Tuesday’s Religion News Roundup: Sandy theodicy, Muslim voters and Halloween in Poland

Stephen Prothero's take on God and the storm. Muslim support for Obama is strong but weaker. And the Catholic Church in Poland takes a stand against Halloween.

Evan-Amos as part of Vanamo Media vis Wikimedia Commons

Sandy was tough on NYC, the Jersey Shore and thereabouts last night, but much kinder to the RNS world headquarters in Washington, D.C. So here's your ready-to-read roundup. 

Stephen Prothero offers another inoculation (Rev. James Martin provided yesterday's) against those who would find God's will behind the havoc of this deathly storm, or the presidential race.

“When it comes to storms like Sandy, I just don't believe in a God who drowns black babies in Haiti yet refuses to drown out the voices of cranky white men who claim so irreverently to speak in His name,” Prothero writes.


Omar Sacirbey reports that most Muslim voters are casting ballots for President Obama, but their support is not likely to be quite as overwhelming as four years ago, and could matter in swing states.

College Corner: Roman Catholic Xavier University in Ohio reverses its decision to reject the federal contraception mandate.

Tufts University's chapter of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship is no longer an official Tufts student group because it would not back down from its insistence that its leader subscribe to basic Christian beliefs.

In other Massachusetts Christian collegiate news: Can't give this thing away. Yet another Christian institution walks away from a free 217-acre campus in the beautiful Berkshires, which the wealthy Green family is trying to gift. 

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Victoria Ann Thorpe is trying to save everyone on death row in Washington state from execution — including her big sister. 


A suspect rammed his car into a Fort Worth-area church, and then killed the pastor, assaulting him with an electric guitar. The suspect is now also dead.

Danish Jews are upset that the organizers of a Copenhagen diversity festival have asked them not to display their Israeli flags, though no other groups, including Palestinian ones sharing a food booth with the Jews, had been asked to hide theirs.

And tomorrow is Halloween, a mostly American event that is taking root elsewhere. Please not in Poland, says the Polish Roman Catholic Church. 

“This kind of fun, tempting children like candy, also poses the real possibility of great spiritual damage, even destroying spiritual life,” the archbishop of Szczecin-Kamien wrote.

Also in Poland, that nation's supreme court has opened the way for a blasphemy verdict for a rock musician who tore up the Bible on stage.

Gunmen killed a Muslim cleric in the Russian republic of Dagestan, exacerbating tensions between moderate and militant Muslims in the region, near Chechnya, where hardliners want to create an Islamic state.


– Lauren Markoe, reporting from Washington, D.C., where we are low on milk and high on candy corn.

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