Monthly Archives: August 2011
Monks’ casket fight heads back to court
By Tracy Gordon — August 18, 2011
NEW ORLEANS (RNS) Louisiana’s funeral industry isn’t ready to give up the fight to preserve its exclusive right to sell caskets. On Monday (Aug. 15), lawyers for the Louisiana Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors appealed a federal judge’s July 21 ruling that allowed a group of Catholic monks to build and sell wooden caskets […]
Mom gets probation after Bible-inspired botched circumcision
By Tracy Gordon — August 18, 2011
PORTLAND, Ore. (RNS) A 30-year-old Portland woman who botched a home circumcision of her 3-month-old son has been sentenced to five years of probation. Keemonta Peterson was arrested last April after a lengthy investigation into the October 2010 incident. Peterson, inspired after reading the Old Testament, decided she wanted her son to be circumcised. But […]
COMMENTARY: The barbarians among us
By Tracy Gordon — August 18, 2011
(RNS) I love the cartoon that shows a hapless customer in a bookstore facing three shelves. One is labeled FICTION. The next is NONFICTION. The third: NOT SURE. Everything these days is relative, even fiction. Consider the recent case of the lobsterless lobster salad at New York’s famed Zabar’s food emporium. It turns out that […]
Wednesday’s Religion News Roundup
By Lauren Markoe — August 17, 2011
The Vatican has posted on the Internet its internal files on a priest accused of molesting young people in Ireland and the United States . In other Vatican news, it has granted priests the right to forgive the sin of abortion when hearing the confessions of hundreds of thousands of young people attending a Roman […]
Senators probe politics and piety in new books
By Tracy Gordon — August 17, 2011
Tuesday’s Godbytes
By Jack Jenkins — August 17, 2011
CNN offers story on professional Christian Soccer teams, proving once again that God is probably the only entity that can make Americans care about soccer: “The team was established in 1993 after a ‘sports junkie fell in love with God,’ Eagles co-founder Brian Davidson says. But if he was going to continue being involved in […]
King’s nephew named to head civil rights group
By Tracy Gordon — August 17, 2011
(RNS) Two and a half weeks after the sudden death of its president, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference has named a nephew of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as its new leader. Isaac Newton Farris Jr., 48, was elected on Monday (Aug. 15) to lead the Atlanta-based organization that has mobilized churches to fight […]
Tuesday’s Religion News Roundup
By Jack Jenkins — August 16, 2011
The Princeton Review released its list of colleges with the most and least religious students. Turns out the top spot goes to Brigham Young University (shocking!) while the mantle of “least religious school” goes to heathens of Bennington College in Vermont. May God have mercy on their GPAs. Catholic pharmacists in the United Kingdom could […]
Intrepid young activists push condoms at World Youth Day
By Tracy Gordon — August 16, 2011
(RNS) Sending a small band of young people to talk about condoms at World Youth Day, the triennial Catholic jamboree that opens in Madrid on Tuesday (Aug. 16), sounds like penance, if not a kind of martyrdom. The six-day event is expected to draw close to 1 million young pilgrims, as well as thousands of […]
COMMENTARY: Time to leave the nest
By Tom Ehrich — August 16, 2011
SONOMA, Calif. (RNS) Histories flowed like Sonoma Valley wine at our son’s wedding here, as more than 100 people descended on this lovely town in perfect weather. There were parents, aunts and uncles and cousins, some of them recently married. Friends from childhood, friends from college, friends and colleagues from young careers. Histories that began […]
Where are the pages of yesteryear?
By Mark Silk — August 16, 2011
On a gray day on the Maine coast, my heart is heavy for the termination of the page program in the U.S. House of Representatives. OK, you don’t care, and why should you? In an age of text messaging and pdfs, the program can’t convince the bean-counting leaders of the House that it’s worth the […]
Monday Godbytes
By Jack Jenkins — August 16, 2011
Apparently folks over at Christianity Today think God has “a wonderful plan for your body.” And by “plan” they mean “yoga.” And by “yoga” they mean “that thing that some Christians disapprove of”: “Whatever we make of yoga’s relationship to Christianity, it functions as a cultural bellwether within evangelicalism and its offspring. Pagitt and those […]
Guns, gays and God collide in champ’s choice of queen
By Tracy Gordon — August 15, 2011
BERLIN (RNS) It’s not the first time the choice of a royal spouse has caused a stir. But it might be the first such case where gay men, guns and German Catholic groups have played such an intertwining role. The mini-scandal centers around whether Dirk Winter, a 44-year-old beverage wholesaler who lives near Munster, should […]
Ohio pastor elected to lead breakaway Lutheran church
By Tracy Gordon — August 15, 2011
(RNS) Members of the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) have elected an Ohio pastor as their new head bishop, making him the first non-provisional leader of the year-old denomination. The Rev. John Bradosky was elected Aug. 11 by 800 NALC members who met in Columbus, Ohio, to elect new leaders and conduct official church business […]
Black Baptists decry `disrespect’ directed at Obama
By Tracy Gordon — August 15, 2011
WASHINGTON (RNS) A black denomination that began 50 years ago in support of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has decried the “disrespect” shown to President Obama since he took office. Citing slurs and remarks such as “you lie, “boy” and “tar baby,” the Progressive National Baptist Convention called for the ouster of elected officials […]
