The Dalai Lama says he doesn’t care that the White House took a low-key approach to his meeting with President Obama last week. He also commented, obliquely, on Tiger Woods, saying that all religions have a negative view of adultery, and that self-discipline with an awareness of consequences can help manage unruly desires.
Kultilda Woods, Tiger’s mom, said: “Since he was young, always Buddhism. Buddhist teach go inside deep to soul and correct bad thing to be a good thing. He got back to practice Buddhism again, that make him much better person.” Mrs. Woods, who emigrated from Thailand 40 years ago, speaks broken English at times.
None of the 33 Haitian children taken by the American missionaries are orphans, an Associated Press investigation found. In many cases, parents said they gave up their children because they were promised safekeeping in an orphanage in the Dominican Republic.
Government agencies should strictly enforce church/state separation when they fund religious charities, and publicize where the money is going, according to recommendations released Saturday by a White House faith advisory task force.
The Church of Scientology has hired three journalists, including a Pulitzer Prize winner, a former “60 Minutes” producer, and the former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, to investigate the St. Pete Times, which last year published a scathing multi-part series detailing a culture of violence, intimidation and fraud among church leaders.
Investigators in Texas say DNA evidence led them to two suspects in the string of church fires since January. A peak in the Santa Monica mountains has been renamed from Negrohead to Ballard Mountain after a black pioneer and one of the founders of Los Angeles’ African Methodist Episcopal Church. U.S. Muslims are debating how much English they should use in worship without violating Islamic law and abandoning their culture.
A Pew study found that one-quarter of Americans aged 18-29 have no religious preference or affiliation, and fewer than 20 percent attend worship services regularly. A Mississippi man wants a local court to remove church pews from its courtroom.
A clash erupted between Palestinians and Israeli police a day after Israel added a disputed shrine in the West Bank to its list of national heritage sites. The Archbishop of Canterbury voiced concern about the eroding Christian presence in the Holy Land. A Buddhist monk in Myanmar was sentenced to seven years in jail during the visit of a UN envoy.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew struck back at critics of ecumenism, saying that “If Orthodoxy is enclosed within itself and not in dialogue with those outside, it will both fail in its mission and no longer be the ‘catholic’ and ‘ecumenical’ Church. Instead, it will become an introverted and self-contained group, a ‘ghetto” on the margins of history.”
Officials in India are criticizing an image from a school textbook of Jesus drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette (see pic at top left). The picture was apparently intended to illustrate the world “idol.” The Vatican said the percentage of Catholics in the world slightly increased. A baby born on a plane in Bolivia will be baptized on the plane as well – with the chief of the air force presiding as godfather.
