WaPo profiles the drift toward militancy for Faisal Shahzad, the man (left) accused of trying but failing to set off a car bomb in Times Square. This year’s blessing of the fleet along the Golf Coast seems more like a funeral as the giant BP oil spill destroys the region’s fishing industry.
As President Obama mulls his choice to replace Justice John Paul Stevens (the last remaining Protestant) on the Supreme Court, USC’s Marc Cooper has a suggestion: forget religious affiliation and pick an atheist. Speaking of suggestions, evangelist Franklin Graham has one for Obama: throw your weight around to let me pray at the Pentagon for the National Day of Prayer. South Carolina, meanwhile, may start its own state Day of Prayer.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has reinstated an openly gay Atlanta pastor and his partner to active clergy status after voting last summer to allow gay clergy; the Rev. Bradley Schmeling and his partner, the Rev. Darin Easler, had been at the center of a standoff between their congregations (which supported them) and the national denomination.
Three years after the Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed to a $660 million abuse-related settlement, a key part of the agreement — releasing accused priests’ personnel files — remains in limbo. A New York Times poll of U.S. Catholics finds them alienated from the hierarchy in Rome, but an overwhelming majority say the abuse scandal hasn’t prompted them to stop attending Mass, pull their contributions or consider leaving.
As he awaits sentencing on federal fraud charges, former kosher slaughterhouse chief Sholom Rubashkin hasn’t eaten all week in his new digs at the Black Hawk County Jail (where he’s facing state child labor charges) because the food’s not kosher.
WaPo looks at “Golden Compass” author Phillip Pullman’s rewrite of the Gospels, “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ,” and finds it “kind of inspiring.” Even the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue seems rather ho-hum about the book.
The founder of the lefty Israeli group Rabbis for Human Rights, Rabbi David Forman, has died at age 65, and Rabbi Moshe Hirsch, who led an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect that rejected the idea of Israel as a Jewish state, died at 86. Also in Israel, environmental activists are warning that the famed Jordan River could dry up by next year.
The Serbian Orthodox Church has dismissed its top leader, Archbishop Artemije, after millions in church funds were allegedly embezzled under his watch. A few weeks after a French Muslim woman was fined for wearing a face-covering veil while driving, a veiled Muslim woman in northern Italy was fined while walking to a mosque. Jean-Francois Cope, the majority leader in the French National Assembly and the mayor of Meaux, explains his support for a veil ban in today’s NYT.
