Thursday’s Religion News Roundup

Funeral services will be held today for 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, the precocious aspiring politician who died in Saturday’s massacre in Tucson; she’ll be buried in a custom-made casket crafted by Trappist monks in Iowa. From the Dept. of Thank God for Small Miracles, protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka agreed not to […]

Funeral services will be held today for 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, the precocious aspiring politician who died in Saturday’s massacre in Tucson; she’ll be buried in a custom-made casket crafted by Trappist monks in Iowa. From the Dept. of Thank God for Small Miracles, protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka agreed not to picket outside any of the Arizona funerals.

President Obama tried to summon the better angels of Americans’ nature last night in eulogizing the victims of the massacre (full text here). There wasn’t a lot of overt biblical language from POTUS but the speech was suffused with a Reinhold Niebuhr sense of Christian realism:

“Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. … Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath,” Obama said.


Speaking of Tucson, Sarah Palin continues to draw criticism for her choice of the term “blood libel” in what she called a “reprehensible” attempt to link her campaign rhetoric to the shootings in Tucson (Gallup says most Americans are dubious of the connection).

NYT’s Laurie Goodstein probes the history of the loaded phrase; WaPo’s Ruth Marcus says it’s classic Palin: “attack and provoke,” David Gibson calls it “overreach,” Mark Silk labels it “bad taste” and Alan Dershowitz calls it much ado about nothing.

Looking ahead to 2012, Religion Dispatches’ Sarah Posner unwraps Mike Huckabee‘s potential “Bapticostal” run for the White House, and conservative favorite Sam Brownback calls his inauguration as Kansas governor a “gift from God.”

Remember Terry Jones, the Gainesville pastor who wanted to BBQ a pile of Qurans? Now he wants to put the Islamic holy book on trial. Says Imam Muhammad Musri, from the Islamic Society of Central Florida, who helped defuse tensions last time around: “My first reaction was, ‘Here we go again.'”

An appeals court in balmy Saskatchewan says marriage commissioners can’t decline to perform same-sex weddings for religious reasons. Over in Ontario, Catholic schools are under fire for not allowing gay-straight student alliances after one school official made the unfortunate comparison to Nazi student groups.

The Archdiocese of Boston, which came under fire last year for rejecting a student with two lesbian mothers, has backtracked a bit, saying its schools do not “discriminate against or exclude any categories of students.”


Reports are circulating around Rome that B16 could approve the miracle to beatify JP2 as soon as tomorrow, putting the late pope one step away from sainthood barely six years after his death. The head of the schismatic Society of St. Pius X (see Williamson, Richard) doesn’t like B16’s planned interfaith summit in Assisi.

Haitians, still struggling one year on, marked the first anniversary of the devastating earthquake that killed more than 230,000 and left 1 million+ homeless. Christians in Cairo, still on edge following deadly attacks on New Years Day, clashed with police yesterday.

(AP photo)

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