Fox News Apology * Catholic Sackings * Yale Humanists: Tuesday’s Religion News Roundup

Fox News is sorry for publicizing a false report that links President Obama to a Muslim museum. Catholic schools are firing gay teachers, and the laity isn't liking it. Yale Humanists face rejection from the campus religious community.

Road sign to Yale.
Road sign to Yale. Image courtesy of Pincasso via Shutterstock.

Road sign to Yale.

Lots of news today and I’m not sure how it all fits together, but I betcha Michele Bachmann does. (See “Bachmann apocalypse” item below.)

Sh*tdown:


Apologized: A Fox news host for falsely reporting that President Obama is paying out of his own pocket to keep the International Museum of Muslim Cultures open during the federal shutdown. So this means that saying someone supported a Muslim cultural institution is an insult. Sigh.

Naeem Baig, Sister Simone Campbell and Rabbi David Saperstein urge their fellow Americans to remember the surprisingly large number of loaned, leased or federally contracted workers who never earned good money, and are earning none in the shutdown.

Through federal contracts, loans and leases, the federal government employs about 2 million low-wage workers across the country — sewing military uniforms, cleaning the bathrooms at Washington’s Union Station, serving Big Macs at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and hauling federal loads on trucks.

Read my story (please) about Catholic schools firing gay teachers. Once whispered about in the teachers’ lounge, they now air on the nightly news and circulate on Facebook.

Two items from the crossroads of religion and medicine:

An Ohio court has ruled for a hospital that wants to continue chemotherapy for an Amish girl whose parents object to the treatment. Hospital: She has an 85 percent chance of beating cancer with chemo and will die within a year without it. The parents’ lawyer: “They do not wish to subject their daughter to this and believe the will of God will triumph.”

A new Iowa Board of Medicine rule will end the practice of distributing abortion-inducing pills via a conferencing system on Nov. 6 unless the courts intervene. The board did not consider banning any other type of tele-medicine.

The American Bible Society’s board of trustees has removed Doug Birdsall as the group’s president. Here’s how Birdsall explains his departure according to Christianity Today:

. . . there are times when the vision and style of a new leader does not mesh satisfactorily with the culture of an established organization or with the expectations of a board. Unfortunately, things did not develop as we had hoped.

Some Mormons call him their Pope Francis. He’s Dieter F. Uchtdorf, second counselor in the LDS church’s governing three-man First Presidency, and he’s just made a statement that has surprised many in and out of Mormonism:

 . . . there have been times when members or leaders in the church have simply made mistakes. There may have been things said or done that were not in harmony with our values, principles or doctrine.

The Yale Humanist Community’s bid for membership in Yale Religious Ministries — the umbrella group for all religious groups on campus — has been denied. But the Yalie humanists say they aren’t taking it too hard, because Yale Religious Ministries is religious with a capital “R” and Yale humanists are, well, not religious.


Speaking of Yale, its press has just churned out an interesting tome by Catholic scholar Gary A. Anderson that compares Jewish and Christian traditions of charitable giving. Charity: The Place of the Poor in Biblical Tradition. Here is The Forward’s review.

We know from fancy market research that there are a lot of Mainline Protestants reading the roundup, and we are taking an educated guess that a lot of you are sick and tired of being called “Mainline Protestants.” Our own Cathy Lynn Grossman presents a new Mainline Protestant name poll. You get to vote.

The decidedly unMainline Rep. Michele Bachmann said she is utterly convinced we are living in the end times because she read her Bible and President Obama did something involving Syria that she really didn’t like. Here’s the link but don’t even read this. 

Women of the Wall, a group that has spearheaded the campaign to allow women to pray equally with men at the Western Wall, has changed its mind and decided to support with conditions a proposal to create a third mixed gender place at the now-gender-segregated wall.

Jeffrey Weiss reviews “Gravity” for RNS and finds that the film is not about religion. It’s about an astronaut in deep space trouble played by Sandra Bullock. But Weiss also finds “moments where spiritual and philosophical themes take center stage.”

Check out our own Omar Sacirbey’s Moozweek, for a roundup on news from the Muslim world. This week’s edition includes an item about parents of high schoolers in Daphne, Ala., who are worried that new courses in Arabic will set up a slippery slope that ends in Islamic indoctrination.


Court watch: The Supremes Monday refused to take the case of a low-IQ death row inmate in Georgia, and the disability rights community is angered that the court won’t enforce its own 2002 ruling forbidding the execution of even mildly retarded persons.

The highest court in the land is also passing on a case striking down Virginia’s anti-sodomy laws. Some Virginia state officials wanted to appeal the  4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ finding that the law was unconstitutional. So the law will stay defunct.

Navy chaplains will get more training on preventing sexual abuse.

Hobby Lobby craft stores, owned by the devoutly Christian Steve Green, has decided that it will offer Jewish holiday items starting in November in some stores in New York and New Jersey, a decision precipitated by a flap over the lack of Hanukkah stuff on the shelves.

Kret Krot. It’s a tiny Vietnamese village and home to a small Catholic sect, and the jumping off point for an AP story on how closely Vietnam’s Communist government keeps an eye on the religious.

Congrats to two physicists who won the Nobel Prize for their work on the Higgs boson — or the “God particle.”

And the only reason I would know that the founder of Higgs boson thinks “God particle” is a stupid name for the discovery is because I read the Religion News Roundup. If you haven’t signed up for this free, spamless service already, please give it a try, below.


– Lauren Markoe

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