President Obama has proclaimed this Friday through Sunday national days of prayer and remembrance of 9/11 and asked Americans to honor the victims through memorial services, ringing bells and candlelight vigils. The U.S. Catholic Bishops say Americans should take a moment to pray for workers and the unemployed, too, for that matter, this Labor Day.
Episcopal leaders have nominated a new bishop in Pittsburgh, where a majority of the diocese seceded about a year ago, while Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams met privately on Wednesday with seven conservative Episcopal bishops. The Church of England dropped its lawsuit against a photographer who used a sacred altar for an erotic photoshoot and 10 nuns at an Episcopal convent in Maryland converted to Catholicism over homosexuality. “This is like watching your child go off to college,” said Episcopal Bishop Donald Parsons “It is too bad that they have gone, but their new learning experiences will be good.” The breakaway Anglican Church in North America elected two bishops.
China and India are deploying soldiers by the truckload to an eastern Tibetan town once known as a center of Buddhist learning that has now become a tinderbox in relations between the world’s two most populous nations. An Ohio teen who ran away from home to convert to Christianity need not fear her parents’ wrath, according to her mother’s attorney and a woman is suing Billy Graham for allegedly excluding black churches from his evangelism.
Catholic leaders in Boston are defending Cardinal Sean O’Malley’s appearance at Ted Kennedy’s funeral, a Catholic journalist who has criticized Italian president Silvio Berlusconi for being a playboy resigned after he was accused of being gay and harrasing his lover’s wife, and a candidate for governor in Virginia wrote a college thesis twenty years ago at Pat Robertson’s Regent University that said the government should favor married couples over “cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators.”
A San Diego jury has rejected a former public school teacher’s claim that she was fired for dancing to religious songs and a dozen religious groups sent a letter to the Senate asking for a law allowing individuals to wear religious head gear — including turbans, yarmulkes and hijabs — in driver’s license photos. A federal court in Indiana has asked a Christian school and a former teacher to resolve their differences using Matthew 18:15-17, another federal court said a man busted with methamphetamine is different than Native Americans who use peyote in religious ceremonies, and three churches in Phoenix are suing to be allowed to ring their bells.
Ring dem bells, as the Duke would say.
