Jeff Diamant writes in Thursday’s RNS report about American Jews who are keeping their plans to move to Israel despite the increased violence in the Middle East since last week: Ideally, they said, they would have picked another week for the biggest move of their lives. Still, 220 Jews with one-way tickets to Israel boarded an El Al plane Wednesday (July 19), and those interviewed said the past eight days of hostilities between Lebanon and Israel never made them doubt their years-old decision to move to the Jewish nation. “Am I nervous? I don’t know if nervous is the word. Maybe cautious,” Ken Sheff of Passaic, N.J., said an hour before the 3:15 p.m. flight from New York’s Kennedy International Airport. He was moving to a town near Jerusalem with his wife and five children.

The new leader of the Southern Baptist Convention has pledged to continue to focus on New Orleans: The new leader of the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention toured New Orleans’ vast flood zone this week and, astonished at what he saw, promised to point more volunteers toward the region where tens of thousands of Baptist church members have toiled since the second day after Hurricane Katrina. In a neighborhood off Elysian Fields Avenue on Monday (July 17), the Rev. Frank Page chatted with nearly two dozen sweat-soaked Missouri teens gutting a house along with a few adult chaperones.

Joshua Mitnick reports that Israel’s Arabs feel caught in the middle of recent hostilities: Israel was reminded this week that its Arab citizens are just as vulnerable as the Jewish majority in the week-old war, when a rocket that landed in the city of Nazareth on Wednesday (July 19) killed two Arab children. But unlike the overwhelming support for the war among their Jewish countrymen, there is widespread criticism of the government from Israeli Arabs who feel caught in the middle. Arabs make up a fifth of Israel’s population, but they represent half the residents in the northern part of the country where Hezbollah has lobbed rockets.

Catholic bishops are “fishing” for new priests as their numbers continue to dwindle, reports Jeff Diamant: The bishops long have been aware of the statistics. There are now about 43,000 Catholic priests in America, down from more than 58,000 in 1965. As the American Catholic population has risen to about 70 million, more churches must share priests. So, Catholic bishops are trying to encourage priests to more actively recruit young men to the priesthood. A new video, “Fishers of Men,” is part of a program managed by the bishops that they hope will attract younger blood. The title comes from the Bible, in which Jesus told two fishermen and future apostles that if they followed him he’d make them “fishers of men.”