Wednesday’s Religion News Roundup

So that new iPhone confession app is getting lots of chatter around the Interwebs, from MoDo and WaPo and NPR and TIME and elsewhere, but the Catholic League is incensed that too many media reports imply that the gizmo replaces the need to actually seek out a priest for Confession. The Vatican agrees. A federal […]

So that new iPhone confession app is getting lots of chatter around the Interwebs, from MoDo and WaPo and NPR and TIME and elsewhere, but the Catholic League is incensed that too many media reports imply that the gizmo replaces the need to actually seek out a priest for Confession. The Vatican agrees.

A federal judge dismissed an atheist’s objection to a $20,000 state grant to help restore the (allegedly famous) Bald Knob Cross in southern Illinois.

Political observers are trying to figure out if POTUS’ decision to renominate Suzan Johnson Cook as ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom was a good idea or not; some say Obama should have listened to Sen. Jim DeMint and shelved her, and Tom Farr says the time is long past for Obama to get serious on the issue.


Consumer protection guru Elizabeth Warren met with faith groups yesterday to learn the moral lessons from last year’s financial meltdown.

Sarah Palin says she’s cool with the GOP gays at a conservative convention (not so much for the Family Research Council and others); the purists down at the American Family Association say Sister Sarah needs to fire up that confession app on her iPhone. Speaking of gays and conservatives, a leading gay mag asks: “Can You Forgive Ted Haggard?”

Mormon officials issued one of those statements that didn’t actually say very much on the coming-soon South Park Broadway play on Mormons. The folks over at First Things tip their cowboy hats to country singers for being willing to sing about God. Al Mohler doesn’t like Newsweek’s article about the “new scholarship on the Good Book’s naughty bits.”

Two workers in NYC were killed when they fell down an elevator shaft at a building project for Manhattan’s fast-growing Redeemer Presbyterian Church; church leaders expressed their “deepest sympathy.”

Up in the Bronx, a group of black worshippers keep kosher, light a menorah and post a map of Israel on the wall — just don’t call them Jews.

The No. 2 Republican in the House says the top U.S. objective in Egypt should be preventing the spread of “radical Islam.” Reuters says Russia has similar concerns within it’s own borders.


An Israeli court ruled for a woman who sued her husband after he refused — for 16 years — to grant her a “get,” or religious divorce. The NYT says the mannequins in Baghdad store windows are a good barometer of Iraq’s increasingly religious tilt.

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