Friday’s Religion News Roundup

Let us raise a pint today to the late Joe Feuerherd (at left), the hard-charging editor-in-chief of National Catholic Reporter, who died yesterday at the too young age of 48 after a valiant fight with cancer. Joe, the rest of us ink-stained wretches were privileged to count you among us, and we’ll miss you. From […]

Let us raise a pint today to the late Joe Feuerherd (at left), the hard-charging editor-in-chief of National Catholic Reporter, who died yesterday at the too young age of 48 after a valiant fight with cancer. Joe, the rest of us ink-stained wretches were privileged to count you among us, and we’ll miss you.

From the Dept. of Wow, How the Mighty Have Fallen, the Crystal Cathedral is Southern California is being put up for sale, according to the LAT. Under the agreement, the architectural landmark would be sold to a real estate investment group, with a 15-year lease-back and the option to buy back the church’s core facilities.

The Catholic Diocese of Rockford, Ill., is pulling out of all adoption services rather than be forced to accommodate same-sex couples under the state’s new civil unions law.


Here in Washington, conservative activists are threatening legal action if military chaplains aren’t barred from participating in same-sex weddings, as the Navy briefly proposed before putting it on the shelf for now.

A federal judge says a Nazarene pastor will be able to pray in Jesus’ name during a Memorial Day ceremony this weekend. “The government cannot gag citizens when it says it is in the interest of national security, and it cannot do it in some bureaucrat’s notion of cultural homogeneity,” U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes wrote.

A Tennessee school district that’s being sued by the ACLU over alleged favoritism toward Christianity says church-state interactions are inevitable and not all that bad, according to the Tennesseean.

A federal appeals court says a Christian pastor is free to hand out leaflets outside a massive Arab-American festival in Dearborn, Mich., and has the right to sue the city for damages for trying to keep him away.

Atlanta-area megachurch pastor Bishop Eddie Long has settled four sexual misconduct lawsuits from men who say he took advantage of them in his church’s youth academy.

Godfather’s Pizza magnate and GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain is backpedaling on an earlier statement that he would not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet. But would he serve sausage pizza at his cabinet meetings?


We’ve heard a lot about a single-payer health care system, but HuffPo writes about a single pray-er health care system.

Teen actor-turned-evangelist Kirk Cameron is picking a fight with wheelchair-bound cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who recently described heaven as a “fairy story for people who are afraid of the dark.” Says the former Mike Seaver: “To say anything negative about Stephen Hawking is like bullying a blind man. He has an unfair disadvantage, and that gives him a free pass on some of his absurd ideas.”

Time magazine is reporting, via La Stampa, that an Italian priest “in the archdiocese of an influential Italian Cardinal who has been working with Pope Benedict XVI” on abuse reforms was arrested for allegedly asking a Moroccan drug dealer to arrange sexual liaisons with 16-year-old boys.

And finally this, to kick off your long holiday weekend: A 52-year-old woman showed up naked at a police station in suburban Chicago, saying the “spirits” had told had led her there.

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