Tuesday’s Religion News Roundup

If you’re like me, you’ve been getting a lot of e-mails from the Church of Scientology in recent weeks inviting folks to “Meet a Scientologist!” or learn about the churches and facilities they’re planting around the world. Looks like their PR shop will be even busier this week, as the St. Pete Times is reporting […]

If you’re like me, you’ve been getting a lot of e-mails from the Church of Scientology in recent weeks inviting folks to “Meet a Scientologist!” or learn about the churches and facilities they’re planting around the world.

Looks like their PR shop will be even busier this week, as the St. Pete Times is reporting that the FBI is investigating defectors about “abusive and coercive” church practices, and the New Yorker has published a long expose in which a former longtime member (an Oscar-winning director, to boot) – calls the church “a cult.”

Another Vatican sex abuse letter, this time to a bishop in Arizona, is again raising questions about whether Rome told local bishops to withhold damning information from civil authorities.


President Obama re-nominated Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook to be his Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom after a certain someone (looking at you Sen. DeMint!) foiled her nomination last year. The congressional hearings on Muslim radicalization will begin March 7, Rep. Pete King told NYT.

Calls from reporters are again flooding in to LDS headquarters in Utah, reports WaPo, as two Mormons prepare their presidential campaigns. The church’s response has been a little cooler to the upcoming Broadway play about Mormonism from the creators of South Park.

Break out the peace pipe and Polygamy Porter: a legislative proposal aimed at protecting Utahns’ religious beliefs is so broad it might legalize everything from polygamy to smoking peyote, according to the AP.

NYT and LAT take a look at the “flimsily source media accounts” in India that have fanned rumors that a high-ranking Tibetan lama is a Chinese spy.

Islamic hard-liners stormed a courthouse and set two churches on fire in Indonesia to protest what they considered a lenient sentence for a Christian convicted of blaspheming Islam, according to the AP. Indonesia’s president ordered an investigation into an attack on members of a minority Muslim sect after a gruesome video emerged of a mob beating several victims to death. This is the country that President Obama held up as a model of religious tolerance?

The U.S. Catholic Bishops want the Department of Homeland Security to stop sending Haitians back to Haiti.


CNN looks at 10 American companies that wear their religion on their sleeve, or in the bottom of their disposable cups. A Canadian scholar says Canucks are too nice to get religion. Palestinians want the UN to put the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem on its list of World Heritage sites.

The Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, worried about the growing influence of Harry Potter and his team of young wizards, has published a guide aimed at helping teenagers deal with 21st century witchcraft. Note to bishops: Those books are fiction.

A month after Romanian authorities began taxing witches for their trade, the country’s fortune tellers are cursing a new bill that threatens fines or even prison if their predictions don’t come true. “They can’t condemn witches, they should condemn the cards,” Queen witch Bratara Buzea told The Associated Press.

An Indiana bishop has sanctioned an iPhone app to help Catholics through the Sacrament of Penance.

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!