c. 2005 Religion News Service
Proposed Bill Would Undo Israeli High Court Ruling on Citizenship
JERUSALEM (RNS) A proposed bill in Israel, if passed, would undo last week’s controversial court ruling recognizing the citizenship of some converts to Judaism who finalized their conversions overseas.
Israel’s religious political parties are preparing the bill. It would effectively overturn last week’s High Court ruling recognizing the citizenship of Israel-based converts who had studied for non-Orthodox conversions in Israel but who had gone overseas to finalize their conversions.
The court ruling was made in response to combined petitions filed by the Reform and Conservative/Masorti movements in Israel, whose Israel-based conversions are not recognized by the state.
But during a special session in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, on Wednesday (April 6), Eli Yishai, who heads the ultra-Orthodox Sephardi party Shas, asserted that the court’s ruling constituted “the most dangerous decision since the founding of the state.”
Yishai insisted that Orthodox rabbis alone have the religious authority and expertise to facilitate the long process of conversion.
“When someone is sick, he goes to a doctor. When you want to build a house, you consult a builder. And when you want to become Jewish, you must go to a real Jew, an Orthodox Jew.”
Referring to the high rate of intermarriage among non-Orthodox Jews, Yishai said that the Reform movement “is not a stream of Judaism. It is the Movement for Disappearing Judaism.”
Tommy Lapid, head of the secular Shinui party, asserted that the Orthodox Rabbinate’s insistence that potential converts and their families lead a strictly religious lifestyle prior to and following the conversion amounts to religious coercion.
Lapid related a case in which a potential convert “told me that her Jewish Israeli husband is the obstacle to her conversion. This husband told his wife that he is unwilling to allow someone to look in his refrigerator to check his level of kashrut,” the observance of the kosher dietary laws.
Interior Minister Ophir Pines-Paz asserted that the High Court ruling “is evidence of the complete failure of the Chief Rabbinate to address reality. If there were more options in the existing conversion framework, there wouldn’t have been a court petition in the first place. It’s time for you to do some soul-searching,” the minister said to the religious legislators.
_ Michele Chabin
Christian Organizations Mourn Murdered Bible Translators in Guyana
(RNS) As they prepare for a Friday (April 8) memorial service, two Christian organizations are grieving the loss of a missionary couple in southwestern Guyana.
Richard and Charlene Hicks _ killed March 30 _ had been translating Bibles into the Wapishana language of a Guyanese indigenous people under the auspices of the Dallas-based Summer Institute of Linguistics and the Orlando, Fla.-based Wycliffe Bible Translators. Both are Christian organizations that study and document world languages with the goal of spreading the Gospel.
Local police believe the motive was robbery for the murders and the burning of the Hicks home in a region of Guyana near the Brazilian border, the language organizations said in separate statements Tuesday (April 5).
Bob Creson, president of Wycliffe, said in a statement that his organization shares the sadness of the couple’s families and colleagues.
“Yet we rejoice, knowing that the Hickses are now safely with the God they served, and we put our faith in the word they were faithfully translating in partnership with the Wapishana people,” Creson said.
The future of the Wapishana New Testament Scripture translation the Hickses had worked on since 1994 is yet to be determined, Wycliffe Bible Translators said in their statement. While much of the Hickses’ work was destroyed when their house was burned, copies of much of the translation survived, the organization said.
Guyanese police are pursuing suspects, one a ranch hand who worked with the Hickses, they told The Associated Press on Monday (April 4). They will be aided by the FBI in the investigation, the police chief said.
The Hickses were both raised in missionary families, Richard in South Africa and Charlene in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas.
Many Wapishana people and residents of the town of Lethem, near the Hickses’ farm, will likely attend Friday’s service, according to the Wycliffe statement.
_ Celeste Kennel-Shank
Conservative Christians Hail 18th State Amendment Banning Gay Marriage
(RNS) Seeing a trend, conservative Christian groups are hailing a vote by Kansans in favor of a constitutional amendment that affirms heterosexual marriage.
With the vote Tuesday (April 5), Kansas has become the 18th state to pass an amendment that bans gay marriage, with about 70 percent of voters approving it.
“The (Kansas) voters’ voices were loud and their message unmistakable,” said Kevin Theriot, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based legal group. “As voters all across the country have shown, and have affirmed once more in Kansas, Americans want to preserve and protect our most cherished institution.”
Tom Minnery, vice president of government and public policy for Focus on the Family Action, agreed.
“The citizens of Kansas have helped ensure the sanctity of marriage in their state,” he said in a statement from the Colorado Springs, Colo., organization.
The Alliance for Marriage, a Washington-based organization that has advocated for a federal constitutional amendment defining marriage as an institution involving a man and a woman, said the Kansas vote will help that cause.
“It is a prelude to the real battle,” said Matt Daniels, the alliance’s president, in a statement.
Not all religious groups were happy with the Kansas vote.
“There will be negative and profound `unintended consequences’ to the Kansas constitutional vote,” said Sylvia Rhue, director of Equal Partners in Faith, a liberal-leaning network of religious leaders, in a statement.
“Real families will be harmed in real life ways. EPF condemns this action of injustice by an overwhelming majority of Kansas voters.”
In New England, however, there’s another trend, as a bill in Connecticut cleared another hurdle Wednesday that, if passed and signed into law, would recognize gay civil unions. Vermont has already approved civil unions and Massachusetts has approved of gay marriage, both following lawsuits.
The state Senate in Connecticut approved the bill 27-9. It would make that state the first to recognize civil unions without court intervention.
_ Adelle M. Banks
World Vision Pushes for End to War in Uganda
(RNS) Christian organization World Vision convened legislators, human rights advocates and others Thursday (April 7) to launch a report on northern Uganda and urge the U.S. government to take an active role in ending the conflict there.
World Vision’s report, “Pawns of Politics: Children, Conflict and Peace in Northern Uganda,” outlines the roots and effects of the 19-year civil war, which has forced 1.6 million people from their homes.
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., spoke about visiting northern Uganda in December 2004 and the children he met, a few of the more than 20,000 who have been abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group, that forces them to serve as child soldiers.
“It is a forgotten war,” Brownback said. “With us moving to peace in southern Sudan, there can be an end to conflict in northern Uganda.”
Rory Anderson, World Vision senior policy adviser for Africa and principal author of the report, described for panelists and listeners the plight of child soldiers.
“The face of this conflict is children,” Anderson said.
In a visit three weeks ago, she met an 11-year-old who said he was forced to bite another child to death, she said. Brownback, sitting nearby, grimaced.
Anderson said the Ugandan churches have played a lead role in working to end the conflict through prayer. Also important, she said, are efforts to counter disinformation claims by the rebel army, which tells children it has supernatural powers.
John Amos, an actor who has traveled to African countries since the 1960s, including Uganda, implored Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to visit Uganda.
“I vow to God,” Amos said, “if I should ever forget what I’ve seen there, may I return as one of those children.”
World Vision and the panelists called on the U.S. government to pressure the United Nations and the government of Sudan, which has funded and given haven to the rebel army.
Other panelists included Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill.; Carolyn Davis, editorial writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer; and Mulenga Katyoka, international advocacy director for Amnesty International USA.
_ Celeste Kennel-Shank
Bookmakers say Nigerian and Italian Favored to Become Next Pope
(RNS) Irish bookmakers are making a Nigerian and an Italian co-favorites, at 11-4 odds, to replace John Paul II as the next pope.
Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze, 72, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and 71-year-old Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, archbishop of Milan, are the leading contenders, according to Irish bookmakers Paddy Power.
The bookmakers have been taking bets on the next pope for the past five years. Five months ago, Paddy Power gave Tettamanzi 5-1 odds, but the odds have shortened since then.
Next in the running is 62-year-old Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Madariaga, archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, at 9-2, followed by the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the former Holy Office), the 77-year-old German-born Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, at 7-1. In fifth place is a Brazilian, the 70-year-old Franciscan Cardinal Claudio Hummes, archbishop of Sao Paulo, quoted at 9-1.
Three cardinals are then offered at 14-1: 60-year-old Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, archbishop of Vienna; 68-year-old Cardinal Lucas Ortega y Alamino, archbishop of Havana, Cuba; and 68-year-old Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, archbishop of Florence.
All other cardinals, including the Americans _ who Vatican experts say have virtually no chance _ are quoted at 16-1.
_ Robert Nowell
Quote of the Day: Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr.
(RNS) “We want to be faithful to our own convictions, but we recognize that we will inevitably be doing business with companies and individuals whose convictions on some of these issues may differ from our own. … This is not a surprising phenomenon.”
_ R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., on his school’s decision to lay off close to 100 employees and start a maintenance agreement with Sodexho, a gay-friendly company that is rehiring most of the workers. He was quoted by The Courier-Journal.
MO/PH END RNS
