Here’s what you’ll find today on the new Religion News Service website:
— The American missionary movement is turning 200 next month, and raising important questions about its future.
— Alaska Airlines is no longer serving touchy-feely prayer cards at 33,000 feet. (Sarah Palin thinks it’s another example of “people of faith feel their beliefs are constantly marginalized or even under outright attack.”)
— Muslim groups want NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly to resign for showing an incendiary film about Islam to nearly 1,500 officers and detectives.
— In New Orleans, they’re praying for the killings to stop, one block at a time.
Meanwhile, in other news:
Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney went for the jugular last night at the GOP debate in Florida. Asked about what role their religious faith would play in their presidencies, they and others answered (full transcript here):
Ron Paul: “Well, my religious beliefs wouldn’t affect it. My religious beliefs affect my character in the way I treat people and the way I live.”
Romney: “The conviction that the founders, when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, were writing a document that was not just temporary and not just for one small locale but really something which described the relationship between God and man — that’s something which I think a president would carry in his heart.”
Gingrich: “I think anyone who is president is faced with decisions so enormous that they should go to God. They should seek guidance. Because these are decisions beyond the ability of mere mortals to truly decide without some sense of what it is we should be doing. … we have a real obligation to recognize that, if you’re truly faithful, it’s not just an hour on Sundays or Saturdays or Fridays. It’s in fact something that should suffuse your life, to be a part of who you are. And in that sense, it is inextricably tied in with how you behave.”
Rick Santorum: “Faith is a very, very important part of my life, but it’s a very, very important part of this country … so when you say, well, faith has nothing to do with it, faith has everything to do with it. If our president believes that rights come to us from the state, everything government gives you, it can take away.”
Gingrich, however, wasn’t finished.
“One of the reasons I am running is there has been an increasingly aggressive war against religion and in particular against Christianity in this country, largely by largely by a secular elite and the academic news media and judicial areas.
The NYT tries to unpack why evangelicals don’t like Mormons: “Such concerns ultimately say more about the insecurities of the establishment denominations than about Mormonism itself.” Ouch. Romney, meanwhile, is talking about heaven and Jesus with Florida evangelicals.
The Forward says there’s one way to shore up Obama’s Jewish support: make Gingrich the GOP nominee.
Up in New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie is out maneuvering his Democratic foes on the gay marriage issue. And Oral Roberts‘ gay grandson is goin’ to the chapel, and he’s gonna get married.
Catholic Healthcare West, one of the nation’s largest health care systems, is dropping one of its three affiliations, and you can probably guess which one. Discuss.
Down in Texas, a pastor — a pastor!!!! — is accused of tossing his neighbor’s cat off a bridge. Remember the atheist student in Rhode Island who successfully sued to remove a prayer banner at her high school? Looks like a lot of people in Cranston want to throw her off a bridge, too.
Things are looking up in the Archdiocese of Boston as donations climb out of the crater left by the sexual abuse scandal that erupted 10 years ago. Not so much out in Peoria, where Bishop Daniel Jenky says the Obama administration’s mandate to provide contraception coverage will close “every Catholic school, hospital, and other public ministries of our church.”
Belief in God is at record levels in, of all places, Israel.
— Kevin Eckstrom
