c. 2003 Religion News Service

Supreme Court to Hear Religious Scholarship Case

WASHINGTON (RNS) The Supreme Court said Monday (May 19) it will decide whether students at religious colleges can use state scholarships for their studies.

The high court agreed to hear the case of a Washington state student, Joshua Davey, who received a $1,125 state scholarship to attend Northwest College, which is affiliated with the Assemblies of God.

When state officials learned that Davey was majoring in theology, they revoked his scholarship. They said the public money could not be spent on religious instruction, but could be used for other majors, such as business.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last July in favor of Davey. The high court agreed to hear Washington’s appeal during next year’s term, which begins in October.

Davey’s lawyers at the American Center for Law and Justice, a law firm founded by television evangelist Pat Robertson, said state officials violated Davey’s constitutional rights to practice his religion.

“This anti-religious, viewpoint-based discrimination clearly offends the federal Constitution,” ACLJ chief counsel Jay Sekulow told the justices in a filing for the case.

Washington Attorney General Christine Gregoire told the high court that the state policy “does not impair Davey’s free exercise of his religion _ he is free to believe and practice his religion without restriction.”

Fourteen other states have similar restrictions on scholarship funds. They are Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wisconsin, according to the Associated Press.

Both Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and Americans for Religious Liberty, a church-state watchdog group formed in 1982, said they support the state policy.

“One of the bedrock principles of this country’s founding documents is that no one can be taxed to support religion,” said ARL president Edd Doerr. “There is hardly anything more central to religion than the training of clergy, and Washington State and other states are to be commended for their efforts to protect the religious freedom of all from the tyranny of compulsory support for religion.”

_ Kevin Eckstrom

Russian Supreme Court Allows Muslim Head Scarves on Official IDs

MOSCOW (RNS) Russia’s Supreme Court has ruled the country’s Muslim women have the right to wear head scarves in photographs on official IDs, something previously forbidden by the government.

The May 15 ruling, hailed by Muslim leaders and religious freedom activists, ends years of legal tussling pitting devout Muslims from Russia’s Tatarstan region against the police, who maintained women in head scarves would be too difficult to identify.

The women, members of Russia’s 20 million-member Muslim minority, were trapped between a Quranic injunction to public modesty and Russian law. All adult Russian citizens must carry an internal passport with a photograph that shows where they are registered to live, a Soviet-era requirement still used to restrict freedom of movement.

“Religious requirements were being trampled by the dictates of law enforcement agencies,” the women’s lawyer, Vladimir Ryakhovsky, said in a statement issued by his Slavic Legal Center.

The Supreme Court’s decision applies to other faiths as well, Ryakhovsky said. Russian Orthodox women may also now wear head scarves in official photographs and Jewish men can put on yarmulkes.

The Interior Ministry, which issues the internal passports, plans to appeal the ruling to the full presidium of the Supreme Court. The respected daily newspaper, Izvestia, said May 16 that Interior Ministry lawyers might yet prevail since Russian president Vladimir Putin previously voiced his support for the head scarf ban. Russia’s courts are often subservient to political leaders.

_ Frank Brown

On Day After Birthday, Pope Says He Feels He Nearing Death

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Speaking one day after his 83rd birthday, Pope John Paul II said Monday (May 19) he is increasingly aware he is nearing death, and he entrusts himself to divine mercy.

The Roman Catholic pontiff addressed thousands of fellow Poles attending an audience in St. Peter’s Square following his proclamation on Sunday of four new saints _ two Poles and two Italians, who were founders of religious orders.

“Yesterday I was 83 years old. I have entered my 84th year,” John Paul said in off-the-cuff remarks to the pilgrims at the end of the formal audience. He spoke in Polish.

“I am increasingly aware that the day is approaching in which I will have to present myself to God to account to him for my life from the period in Wadowice, to that in Krakow and in Rome,” he said. “I entrust myself to divine mercy and to the mother of God.”

Although the pope suffers from painful arthritis of the right knee and a degenerative neurological condition believed to be Parkinson’s disease, he has appeared to have gained new strength and vigor in recent weeks.

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said in an interview published in the newspaper La Stampa on Saturday that the pope works seven days a week and has never mentioned any possibility of retiring.

“One of the things most extraordinary and moving in these years is the way in which the pope has been able to accept his inevitable physical limitations,” the spokesman said.

“What could have been an impediment, an obstacle to carrying out his pastoral work, has instead become perfectly integrated into his activity. You could almost say that these aliments have become an instrument rather than an obstacle,” Navarro-Valls said.

As part of the birthday celebrations, the Rome University La Sapienza conferred a doctorate in law on the pope Saturday at a ceremony in the Vatican attended by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and dignitaries of Italy’s political and academic worlds. It was the 11th honorary degree John Paul has received in his almost 25 years as pope.

Some 50,000 pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square Sunday for the canonizations of Polish Bishop Jozef Sebastian Pelczar and Sister Urszula Ledochowska and Italian Sisters Maria De Mattias and Virginia Centurione Bracelli. The five Polish nuns who act as the pope’s housekeepers belong to the Ursuline Sisters of the Sacred Heart of the Dying Jesus, founded by Ledochowska.

_ Peggy Polk

Activist Theologian Coffin Honored at Union Seminary

NEW YORK (RNS) William Sloane Coffin, the controversial preacher and peace activist, made what may be one of his last public appearances May 15, when Union Theological Seminary presented him with its highest honor, the Union Medal.

“He can make you hear what you need to hear and not make it hurt,” Union President Joseph Hough Jr. said in presenting the award to Coffin, now 79 and in increasingly frail health.

Coffin, the nephew of Henry Sloane Coffin, one of Union’s late presidents, was honored for his long-time activism and commitment to progressive causes.

“Your voice has been a trumpet of justice,” Hough said to Coffin at a public ceremony in the seminary’s chapel. “You have spoken truth to power.”

Coffin is perhaps best known for his often-controversial 18-year chaplaincy at Yale University beginning in 1958. During his time at Yale, Coffin was arrested and convicted as a Freedom Rider in Alabama _ a conviction eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. He also faced charges, eventually dropped, of aiding and abetting young men resisting the draft for the Vietnam War.

Coffin later served as senior minister of The Riverside Church in New York City from 1977-89 and has also been active in the nuclear disarmament movement.

Though affected by a stroke and requiring a wheelchair, Coffin made a joke about his current condition of not being able to walk without assistance _ “an old football wound,” he said. He then stood unassisted and delivered a fiery speech that addressed the perils of militarism, nuclear arms and current U.S. foreign policy.

Calling war “humanity’s most chronic and incurable disease,” Coffin took the Bush administration to task, sounding an alarm about the dangers of U.S. hubris following the war in Iraq. “Powerful nations,” he said, “have always to be reminded of Ezekial’s lament over proud Tyre: `Your heart was proud because of your beauty, you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.”’

Coffin called for more vigilance and activism, not less, on the part of American Christians, saying “the price of Christian discipleship is going up every day in America.”

“Dissent is not disloyal,” Coffin said to an audience that included such luminaries as his friend Arthur Miller, the famed American playwright. “What is unpatriotic is subservience. Apathy in the face of evil is morally unacceptable.”

_ Chris Herlinger

Cantors Fear Time Crunch Affecting Way Sacred Music is Heard

LOS ANGELES (RNS) The modern time crunch is being felt by cantors in Judaism’s Conservative synagogues _ a time crunch that plays into how Jews hear sacred music and what they expect from it.

“Time is a big problem because the people only have a certain amount of time,” said Julie Jacobs, cantor at Congregation Mount Sinai in Brooklyn Heights in New York, one of about 260 cantors who met May 11-15 for Conservative Judaism’s annual Cantors Assembly.

Whether it is a large Jewish population or a small, remote one, “people aren’t taught how to listen anymore,” said Paula Pepperstone, one of two cantors in all of Kentucky, where she works at Keneseth Israel in Louisville.

Unlike much some religious music’s embrace of secular styles, like Christian rock, conservative synagogue sounds have not been so heavily secularized, cantors said. “What people like to listen to, we try to incorporate a little of that,” Jacobs said.

But the issue of a congregation’s education level crosses Judaism’s branch lines; Orthodox, Conservative and Reform synagogues are serving time-conscious career-driven Jews who have advanced degrees in law, medicine and other disciplines but possess woefully inadequate knowledge of their own faith.

“The average Jewish education level is less than that of a third-grade day school student; because of that lack of knowledge, people are insecure in a synagogue setting,” said Scott Colbert, cantor at the Reform synagogue Temple Emmanuel in Atlanta and head of Reform Judaism’s 450-member American Conference of Cantors, which holds their 50th anniversary convention July 2-6 in New York.

Keeping Jewish music strong was a key theme at this 56th annual Cantors Assembly at the Hilton Universal Hotel, where conventioneers installed legendary cantor Jacob Mendelson, of the Temple Israel Center in White Plains, N.Y., as their new president.

“We have to embrace the new while observing and respecting tradition; we can’t wait for the other arms of the Conservative movement to be in perfect in sync with us,” said Mendelson, who added that the East European Jewish music sung by Holocaust victims cannot be allowed, “to die along with them.”

_ David Finnigan

Quote of the Day: Steven Glamuzina, president of the Empire Liquor Store Association.

(RNS) “Some old-timers are against it. But I’ve had nobody call me from any churches.”

_ Steven Glamuzina, president of the Empire Liquor Store Association in New York, on a new state law that allows liquor stores to be open on Sundays. He was quoted by The New York Times.

DEA END RNS