Happy New Year! It’s almost 5772! Just a few hours left to make your Jewish New Year resolutions.
Christians in Syria are backing dictator Bashar al-Assad, who has afforded them some protection, as much of the Sunni Muslim country looks forward to his ouster.
Christians are incensed in Britain that BBC broadcasters will on longer say “B.C.” or “A.D.” but the more neutral “B.C.E.” and “C.E.”
The twit was blasphemous, according to a Kuwaiti court. Judges have ruled that a Sunni Muslim activist gets three months in jail for twitting comments deemed insulting to Shiites.
Ordination of the first openly gay candidate for minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is slated for next week in Wisconsin. The church in May changed its constitution to make such ordinations possible.
A San Francisco Bay Area Jewish group is taking some flack for its work to close down an exhibit of Palestinian children’s art, which shows bloody Palestinian victims and mean Israeli soldiers. The group called the exhibit one-sided and manipulative of the children. The sponsors say they were censored.
The family of Josh Fattal, the American hiker released by Iran last week after more than two years in prison has a Jewish background that his family didn’t want the Iranian government to know about. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which is like a Jewish Associated Press, said it refrained from reporting on Fattal during his imprisonment for fear of “connecting him to something Jewish.”
More wrenching testimony in the case of the Oregon faith-healing couple who sought no medical help for an infant that doctors say could easily have been saved. The mother says human intervention would have been futile, because God decides. The defense rests.
In other upsetting religion-crime news, a Houston pastor is facing capital murder charges for the death of his wife in a case that involves a mistress he shared with his son and the stepson of the deceased, who is also implicated.
A contestant on Survivor has a crisis of faith and a Survivor alum says that’s par for the show.
A worker at a Catholic cemetery in Wisconsin stole an extremely cool guitar from the casket of a deceased man who had asked to be buried with it. But some sleuthy folks at the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay recovered the instrument and returned it to its rightful, departed owner.
Shana Tova Umetukah/A Happy and Sweet New Year,
Lauren Markoe
Lauren Markoe
