Here’s how it’s looking out there as we slide into the weekend …
From the Dept. of Oops They Did It Again, the Archdiocese of Louisville says a defrocked priest who was on probation for abuse shouldn’t have held a seat on a parish council. Up in Boston, Cardinal Sean O’Malley is launching a month-long “consultation” with disgruntled parishioners over the fate of shuttered churches.
Out in Oregon, sex abuse victims are suing various groups who got money from the Jesuits, essentially arguing that they skipped the line and prevented the Jesuits from being able to pay to settle abuse lawsuits. Or something like that.
In South Dakota, lawmakers have shelved a proposal to legislate “justifiable homicide” in order to protect a fetus; critics said it would lead to open season on abortion providers, and a spokesman the governor calls the proposed language “a very bad idea.”
The 2011 battles over gay marriage got off to a raucus start in New Hampshire yesterday, where Republicans and conservatives vowed to make gay marriage a big issue in the 2012 first-in-the-nation primary. A bill to legalize gay marriage in Maryland cleared a significant hurdle yesterday.
After getting a SWEDOW dump of losing Pittsburgh Steelers Super Bowl T-shirts, World Vision is now getting $500,000 from … Watson, the IBM super computer who mopped the floor of Jeopardy this week. Publishing giant Zondervan isn’t renewing the contract of CEO Moe Girkins.
A Presbyterian pastor in Pennsylvania says Protestants could really use their own confession iPhone app. A home-schooled wrestler (and son of a preacher man) forfeited his match against a female opponent, saying guy-on-girl rolling around the mat isn’t “appropriate.”
From the Dept. of It’s Not About You, It’s About Me, Conservative Judaism is trying to woo independent-minded prayer groups, but it’s not clear those groups are interested in dating.
The good folks over at American Spectator join our coverage earlier this week in exploring the newfound anti-debt zeal among social conservatives. UC-Davis has scrubbed language from its website — which “defined religious discrimination in the United States as `institutionalized oppressions toward those who are not Christian,'” according to the AP — after Christian campus groups filed a protest.
Leaders of the World Council of Churches want to change the name of their Central Committee because it sounds, well, too communist.
France‘s governing parties are planning to launch a series of talks about the role and future of Muslims within French society, Reuters reports. Over in Russia, they’re venerating a “miracle-working” icon of former Czar Nicholas II, who was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
Down in Brazil, Catholic bishops gave a collective thumbs-down to reality TV, calling it undignified.
