In Friday’s RNS report Senior Editor David E. Anderson looks at the issue of torture and says it remains unresolved in the United States: The debate over Sen. John McCain’s anti-torture law and the strong bipartisan political and public support it enjoyed suggest there is a broad moral consensus against the use of torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of those the United States holds in captivity. But how that consensus is put into law and then parsed into policy-from definitions of torture to permissible techniques for interrogation-and whether public deliberation might yet be cast in the language of religion and ethics remains largely unresolved.
We’re also publishing a feature on what is possibly the largest Romanian church outside of Romania, in Portland, Ore. Gosia Wozniacka writes: Elegantly dressed women fill the pews on the right, heads covered in gauzy scarves. Men in suits take the left. Some whisper to themselves. Others pray aloud or wail in the singsong language of Romania. And in a throne-size chair up front sits the immigrant who takes responsibility for all of them. Neculai “Nicky” Pop, 68, presides over what may be the largest Romanian church outside his homeland. On a typical Sunday, 3,000 people convene under the wooden dome of his Romanian Pentecostal church, all of them Romanian immigrants or the children of Romanian immigrants. Since 1979, when he arrived in Portland and started holding religious services in his bedroom, Pop estimates that he has sponsored or helped sponsor 15,000 immigrants, about half the Romanians living in Oregon.
Peter Ames Carlin offers his take on “The Book of Daniel,” which premieres tonight on NBC: “The Book of Daniel” comes with a lot of spinning wheels and fast-moving parts. But it works, thanks both to a slew of delicate performances (particularly Aidan Quinn) and to a creative vision that owes as much to the remembered lessons of Sunday school as it does to the Sunday night flamboyance seen each week on “Desperate Housewives.” Like CBS’ “Joan of Arcadia,” the last talking-to-God show to hit the airwaves, “Daniel” comes with a spiritual subtext that hovers somewhere between traditional Christianity and New-Age-style, hands-on spirituality. And though it’s not clear if Quinn’s visions of Jesus-who appears to him as a laid-back, witty hippie of a deity-are the real thing or merely a side effect of his Vicodin-heavy diet, they both affirm his faith and leave him with a kind of transcendent grace.
