groups and individuals have flocked to LAX to solicit donations.

The Los Angeles City Council passed a law in 1997 prohibiting the receiving of donations at the city-owned airport. The council later changed the law to allow solicitations in designated areas until the initial federal lawsuit was filed.

Lawyers for the city argue that they always had the right to prohibit such behavior but their authority increased even more after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when airports were required to tighten security.

In 2006, a federal trial judge in Los Angeles sided with the city, finding that the airport is a "nonpublic" forum.

The religious group appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which referred the case to the state Supreme Court to determine whether the airport is private or public property.

If the state Supreme Court decides that the airport is public property, Los Angeles city officials will have to overcome a bigger legal hurdle to enforce the prohibition.

The state Supreme Court is expected to rule within 90 days.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
        

Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien, spiritual leader of the area's half million Catholics, has issued a statement on the plea agreement and pending resignation of Mayor Shelia Dixon:

"The news of Mayor Dixon’s plea in court today and her decision to resign as Mayor of Baltimore is sad news for the mayor, her family and for our entire city," he said. "I would ask the Catholic community in Baltimore City and throughout this historic Archdiocese to pray for the mayor and her family at this difficult time, as well as for City Council President Rawlings-Blake, and to unite in prayer with our sisters and brothers from other faith families for the good of our beloved city."

While the Archdiocese of Baltimore works with the city on several efforts, O'Brien has been at odds with both Dixon and Rawlings-Blake over the new city ordinance that requires faith-based crisis pregnancy centers to post signs making clear that they don't provide referrals for abortion or birth control.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

I’ve had an interest in Voodoo dating back to my first-ever (college) newspaper interview, which was with Wade Davis, the Harvard ethnobotanist who explored pharmalogical bases for many of its claims, and continuing through my time in the Caribbean and travels in Latin America, where Voodoo and its cousins, Santería and Obeah, are commonly practiced.

A common complaint among adherents to the three religions, all of which combine elements of West African beliefs with Roman Catholicism, is their association in American popular culture with evil – a tradition, the University of Miami religion scholar Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado writes at religiondispatches.org, that continues in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog:

I do not know where to begin my comments on how this film perpetuates offensive stereotypes about Voodoo. The loas are represented as evil spirits full of greed and anger. The masks themselves are vengeful, and end up killing Dr. Facilier when, in inevitable Disney fashion, his evil plan fails. This climax occurs, of course, in a graveyard, reaffirming the film’s association of Voodoo with death.

The African style of the masks connects their sinister nature with African religion. Dr. Facilier is often presented with his shadow, who moves independently and manipulates human actions. His big song, “Friends on the Other Side,” emphasizes his connection to the spirits. The “fairy godmother” is Mama Odie, a “good” Voodoo priestess who makes two brief appearances and is not in any way associated with spirits or masks. Both the good and evil sorcerers are associated with snakes. Two snakes wrap around Prince Naveen in order to turn him into a frog and Madame Odie has a snake as her mascot. The use of blood is prominent in the film. Dr. Facilier needs the prince’s blood and keeps it in a smaller African mask. This is hung around the servant’s neck in order for him to maintain the physical appearance of the prince.

The terms Voodoo, Hoodoo, and conjuring are used interchangeably throughout. In the end one is presented with an evil religion that will ultimately fail.

I did not expect critical race analysis or a sophisticated presentation of Voodoo when I walked into the theater. It is, after all, Disney. I did not expect such a blatant, racist, and misinformed presentation of Voodoo, however. The reduction of religion to magic is also reaffirmed in the curious absence of Catholicism in the film. My son is correct, Disney Voodoo is bad magic; it just doesn’t have anything to do with the authentic African Diaspora religion.

Read the rest of the piece at religiondispatches.org.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 6:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

The 89-year-old man charged with the deadly shooting at Washington's Holocaust museum last June has died, the Associated Press is reporting.

At Butner federal prison in North Carolina, spokeswoman Denise Simmons announced that James von Brunn died shortly before 1 p.m. Wednesday.

Simmons said the suspect had "a long history of poor health which included chronic congestive heart failure and sepsis." She said he was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Von Brunn's lawyer, A.J. Kramer, called the death "a sad end to a tragic situation," but declined further comment.

The elderly suspect had been awaiting trial for the killing of security guard Stephen T. Johns at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on June 10. Von Brunn had been wounded by return fire.

Officials at the prison hospital had previously said chronic medical problems had complicated a psychiatric evaluation for the suspect, a white supremacist who prior to the shooting had written racist and anti-Semitic screeds on the Internet.

One of the two guards who fired back at von Brunn said he had mixed feelings about his death.

"I'm shocked. I'm glad he's gone. I wish he had his day in court but it'll never come," said Harry Weeks of White Plains, Md.

Weeks returned to work in August and said he thinks often about his slain colleague.

"He was a good man. There's not a day that goes by that I don't miss him," he said of Johns. "It's been very hard, there's not a day that I don't think about him when I'm on post."

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

The American Astronomical Society this week honored Baltimore native George V. Coyne, the retired former director of the Vatican Observatory and a Jesuit priest, for his work in establishing a summer school for young astronomers and promoting discussions on faith and science, Catholic News Service reports.

Coyne, 76, received the George Van Biesbroeck Prize at the opening of the society’s 215th general meeting Monday in Washington. As The Catholic Review notes, Coyne graduated from Loyola High School in 1951 and was ordained at the now-defunct Woodstock College, then located in Howard County.

In presenting the honor, Catholic News Service reports society president John Huchra cited Father Coyne’s work with the Vatican Observatory Summer School, which brings 25 graduate students to the observatory’s headquarters in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, every two years for a month of intensive research.

“The prize means a lot to me personally,” Father Coyne told Catholic News Service. “It recognizes the Vatican Observatory as a research institute.”

Read the rest of the Catholic News Service story at catholicreview.org.

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Brit Hume says reactions have been mixed since he stunned his fellow Fox News Sunday panelists when he recommended that Tiger Woods address his current woes by converting to Christianity (and suggesting in the process that Buddhism was inadequate to the task).

While Washington Post television writer Tom Shales recommended Tuesday that the Fox News personality apologize, Hume has declined to back down. He spoke at length on the subject – and more explicitly – Monday on the O’Reilly Factor.

O’Reilly began by asking whether Hume was proselytizing. Hume's response:

I don't think so. I mean, look, Tiger Woods is somebody I've always rooted for as a golfer and as a man. I greatly admired him over the years, and I always have said to people it was the content of his character that made him, beyond his extraordinary golf skills, so admirable.

Now we know that the content of his character was not what we thought it was. He is paying a frightful price for these revelations. I – my sense is that he has basically lost his family, and there's a lot of talk about the endorsements he's lost. But that pales, I suspect, in his mind, with what he's lost otherwise.

And my sense about Tiger is that he needs something that Christianity, especially provides and gives and offers. And that is redemption and forgiveness.

And I was – I was really meaning to say in those comments yesterday more about Christianity than I was about anything else. I mentioned the Buddhism only because his mother is a Buddhist and he has apparently said that he is a Buddhist. I'm not sure how seriously he practices that.

But I think – I think that the – Jesus Christ offers Tiger Woods something that Tiger Woods badly needs.

Hume described the feedback he has received since the segment aired.

I got some letters and e-mails from people who were like me, who are believers who said, "Great. Right on. Right on. Way to go."

I've heard a lot of terrible comments from people who claim that I was a pompous jerk who had no business mouthing off on the subject and that I shouldn't have belittled the Buddhist faith and so on. I really wasn't trying to belittle and demean. …

It has always been a puzzling thing to me. The Bible even speaks of it, that, you know, you speak the name, "Jesus Christ," and I don't – and I don't mean to make a pun here, but all hell breaks loose. And – and it has always been thus. It is explosive.

I didn't even say the name in that way. I simply spoke of the Christian faith. But that was enough to trigger this reaction. It triggers a very powerful reaction in people who do not share the faith and who do not believe in it.

On Fox News Sunday, Hume said he didn’t think Buddhism “offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith.” Shale devoted a column on Tuesday to Hume’s comments.

"It sounded a little like one of those Verizon vs. AT&T commercials – our brand is better than your brand – except that Hume was comparing two of the world's great religions, not a couple of greedy communications conglomerates," Shales writes. "Further, is it really his job to run around trying to drum up new business? He doesn't really have the authority, does he, unless one believes that every Christian by mandate must proselytize?"

Shales notes that Hume embraced the faith after the 1998 suicide of his son.

It would be indefensibly insensitive to mock Hume for his beliefs, especially considering the way he came to them, but that still doesn't mean one must cheer him on as he tries to turn a bully pulpit into a pulpit, period.

In a way that many others had spoken of this particular faith, Hume seemed so bolstered by Christianity that he just had to go tell it on the mountain. And the golf course. And Fox news-talk shows.

Shales concluded with some advice for Hume.

First off, apologize. You gotta. Just say you are a man who is comfortable with his faith, so comfortable that sometimes he gets a wee bit carried away with it. If Hume wants to do the satellite-age equivalent of going door-to-door and spreading what he considers the gospel, he should do it on his own time, not try to cross-pollinate religion and journalism and use Fox facilities to do it.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (69)
        

Over at Religion Dispatches, Austin Dacey has an interesting rumination on the death of an Atheist.

At the funeral of Herbert “Sibanye” Crimes, Dacey, a fellow nonbeliever, felt compelled to point out that according to his friend’s beliefs, he had not gone on to “a better place.”

“The person I knew and admired, having had no hope for a life hereafter, devoted most of this life’s energies to making this world that better place,” Dacey writes. He goes on:

Believers in the beyond often ask unbelievers how they can accept the prospect that death is the end. Some even confess they are motivated to believe by their wish to vanquish the grave. It is true that the atheist has nowhere to go in death but to the “mankind making/Bird beast and flower/Fathering and all humbling darkness,” as Dylan Thomas puts it in his astonishing poem to end all eulogies, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, Of a Child in London.”

This non-destination makes every death an infinitely greater loss, and makes unmitigated grief the only appropriate response. In this, only the secular way of death fully honors the dead, where “better place” platitudes betray him. Thomas’ paradoxically titled “Refusal to Mourn” is in fact the refusal to mitigate grief, to paper over the universe’s forever-loss of singular person in guaze-promises of eternity: “I shall not murder/The mankind of her going with a grave truth.”

Yes, dying may be harder for the atheist. But what I cannot understand, and reject totally, is the further claim that the life stopped short of eternity is thereby robbed of sense or worth: If it all comes to an end, what’s it all for? The first thing to observe about this existential anxiety is that we can’t resolve it just by postulating an eternal afterlife. Consider the sorts of good things that might possibly await us in paradise: knowing and loving other persons (including God), being known and loved, apprehending truth, experiencing beauty (and, in the afterlife of some, fine food, drink, and other sensual delights). These goods worth wanting in the next world are goods that we already have in this one—things like love, knowledge, beauty, and pleasure (even praising an Almighty!). If a life there is worth having, then a life here is worth having. Every treasure laid up in heaven has been stolen from earth, and the joys of paradise are parasitic on the joys of the world.

Yes, having more joy is better than having less, all else being equal. And that is why death is a loss. It takes away the possibility of participating in any goods whatever. But that is not the same as showing them to have never been goods at all. When our participation in a good is cut short, we may wish it could go on, but the wishing is a sign that it was worth pursuing after all. The recognition that we missed out on some of its value is evidence that the value did not lose all of its sense.

Read the complete piece at religiondispatches.org.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 1:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)
        

The government of Malaysia is fighting a court ruling that allowed non-Muslims to use the word Allah to refer to God, a decision that triggered protests in the Muslim-majority country, the Associated Press reports.

In an appeal filed Monday, the government says “Allah” is an Islamic word and implies that its use by others could be used to convert Muslims to other religions. “Allah,” an Arabic word, predates Islam and is used by Arabic-speaking Christians in places such as Egypt and Syria.

The Malaysian High Court ruled last month that a newspaper published by the Catholic Archdiocese of Kuala Lumpur could use it as a name for God.

Subsequent protests by Muslim groups, although peaceful, have raised fears of friction between the Malay Muslim majority and the large ethnic Chinese and Indian minorities, who mainly practice Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

Religious minorities and some moderate Muslims welcomed the High Court decision.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
        

Regular readers of this blog likely will have noticed that we have had little information here on the Amish, and even less on Verne Troyer. Which is why we are delighted this morning to address both circumstances in a single post.

It turns out that the actor, best known for playing Mini-Me in the Austin Powers movies, grew up around the Amish. Even considers himself ex-Amish, in a way.

“I used to be Amish,” Troyer tells something called Bang Showbiz. “I had to stay a lot with my grandparents or aunts and uncles who are Amish, so I was sort of partially Amish. When I go back there now I still get into that culture. I can drive a horse and buggy because they don't use cars. And, of course, there's no electricity. I respect them a lot. The Amish like to live a very plain lifestyle, the way they think God intended. It sort of brings you back to like 'Little House on the Prairie' days or something."

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 7:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

President Barack Obama didn’t visit Rush Limbaugh in the hospital, but the Pray at the Pump Movement isn’t giving up on the idea of bringing the two together.

On Wednesday, founder Rocky Twyman says, group members will hold a picket outside the White House urging Obama “to drop his political pride and visibly reach out to Rush Limbaugh, the new head of the Republican Party and one of his greatest enemies.”

“This peaceful act could best be accomplished through sending a belated get well card, making a phone call and organizing a peace prayer Summit at the White House,” the group says in a release. “Since Obama is the Nobel Peace Prize Winner for 2009, these prayer warriors think that such a summit could help promote bipartisanship that is so sorely needed in our country at this time.”

The group is also concerned about Obama’s smoking.

The picket is scheduled for 9 to 11 a.m. Wednesday outside the White House. Members will be holding “impromptu prayer sessions” with visitors to the White House and entertaining with “special music from local artists.”

Passersby will also be asked to sign a book “pledging to pray to the God of their choice every night at sundown to heal the wounds between these two leaders who impact the lives of millions daily.”

More from the Pray at the Pump Movement:

PRESIDENT OBAMA IT IS NOT TOO LATE TO WISH GOOD HEALTH FOR RUSH LIMBAUGH, ONE OF YOUR GREATEST ENEMIES. ACCORDING TO GOD'S WORD THAT YOU BELIEVE IN, THIS IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO. WHILE WE ARE ON THE TOPIC OF HEALTHCARE, PAPM URGES PRESIDENT OBAMA TO SEEK HELP FROM GOD FOR HIS SOMKING HABIT. TO CONTINUE THIS ADDICTION IS DETRIMENTAL TO HIS HEALTH AND MAY CUT HIS TIME SHORT WITH HIS BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTERS. WE WANT HIM TO BE IN TOP NOTCH HEALTH AS HE TACKLES THE NATION'S MOST CRITICAL PROBLEMS. WE SUGGEST THAT HE LOOK INTO THE GREAT SEVEN DAY PLAN TO STOP SMOKING SPONSORED BY SHADY GROVE HOSPITAL.

WE ALSO ADVISE HE AND LIMBAUGH TO FAST AND PRAY JUST LIKE THE PROPHETS OF OLD DID WHEN THERE WAS A CRISIS IN THE LAND. WE SHOULD ALSO NOTE THE 21 DAY FAST THAT DR. JENTEZEN FRANKLIN, AUTHOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, FASTING USES. THE BOOK GIVES ACCOUNTS OF MIRACLES THAT HAVE COME TO THIS CONGREGATION FROM USING THE FASTING PRINCIPLE. WE WOULD HOPE THAT RUSH LIMBAUGH WOULD AT LEAST SEND A CARD TO OBAMA IF HE WERE SUDDENLY HOSPITALIZED FOR ILLNESS. WE CONTINUE TO EMPHASIZE TO RUSH LIMBAUGH AND PRESIDENT OBAMA THAT PRAYER AND NOT PARTY BICKERING AND HARSH RHETORIC IS THE ANSWER TO ALL OF AMERICA'S PROBLEMS. PRAYING IS SO SIMPLE, BUT POWERFUL. GOD IS ALWAYS LISTENING. WE ARE BAFFLED THAT THESE TWO LEADERS DO NOT USE THIS SIMPLE WEAPON MORE.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Har Sinai Congregation has elected Rabbi Benjamin Sharff unanimously to become its 14th rabbi since its founding in 1842. He will assume the spiritual leadership of the Reform congregation in Owings Mills on July 1.

“One of the main goals of my rabbinate is to help others to understand the beauty and complexity of our religion, our people and our tradition,” Sharff said in a statement circulated by Har Sinai. “I also believe in the evolving tradition of Torah and want to help others discover the beauty, and insights contained in our texts, literature, traditions, customs and liturgies. I am committed to lifelong learning and helping others raise their own Jewish literacy and knowledge. I am excited to share these goals with Har Sinai’s congregants and the Baltimore Jewish community.”

Sharff comes to Baltimore from Temple Emanu-El in Tuscon, Ariz., where he has been associate rabbi since 2005.The son of a Reform rabbi, he earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and his rabbinic ordination and a master’s degree in Hebrew letters from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati in 2004.

At Temple Emanu-El, according to a release by Har Sinai, Sharff coordinated and taught adult and youth education programs and communal outreach programs, engaged in interfaith activities and discussions and participated in the larger Tucson Jewish community, spearheading the drive to increase Temple Emanu-El’s presence in northwest Tucson. He served as editor of The Comic Book Siddur as a unique outreach to Jewish youth. Additionally, he conducted both traditional and creative worship services and ministered to the congregants’ spiritual, personal and religious needs.

“We were impressed by Rabbi Sharff’s presence, his warmth, his success with youth programs and his ability to engage all members of the congregation,” Har Sinai President Louise Zirretta said. “We are absolutely thrilled to welcome Rabbi Sharff to our congregation.”

Sharff’s wife, Joy, is a pediatrician; the couple have two children, Emily Hannah, age 3, and Noah Daniel, 5 months old. The Har Sinai release describes the Sharffs as accomplished musicians; he plays rhythm guitar and she plays the clarinet, and both were members of the Temple Emanu-El’s Avanim Rock Band.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
        

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is objecting to new measures announced by the Transportation Security Administration over the weekend that focus on flights from 13 Muslim-majority countries.

The move follows the attempt by a Muslim from Nigeria to blow up an airliner from Amsterdam as it landed in Detroit on Christmas Day.

The 14 nations on the list include four designated by the State Department as state sponsors of terrorism – Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria – and 10 additional “countries of interest:” Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. Travelers from these countries will face automatic pat-downs and baggage searches before they are allowed to board a flight to the United States.

In a release on Monday, CAIR said the list discriminates unfairly against Muslims.

“Under these new guidelines, almost every American Muslim who travels to see family or friends or goes on pilgrimage to Mecca will automatically be singled out for special security checks -– that’s profiling,” CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said in a statement. “While singling out travelers based on religion and national origin may make some people feel safer, it only serves to alienate and stigmatize Muslims and does nothing to improve airline security.”

“We all support effective security measures that will protect the travelling public from an attack such as that attempted on Christmas Day. But knee-jerk policies will not address this serious challenge to public safety.”

Awad suggested alternatives to what CAIR called “faith-based security checks:"

“First look at behavior, not at faith or skin color," he said. "Then spend what it takes to obtain more bomb-sniffing dogs, to install more sophisticated bomb-detection equipment and to train security personnel in identifying the behavior of real terror suspects.”

CAIR cited an editorial published by the generally conservative San Diego Union-Tribune:

It’s wrong to single out whole groups of people based on some arbitrary characteristic. For instance, just because a majority of terror suspects arrested or killed by U.S. officials since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were Muslim males, it does not logically follow that all or most Muslim males are terrorists.

But aside from the moral objections, as we’ve seen, profiling by characteristic isn’t very efficient. The minute U.S. officials put out the word that they’re not scrutinizing people with blond hair and blue eyes is the minute that al-Qaida starts recruiting people with blond hair and blue eyes. Would looking for Arab-Americans have turned up a passenger that resembled “American Taliban” fighter John Walker Lindh? Would applying extra scrutiny to people with foreign-sounding names have kept would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid off a plane?

Of course not. We’d prefer a counterterrorism policy that is more benign and yet arguably more effective – profiling passengers based on behavior. That used to be called being vigilant, and adding up clues when suspicions were raised about particular individuals because of what they do and not how they look or what religion they practice.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (39)
        

Did President Barack Obama mislead Christians about his faith during the 2008 presidential campaign?

The question, posed by the Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition, has provoked an interesting exchange. In a release last week, Mahoney said Obama has not gone to church regularly as president, and his family has yet to find a church home in Washington.

"It is important to note that it was President Obama who made his regular church attendance and the importance of a local church community a major part of his campaign,” Mahoney says. “He stated in the national press that he, 'regularly attends church while on the campaign trail.'

"The issue is not whether a President has to attend church on a regular basis to be an effective President. They do not. The issue is one of integrity and honesty. To portray yourself as person of deep Christian faith and very involved in the life of the local church during the campaign and then abandon that position after you are elected reduces faith to a commodity and religion to a political tool.”

Over at Religion Dispatches, the Rev. Candace Chellew-Hodge questions whether the majority of Americans who don’t attend church weekly themselves are likely to care about Obama’s church attendance.

“Being in church doesn't make you any more a Christian than being in a garage makes you a car,” writes Chellew-Hodge, associate pastor of Grace United Church of Christ and founding editor of Whosever: An Online Magazine for GLBT Christians. “Most Americans, I would think, could tell the character of a person's faith by how they live, not where they spend Sunday morning. By that measure, I myself, have some questions about Obama's faith, especially as he backpedals on his promises to the gay and lesbian community, his penchant for bending to Republican pressure, and his commitment to continuing Bush's war in Afghanistan – but his church attendance isn't something I care about.

“The religious right, however, seems obsessed with the church going habits of the current resident and what that says about the depth of his faith, but I don't recall them complaining about George W. Bush's lack of church attendance or the backsliding by Ronald Reagan (because security would be disruptive to service, he said). Instead, these are regarded as ‘Godly men’ by the religious right, mainly because they agreed with the religious right on social issues. As long as the White House occupant is on board with their issues, they can spend Sunday morning doing whatever they please without fear of retribution or complaint - but let a ‘Kenyan-born, secret Muslim’ try it and the concern trolls will always crawl out from under the bridge to lodge spurious complaints.”

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (60)
        

The New York Times on Monday has an interesting story on the role that a visit by three American Evangelicals to Uganda last year played in legislation now before the parliament there to make homosexuality a capital crime.

Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer were presented as “experts on homosexuality” at a conference in March in the African country, where reporter Jeffrey Gettleman says they discussed “how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Lively, Brundidge and Schmierer all have attempted to distance themselves from legislation the Gettleman writes has made Uganda “a far-flung front line in the American culture wars, with American groups on both sides, the Christian right and gay activists, pouring in support and money as they get involved in the broader debate over homosexuality in Africa.”

“I feel duped,” Schmierer tells Gettleman, and says that he had been invited to speak on “parenting skills” for families with gay children. He acknowledges telling audiences how homosexuals could be converted into heterosexuals, but he said he had no idea some Ugandans were contemplating the death penalty for homosexuality.

“That’s horrible, absolutely horrible,” he says. “Some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people.”

As Gettleman notes, Lively and Brundidge have made similar comments. But he adds that the Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it, and he has blogged that the campaign had been likened to “a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda."

“I pray that this, and the predictions [of a ‘significant improvement in the moral climate of the nation’] are true,” he wrote.

Gettleman’s story begins:

Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.

The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.

Read the rest of the story at nytimes.com.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (39)
        

Fox News analyst Brit Hume has some advice for Tiger Woods: Convert to Christianity.

One segment of Fox News Sunday involved predictions for 2010. When it came to sports, Hume focused on the golfer who has withdrawn from the sport in the wake of an infidelity scandal:

Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person I think is a very open question, and it's a tragic situation with him. I think he's lost his family. It's not clear to me that – whether he'll be able to have a relationship with his children.

But the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal – the extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith. He's said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith.

So my message to Tiger would be, “Tiger, turn your faith – turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world."

We haven’t seen Woods call himself a Buddhist, but he did tell Reuters in 2008 that his Buddhist mother had taught him to meditate.

“We also have a thing we do every year where we go to the temple together,” he said.

“In the Buddhist religion, you have to work for it yourself, internally, in order to achieve anuthing in life and set up the next life. It is all about what you do and you get out of it what you put into it.”

Back on Fox News Sunday, panelist Bill Kristol called Hume’s concern for Woods’ soul “admirable,” but offered what he called “a more straightforward sports prediction:”

“He'll come back and win the Masters, because, you know, he's still an awfully good golfer, despite the chaos and bad news about his personal life.”

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)
        

Pope Benedict XVI' has sent his personal aide to visited the young woman who jumped over a barrier and knocked the pontiff down in St. Peter's Basilica on Christmas Eve, the Associated Press reports.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi says that Benedict asked the aide to pay a call on the woman, who is being treated for psychiatric problems, to "show the pope's interest and benevolence."

Lombardi declined to comment on an Italian newspaper report Sunday that the papal aide told the woman during the Dec. 26 visit that Benedict had "pardoned" her.

The Italian-Swiss woman, 25-year-old Susanna Maiolo, yanked Benedict's vestments, pulling him down as he walked up the center aisle to celebrate Mass. In the commotion, an elderly French cardinal fell, breaking his hip. The pope wasn't hurt.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Evangelical pastor Rick Warren's plea for donations to fill a $900,000 deficit at his Southern California megachurch brought in $2.4 million, the Associated Press is reporting.

Warren said the amount raised after the appeal was posted online Wednesday included only money parishioners brought in person to Saddleback Church by New Year's Eve. More was arriving by hand and by mail, he said.

"This is pretty amazing," said Warren, who made the announcement by bringing out 24 volunteers each holding a sign for $100,000. "I don't think any church has gotten a cash offering like that off a letter."

The pastor said he planned to talk about what he called his church's "radical generosity" in the rest of the weekend's sermons. He said the total came from members, and the donations were all under $100.

"We're starting the new decade with a surplus," he said. "It came from thousands of ordinary people. This was not one big fat cat."

Read the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 12:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
        

The Associated Press has an interesting story on Taqwacore, a movement of Muslim and Hindu punk bands among the American children of Middle Eastern and South Asian immigrants.

Datelined Wayland, Mass, the story by Russell Contreras begins:

Artwork from the Punjab state of India decorates the Ray family home. A Johann Sebastian Bach statue sits on a piano. But in the basement — cluttered with wires, old concert fliers and drawings — 25-year-old Arjun Ray is fighting distortion from his electric guitar.

For this son of Indian immigrants, trained in classical violin and raised on traditional Punjab music, getting his three Pakistani-American bandmates in sync is the goal on this cold New England evening. Their band, The Kominas, is trying to record a punk rock version of the classic Bollywood song, "Choli Ke Peeche" (Behind the Blouse).

"Yeah," said Shahjehan Khan, 26, one of the band's guitarists, "there are a lot of contradictions going on here."

Deep in the woods of this colonial town boils a kind of revolutionary movement. From the basement of this middle-class home tucked in the woods west of Boston, The Kominas have helped launched a small, but growing, South Asian and Middle Eastern punk rock movement that is attracting children of Muslim and Hindu immigrants and drawing scorn from some traditional Muslims who say their political, hard-edged music is "haraam," or forbidden.

The movement, an anti-establishment subculture borne of religiously conservative communities, is the subject of two new films and a hot topic on social-networking sites.

The artists say they are just trying to reconcile issues such as life in America, women's rights and homosexuality with Islam and old East vs. West cultural clashes.

"This is one way to deal with my identity as an Arab-American," said Marwan Kamel, the 24-year-old lead guitarist in Chicago-based Al-Thawra. "With this music, I can express this confusion."

The movement's birth is often credited to the novel "The Taqwacore," by Michael Muhammad Knight, a Rochester, N.Y.-raised writer who converted to Islam.

Knight coined the book's title from the Arabic word "Taqwa," which means piety or God-fearing, and the word hardcore. The 2003 book portrayed an imagined world of living-on-the-edge Muslim punk rockers and influenced real-life South Asians to form their own bands.

Read the rest of the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 7:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

The Pray at the Pump Movement, the group that was urging President Barack Obama to visit conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh in the hospital, is thanking God for Limbaugh’s recovery while also praying that God will make Limbaugh more tolerant of minorities.

Limbaugh, 58, was released from The Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu on Friday, two days after he was admitted with chest pains.

From Pay at the Pump Movement founder Rocky Twyman:

50 minorities will hold a unique 5 hour vigil of thanks to God for sparing Mr. Limbaugh from any heart ailments on this Saturday night, January 2. They will use different locations in Montgomery County from 4-9 p.m. to pray for his continued recovery.

We condemn those who are wishing death on this radio icon that has the largest number of listeners in the country and whom experts say pulls in over 40 million dollars a year.

In our prayers today, we will ask that God touch his heart and make him more tolerant of minority groups that are the subject of many of his vitriolic attacks. In his new conference on New Year’s Day, Limbaugh said that the pain was real. The pain that he inflicts on minority groups is very real and does cause deep divisions in a country that is reeling from a deep recession.

The vigil begins at 4 p.m. at the Rockville Seventh-day Adventist Church located at 727 West Montgomery Avenue.

Members of the Pray at the Pump movement are urging President Obama to at least call Rush Limbaugh who went to the airwaves wishing that Obama would fail as a president. Participants in the traveling vigil will be asked to sign a book entitled Happiness Digest that will be sent to the radio icon this week. The group is urging Obama to take the high road.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (53)
        

A Somali man was charged Saturday with two counts of attempted murder for an attack on a Danish artist whose 2005 cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad ignited riots and outrage across the Muslim world, the Associated Press is reporting.

The 28-year-old Somali — who had ties to al-Qaida — broke into Kurt Westergaard's home in Aarhus on Friday night armed with an ax and a knife, said Jakob Scharf, head of Denmark's PET intelligence agency.

The 75-year-old artist, who has been the target of several death threats since depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban, pressed an alarm and fled with his 5-year-old granddaughter to a specially made safe room.

Officers arrived two minutes later and tried to arrest the assailant, but then shot him in the hand and knee when he threatened them with the ax, said Preben Nielsen of the Aarhus police.

Nielsen said the man's wounds were serious but not life-threatening, and Westergaard was "quite shocked" by the attack but was not injured.

The Somali man denied the charges at a court hearing Saturday in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city, 125 miles (200 kilometers) northwest of Copenhagen. Accompanied by a lawyer, he was wheeled into the court on a stretcher from the hospital where he was being treated.

Read the rest of the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

A small group of Haredi Jews were preparing Friday to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath in Gaza, in an unlikely show of support for Palestinians in the Hamas-run coastal territory, the Associated Press reports.

Bearded and wearing black hats and coats, the four members of a tiny Jewish group vehemently opposed to Israel's existence were a rare sight in the poverty-stricken Palestinian territory.

Members of the Neturei Karta group have expressed support for the Iranian regime and for others who oppose the Jewish state, which they believe was established in violation of Jewish law. They made a similar visit to Gaza last year.

"It's crucial that the people of Gaza understand the terrible tragedy here is not in the name of Judaism," said one of the men, Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of New York City, as the four prepared to observe the Sabbath at a Gaza City hotel.

Gaza is still recovering from Israel's devastating military offensive a year ago, which was aimed at halting rocket fire from the territory. Thirteen Israelis and almost 1,400 Gazans were killed in the three-week war.

The four men are American and Canadian citizens. Israel bans its citizens from visiting the blockaded territory. Weiss and his comrades entered Gaza through a border crossing with Egypt.

Neturei Karta, Aramaic for "Guardians of the City," was founded seven decades ago in Jerusalem by Jews who opposed the drive to establish the state of Israel, believing only the Messiah could do that.

Considered marginal even among Haredi Jews, the group's size is estimated at between a few hundred to a few thousand people.

Read the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

More religion news from Uganda: Twenty renegade Catholic priests who are either married or want to marry have broken from the mainstream Roman Catholic Church in the African nation and formed a new church where celibacy is not required, members told the Associated Press.

The Ugandan government said Thursday it was investigating the breakaway Catholic Apostolic National Church in Uganda and would ban it if found to be illegal, the AP reports. Vatican officials said the priests were now considered "outside" the Catholic Church and would likely be excommunicated.

The creation of the splinter church underscored the increasingly vexing problem of enforcing celibacy for Roman Catholic priests in Africa, which has the world's fastest-growing Catholic population but where there have been several cases of priests living openly with women and fathering children.

Earlier this year, the Vatican summoned African bishops to Rome for a three-week meeting on problems of the church in Africa, and celibacy was a key topic of discussion. The Vatican, however, has remained firm that priests must not marry, although there are exceptions for priests of the Eastern rite and for converts from Anglicanism.

The breakaway Ugandan church has as its head a former Zambian Catholic priest, the Rev. Luciano Anzanga Mbewe, who was excommunicated earlier this year for having founded what the Vatican called a schismatic church, the Catholic Apostolic National Church of Zambia, which allows for a married priesthood.

The Ugandan offshoot is located in the eastern town of Jinja. Mbewe is expected to visit soon to officially launch the church and ordain new priests, said Rev. Leonard Lubega, who says he has been appointed bishop-elect by Mbewe.

Mbewe has said he was inspired by the former Zambian archbishop, Emmanuel Milingo, who was married in 2001 to a South Korean woman by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church.

Milingo was excommunicated in 2006 after installing four married men as bishops in the United States. Two weeks ago, the Vatican defrocked Milingo entirely, stripping him of his priestly functions so any future ordinations by him would be invalid.

Read the Associated Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)
        

Pope Benedict XVI called for the respect of all people without discrimination and the protection of children from war and violence during a Mass on Friday marking the start of the new year, the Canadian Press reports.

Peace begins with the understanding that men are brothers, not rivals or enemies, the pontiff said during the Mass at St. Peter's Basilica.

"Peace begins with a look of respect that recognizes in another man's face a person, regardless of the colour of his skin, nationality, language or religion," Benedict said.

The value of respect for all should be taught from an early age, Benedict said. He called classrooms containing children of different backgrounds "are a prophecy of the kind of humanity we are called upon to create: a family of families and peoples."

Read the rest of the Canadian Press story.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)