President Obama has kept Bush-era protections for religious charities that receive federal funds and want to hire only their own kind — despite his own objections to the practice –in order to woo conservatives, according to the Wall Street Journal. The article, the second this week to criticize the White House’s faith-based office after the WaPo took a shot on Tuesday, reports that the president’s advisory council voted to allow religous charities that receive government money to display religious symbols in rooms where clients receive aid.

Church-state separationist Rev. Barry Lynn argues in an op-ed that allowing groups like Catholic Charities and World Vision, which both have members on the advisory council and receive millions of dollars in government grants, to vote on recommending policies that could benefit themselves is a conflict of interest.

The lawyer for the 10 Baptist missionaries charged with child kidnapping in Haiti told a judge that they should be allowed to return to the U.S. pending the outcome of their case. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson met yesterday and talked about the internal challenges both face in trying to hold together churches fractured by disagreements over homosexuality.

In shades of the Jack Abramoff scandal that sank Ralph Reed, the Alabama Christian Coalition has received thousands of dollars from the gambling industry while holding press conferences to denounce government efforts to shut down casinos. Former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor says he gave televangelist Pat Robertson a gold mining concession in 1999 and Robertson later offered to lobby the Bush administration on his behalf. A Robertson spokesman said there was no quid pro quo.

Arsonists have burned eight Texas churches since Jan. 1, putting pastors and congregations on edge. In the wake of a criminal negligence prosecution of two parents, officials in Oregon want to talk to members of the Follower of Christ church to prevent more faith-healing deaths. Mormons in California have held reconciliation services to help salve wounds caused by the Prop 8 fight. Churches of Christ are dropping their isolationism, even adding instruments to Sunday services!

British PM Gordon Brown decried the record-breaking increase in anti-Semitic incidents in England last year. A top Vatican official who is overseeing the investigation of U.S. nuns said Catholic religious orders are confronting a “crisis.” Ugandan evangelicals are peeved that President Obama called their Anti-Homosexuality Law “odious.” A Catholic bishop in Poland has apologized for saying Jews “invented the Holocaust.”