Thursday, September 02, 2010
Thursday’s roundup
More than 50 leading Muslim groups said it is "unethical,
insensitive and inhumane" to oppose the planned Islamic center and
mosque near Ground Zero.
Meanwhile, the Council on American-Islamic Relations released three public service announcements highlighting American Muslims' roles in 9/11 as first responders to, and victims of, the attack. A former military interrogator in Iraq and a national security expert, together with faith leaders, said Park51, as the NYC project is known, would deprive terrorists of a recruiting tool.
More than 90 clergy have signed a public letter castigating the widespread mischaracterizations of President Obama's Christian faith and saying that "the elephant in the room is race."
Obama said Wednesday that he is "cautiously hopeful" about the prospects of a new Middle East peace deal after meeting with leaders at the White House on Wednesday. Before a working dinner with the leaders, Obama mentioned that both Jews and Muslims are celebrating holy months (Elul and Ramadan, respectively), a rare shared period of devotion.
For both, Obama said, it's "a time to reflect on right and wrong; a time to ponder one's place in the world; a time when people of two great religions remind the world of a truth that is both simple and profound, that each of us, all of us, in our hearts and in our lives, are capable of great and lasting change." Then Abbas slipped a whoopee cushion under Netanyahu.
Thousands of Shiite Muslims in Pakistan mourned the 35 victims of a triple bombing that sought to inflame sectarian tensions.
John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, has asked a federal judge to order prison officials to allow him and other Muslims to pray as a group, in accordance with Muslim practice.
Funding a Catholic group through student activity fees at the University of Wisconsin does not violate the Establishment Clause, a federal appeals court ruled. An Illinois city has given up on trying to collect a tax bill from a Hindu woman who refused to remove a tree from her property because she says Hinduism prohibits the needless killing of any living thing.
Dozens of children whose parents were missionaries for a Florida-based organization were sexually and physically abused at an African boarding school, according to a new report.
The Mormon church says it has changed its genealogical database to prevent the names of Jews killed during the Holocaust from being posthumously baptized. But not everyone is convinced the problem is settled, the SLT reports.
The United Methodist Church is using the results of a massive congregational survey to halt a decades-long drops in members. RNS reported on the study last month.
Focus on the Family says schools' anti-bullying and tolerance programs promote political aims like same-sex marriage. The Toronto Vegetarian Association barred the Seventh-day Adventist Church from having a booth at the annual Vegetarian Food Fair because of the church's opposition to homosexuality.
Physicist Stephen Hawking says God wasn't necessary for the creation of the universe.
Posted by Daniel Burke at 9:58 am
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Wednesday, September 01, 2010
Wednesday’s roundup
The State Department says the imam planning to build the Islamic center near Ground Zero is wrapping up his diplomatic tour of the Persian Gulf early, returning to the U.S. on Wednesday.
On Tuesday in Dubai, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf told a group of intellectuals that the fight over the mosque is about more than "a piece of real estate" and could shape the future of Muslim relations in the U.S.
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that a state investigation of the finances behind Park51, as the project is known, would set a "terrible precedent." Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., disagreed, saying it is essential to find out who is behind the project. "A number of terror plots have emanated from mosques," King told the AP.
A group of teenagers fired a shotgun at a small-town mosque in western New York during two nights of drive-by harassment, according to authorities. Austria's far right Freedom Party has designed an online video game that has players collect points by shooting mosques, minarets, and muezzins, who call Muslims to prayer.
A new Newsweek poll confirms what last month's Pew and Time magazine polls have already shown: About 20 percent of Americans think President Obama is a Muslim.
The president is opening a new round of Mideast peacemaking today in Washington, as he brings Israeli and Palestinian leaders to the White House for their first face-to-face talks since 2008. On cue, a Palestinian gunman opened fire one a Israeli vehicle in the West Bank, killing four passengers, and Israeli settlers responded by vowing to break a freeze on West Bank settlements.
As expected, the Obama administration on Tuesday asked a federal judge to lift a restraining order blocking federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
A conservative legal group that includes Christians is trying to force California's Gov. Schwarzenegger and attorney general to defend Prop 8 in court. Gay couples cannot divorce in Texas, where they also cannot get married, a state appeals court has ruled.
A federal lawsuit against the new health-care bill alleges that the legislation violates the religious freedom of the plaintiffs by funding abortion and establishing the "secular religion of Socialism."
Pennsylvania law enforcement will not bring charges against a 40-year-old Catholic priest who impregnated a 19-year-old girl; the Vatican, though, is looking into defrocking him. The priest and the girl, who has given birth, are evidently living together now, the AP reports.
James Dobson and Glenn Beck touched their rings together and activated their Wonder Twins powers, Beck said. The conservative commentator noted, though, that several other conservative Christian leaders declined to enlist in his "Black Robe Regiment," saying they'd "lose half their congregation." The RNS story on Beck's courtship of evangelicals is here.
Indonesian Buddhists succeeded in getting a "Buddha Bar" closed, and its owners were fined about $110,000 for causing mental distress, according to Reuters. NPR looks at whether religious belief confers an evolutionary advantage.
Oklahoma City has rented out a room to a Satanist Church for a public exorcism ceremony; a Rastafarian forgot to say that his dreds were religious, which means the security company that refused to hire him did not discriminate against his religion, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court ruled.
Posted by Daniel Burke at 10:09 am
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Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Tuesday’s roundup
The developer behind the Islamic cultural center and mosque planned
near Ground Zero said it never occurred to him that his project would
stir up so much controversy.
Sharif El-Gamal has quite a checkered past, according to the AP, with arrests for disorderly conduct, driving while intoxicated, petit larceny, patronizing a prostitute, and trespassing. A former tenant also says El-Gamal roughed him up in 2005 when the tenant was a month late on the rent. "I regret many things that I did in my youth," El-Gamal said in a statement.
A new poll finds that 71 percent of New Yorkers want the Park51 project moved further away from Ground Zero. The same number want NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to investigate funding of the project.
A 21-year-old film student was indicted on Monday on charges of attempted murder and assault as hate crimes for slashing a Muslim taxi driver last week. A suspicious fire at a mosque construction site in Tennessee has local Muslims worried that their project has been dragged into the Ground Zero debate. The Council on American-Islamic Relations is suing the Illinois State Police on behalf of a local Muslim cleric whose chaplaincy appointment was revoked last month. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a suit on behalf of Somali Muslims who were denied prayer time and faced harassment.
U.S. Muslim leaders say they are stepping up efforts to unify their communities and get them politically involved to counter the recent spate of anti-Muslim sentiment.
The man suspected of gunning down a lay Mormon bishop in California was mentally ill and believed the church wronged him when he was a member back in the 1980s, family members told the AP. Mormon officials are in talks with China to secure religious freedom for Mormons living in the communist country.
In yet another Obama-Lincoln parallel, a New York University law professor says that just as some Americans suspect Obama is a closet Muslim, a handful in the 1860s believed Honest Abe was a secret Catholic.
Glenn Beck sought the imprimatur of 20 heavyweight evangelicals like James Dobson at a secret meeting weeks before he went all Billy Graham on us, according to WaPo. He wants to lead, but will evangelicals follow? One Southern Baptist dean dismissed Beck's message as "just Fox News at prayer."
A Belgian Cardinal who told a sex abuse victim to hush up says he was "naive" to get involved. Germany's Catholic bishops approved new guidelines that require church officials report to prosecutors suspected cases of sexual abuse of minors. An Oregon couple pleaded not guilty to manslaughter charges in the faith-healing death of their infant son.
A new study says that American women derive more happiness from religious services on Sunday than shopping. The Dalai Lama has condemned cage confinement for hens.
Posted by Daniel Burke at 9:41 am
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Monday, August 30, 2010
Monday’s roundup
President Obama marked the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on Sunday with a visit to the recovering city and a quote from the Book of Job.
"`There is hope for a tree if it be cut down that it will sprout again, and that its tender branch will not cease,' " Obama said, drawing from Job 14.
Fortunately, he stopped there, because the rest of the chapter, like a lot of Job, is pretty grim. For example, a following verse says that, unlike trees, "man dies and is laid low; he breathes his last and is no more."
In his first comments on the polls that showed nearly 20 percent of Americans believe he is Muslim, Obama told NBC Nightly News, "the facts are the facts" and blamed the mistaken rumours on "a network of misinformation that in a new media era can get churned out there constantly."
In a fiery Sunday sermon in Arkansas, Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, said people who wrongly believe Obama is Muslim are catering to the president's political foes.
Neither speeches are likely to please conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who sharply criticized (again) Obama's religious beliefs in his "Restoring Honor" rally this weekend in Washington.
Beck's own language was remarkably faith-fueled, a kind of civil religion on steroids, as he enlisted and exhorted his "black-robed regiment." Does that mean he's going to recruit Catholic priests? Southern Baptist political guru Richard Land says he was "stunned" by Beck's missionary rhetoric, saying "he sounded like Billy Graham."
Back to Katrina, the NYT looks at how churches in black neighborhoods still haven't recovered from the storm, calling the Lower Ninth Ward "a desolated disgrace." The AP writes about a Catholic priest still missing after five years.
In the wake of a wave of hate crimes against U.S. Muslims, a coalition of religious groups, including Baptists, Jews, Christians and Muslims are meeting with Department of Justice officials. The FBI is investigating a fire at a Tennessee mosque construction site that had drawn anti-Islamic protests. The Council on American-Islamic Relations also says a mock pig emblazoned with the message "No Mosque in NYC" was left in a California mosque's mailbox.
The chairwoman of a NYC committee that approved the Islamic cultural center to be built blocks from Ground Zero says an interfaith center should be added to the blueprints. The imam spearheading the project, who is on a diplomatic tour of the Middle East, told an Abu-Dhabi newspaper that the "election season" has had an adverse impact on the debate about Park51. The AP says, "Whatever the outcome, the uproar over a planned Islamic center near the former World Trade Center site is shaping up as a signal event in the story of American Islam."
A lay bishop at a Mormon church was fatally shot as he was was doing administrative paperwork on Sunday between services.
The former leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium urged a victim of serial sexual abuse by a bishop to keep silent for a year, until the bishop - the victim's own uncle - could retire, according to tapes made by the victim last April and published over the weekend in two Belgian newspapers.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, founder and now spiritual head of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas Party, declared that God should send a plague to strike down the Palestinians and their leader, Mahmoud Abbas. Shas is a member of the current Israeli governing coalition, whose leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is about to enter into formal peace talks with Abbas.
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's attempt to convert dozens of young women to Islam during a visit to Italy drew an angry reaction from Italian media. A motorist fired pepper spray Saturday at a group of demonstrators from Westboro Baptist Church outside a funeral for a U.S. Marine in Nebraska.
More than 1,000 documents, including some dating back to the beginning of the Nation of Islam, have been found in Detroit, the city where the movement started 80 years ago.
An Arizona federal district court dismissed a complaint by a Quaker that the use of his federal income tax payments for military spending substantially burdens his religious exercise. The Kentucky Supreme Court held that the Medi-Share Program operated by the American Evangelistic Association and the Christian Share Ministry is subject to regulation by the state.
Posted by Daniel Burke at 10:01 am
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Friday, August 27, 2010
Friday’s roundup
CNN says some (semi) high-profile evangelicals are under fire for their participation in tomorrow's "Restore Honor" rally hosted by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin in DC; some Christians are nervous about Beck's Mormon faith, even though they worked with Mormons to outlaw gay marriage in California.
Conservatives are happy, though, that the FCC will appeal a federal judge's ruling that struck down its policy against "fleeting expletives" on TV.
The NYT profiles the developer of the Park51 Islamic center and finds that he "has yet to secure financing, hire an architect, incorporate the nonprofit entity that will run the center, start its fund-raising, recruit its board members, or present formal feasibility studies and business plans to community meetings."
WaPo looks into the widespread hostility directed at U.S. Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan. The Muslim cab driver who was stabbed by a drunken 21-year-old met with NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg as Hizzoner tries to calm tensions in Gotham. Muslim leaders say they're concerned about growing "anti-Muslim hysteria."
Conservatives -- and not a lot of others -- are pushing back against a proposed bill that wouldn't let them hire and fire based on religion if they receive government grants. An "Episcopal" school that's really conservative Anglican in Fort Worth, Texas, has denied admission to a 4-year-old because she has two mommies. The strippers are back outside an Ohio church whose members picketed the ladies' strip club.
The U.S. ambassador to Malta, Doug Kmiec -- a Catholic Republican who endorsed President Obama -- is said to be in stable condition following a car wreck in California that killed an elderly nun and injured a priest. Speaking of stable condition, a new study says doctors with deep religious beliefs are more likely to take steps to keep you alive, while those who aren't religious are more willing to pull the plug.
Pope Benedict XVI praised Mother Teresa on her 100th birthday as an "exemplary model of Christian virtue." In New York last night, a few hundred outraged Catholics rallied outside the Empire State Building to vent their anger that building managers wouldn't light the iconic spire in Mother T's blue and white (it was red, white and blue to celebrate the anniversary of women's suffrage).
The 33 trapped miners in Chile have asked for statues of saints and a crucifix to create a shrine in their underground encampment. Egyptian Muslims are steaming (almost literally) about consecutive powers failures at the height of Ramadan. A South African pastor angered his flock for saying "Jesus had HIV" (he was trying to take away the HIV stigma, he says). A Saudi cleric was told to stop issuing fatwas after a recent edict told Muslims to stay away from supermarkets with female cashiers.
Posted by Kevin Eckstrom at 9:18 am
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Thursday, August 26, 2010
Thursday’s roundup
More than 70 Christian leaders, including heads of denominations and evangelical heavyweights, say they are "deeply troubled" by the questioning of President Obama's Christian faith. "We understand that these are contentious times," the leaders say in an open letter, "but the personal faith of our leaders should not be up for debate."
The GOP is trying to distance itself from the RNC's new media director, who tweeted that Obama himself might be among the 20 percent of Americans who think he's Muslim. Glen Beck said Obama is "not a Christian." Conservatives are trying to stir up controversy about Obama speaking at Xavier University, a Catholic school, at a Katrina memorial on Saturday.
One of the co-organizers of Park51, the mosque and cultural center planned near Ground Zero, said moving the project is "off the table for now." Park51 got a boost on Wednesday from a coalition of supporters that includes families of 9/11 victims, reports the AP, which also profiled the real estate developer behind the project.
The NYT looks at world opinion of our raucous debate over Park51 and finds that in almost every country people see the debate as confirmation of their pre-existing feelings about the country - good or bad. I think I'm with Jon Stewart on this one.
A Muslim taxi driver in NYC was stabbed by a 21-year-old film student in what police are calling a hate crime. A man urinated on prayer rugs in a Queens, N.Y. mosque; another mosque in Calif. was vandalized with signs saying "No temple for the God of terrorism at Ground Zero. ANB." ANB stands for American Nationalist Brotherhood, says the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The armed militia group that had planned to protect a Florida church's Quran burning on 9/11 has had second thoughts, according to CNN. The NYT profiles the pastor behind the burning, Terry Jones, who says he has "no experience of (the Quran) whatsoever. I only know what the Bible says." WaPo finds that "shariah" has become a rallying cry for American critics of Islam.
USA Today profiles Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric who has become the Osama bin Laden of the Internet.
Denver's Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput said "systematic discrimination" against the church is emerging in the U.S. and Europe. More than 100 religious charities sent a letter to Congress protesting a provision in pending legislatin that would prohibit them from receiving federal money if they make personnel decision based on religion.
Disgruntled former members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will be voting to create their new denomination on Friday. ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson asks "how this separation in the body of Christ will serve the ministry and message of reconciliation entrusted to us by God." The Minneapolis Star-Tribune finds that, a year after voting to allow sexually active gay clergy, the ELCA remains largely intact.
Hundreds of Catholic nuns and impoverished Indians are celebrating the 100th anniversary of Mother Teresa's birthday. The Rev. Jim Martin has a nice meditation on Teresa's spiritual struggles over at HuffPo. Pope Benedict XVI will soon announce Oct. 9 as the feast day for Cardinal Newman.
A Las Vegas man is suing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because he hurt his back baptizing heavy people. An Italian cobbler has made identical shoes for the pope and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill in a bid to promote ecumenism. They are white satin. Benedict's taste runs more scarlet, I hear.
Posted by Daniel Burke at 9:48 am
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Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Wednesday’s roundup
Republican leaders say they were just joking when suggesting that President Obama is part of the 20 percent of Americans who believe POTUS is a Muslim; WaPo's Howard Kurtz wonders if any of this is the media's fault. Two top Democratic strategists who specialize in religion blame "a widespread and constant misinformation campaign by Fox News and right wing bloggers and radio hosts."
A new poll finds that Americans don't necessarily think Islam encourages violence, but their views of Islam have worsened in the past five years. The ACLU and others have filed suit against the FBI over allegations of surveillance of Muslims.
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave another impassioned defenseof Park51, the Islamic center near Ground Zero, saying American cannot "compromise our commitment to fighting terror with freedom." New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan is worried about the tenor of the debate in Gotham. The NYT says the area near Park51 was once known as Little Syria. Up in the Bronx, the trial of four men accused of plotting to blow up synagogues in 2009 got underway yesterday.
An amred Christian militia (does anyone else get the irony here?) says it will stand guard outside a church in Gainesville, Fla., that plans to burn Qurans on 9/11. Other Gainesville faith leaders are planning a counter-demonstration. A Muslim member of the 101st Airborne is seeking conscientious objector status so he won't be forced to fight other Muslims in Afghanistan.
Theclass on gay marriage at (Catholic) Seton Hall University that got the local archbishop all riled up is set to go on as scheduled, the professor says. The White House says it will appeal a judge's ruling that put a halt to federal funding of embryonic stem cell research; the NIH says some current research will continue.
Looks like the Washington Times (owned by leaders of the Unification Church) is being sold to a company affiliated with the Unification Church. Right-wing bomb thrower Ann Coulter blasted the "fake Christians" who disinvited her from a conservative convention after she agreed to speak to gay conservatives.
Accusations of child abuse in a New Jersey Jewish enclave have the rabbis upsetafter the boy's father went to police instead of the rabbis first. Eventhough a federal judge has ruled South Carolina's state-issued "I Believe" license plates unconstitutional, the state attorney general hasgreen-lighted similar plates that are sponsored by a private group. A federal appeals court has resurrected a defamation suitagainst ABC's 20/20 program for selective editing that made a California prosperity gospel preacher sound richer than he really was.
Scottish songstress Susan Boyle will singfor Pope Benedict XVI in Glasgow next month (singing a decidedly Protestant (and Swedish) favorite, "How Great Thou Art.") Meanwhile, craftsmen are busy making the ambo (pulpit) and chair for B16's Mass.
Speaking of the Brits, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was toldby Anglican bishops in Africa that "homosexuality is incompatible" withthe Bible. And, in case anyone needed further proof of the ginormous cultural gap between Western and Global South Anglicans, Gallup says 55 percent of sub-Saharan Africans believe in witchcraft.
New DNA testson Adolf Hitler's surviving relatives indicate the Butcher of Berlin had Jewish and even African branches in his family tree. In France, there are serious signs of friction between President Nicolas Sarkozy and the Catholic Church over the mass deportation of about 200 Gypsies. Pakistan says it will clamp down on extremist groups trying to provide aid to the millions of people displaced by flood waters.
The Wall Street Journal posts an architectural critique of the iconic chapel at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs (not entirely sure what the news peg is here).
Posted by Kevin Eckstrom at 10:08 am
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Tuesday, August 24, 2010
… and I’m an (ex-) Mormon
You may have seen those "...and I'm a Mormon" ads from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, trying to knock down stereotypes about clean-cut blond-hair blue-eyed Mormons.
Now Chad Hardy, the guy behind those "Men on a Mission" and "Mormon Muffins" calendars, has a video of his own, and it's not exactly what the folks in Salt Lake City had in mind:
Posted by Kevin Eckstrom at 3:59 pm
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Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Tuesday’s roundup
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, on the first stop of his 15-nation goodwill tour though Muslim nations, spoke expansively about religious law and Islam, but had little to say about the controversy surrounding his plans to build an Islamic center and mosque two blocks north of Ground Zero in NYC.
A Bahraini man asked Rauf, "Why don't we just change the place, to show that Islam is not there to threaten everybody, that Islam is a religion of peace?"
To which Rauf responded, "The opposition to us has come from outside the community. The fact that there has been this misunderstanding shows the need for the project."
The AP finds that Muslims in the Middle East are pretty indifferent to all the Park51 hubub. Over in Europe, though, President Obama is getting a lot of grief over his position on the project, with a German paper calling his lukewarm support "cowardly."
NY Gov. Paterson and Archbishop Timothy Dolan are meeting today to discuss the controversy. Greek Orthodox Christians wonder why their efforts to rebuild a church damaged on 9/11 haven't received the attention of politicians.
A NYT columnist, noting that there are mosques four and twelve blocks away from Ground Zero, asks how far away Park51 would have to be to appease its opponents.
National Catholic Reporter compares opposition to Park51 to the hostility Irish Catholic immigrants faced 100 years ago in NYC; the Salt Lake Tribune says Mormons' "9/11 mosque" moment also occured a century ago, when the first Mormon U.S. senator was elected.
A federal judge blocked the Obama administration from funding human embryonic stem cell research, ruling that it violates a federal law barring the use of taxpayer money for experiments that destroy human embryos. The Ninith Circuit Court ruled that World Vision, the huge Christian charity, is exempt from laws prohibiting religious discrimination in hiring employees.
In its first-ever report to the UN Human Rights Council, the U.S. said a number of minority groups - including Muslims - face discrimination, but the country's political system has the means to improve the situation. An Alaskan man who compiled a hit list of targets he called "enemies of Islam" was sentenced Monday to eight years in prison. Virginia, which only began hiring non-Protestant prison chaplains last year, doesn't have nearly enough Muslim chaplains to accomodate its inmates.
James Dobson, founder of the Focus on the Family, will form a political action group. The family of a killed U.S. soldier is disappointed that prosecutors and Westboro Baptist Church reached a deal that will keep both sides out of court.
A report says the British government and the Roman Catholic church colluded to cover up the involvement of a priest in a 1972 bombing that killed nine people and injured 30 in Northern Ireland.
A retired Presbyterian minister is facing a church trial (again) for marrying gay couples. A Muslim woman has rejected Disney's suggested compromise that she wear a hat-and-bonnet rather than her veil while onstage.
Britons will not be allowed to bring pets, booze or barbecue at open-air service conducted by Pope Benedict XVI next month. Catholics are split over whether it's worthwhile to protest the Empire State Building's refusal to honor Mother Teresa.
A country singer has written the worst song evuh about 9/11 and the so-called Ground Zero mosque. Listen here, if you dare.
Posted by Daniel Burke at 9:28 am
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Monday, August 23, 2010
Monday’s roundup
About 500 opponents and 200 supporters of the so-called "Ground Zero mosque" protested in NYC on Sunday. Though the rhetoric was heated, the biggest problem was the rain, said a police spokesman.
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is on a 15-national State Department-sponsored tour of the Middle East to promote religious tolerance, said all the attention generated by the project is a good thing. His wife and co-organizer of Park51, Daisy Khan, said she may be open to moving the planned Islamic Cultural Center and mosque further away from Ground Zero and that opposition to the project "is like metastasized anti-Semitism."
Both the WaPo and the NYT devote some serious ink to Rauf, including an extensive look at what he has said about Islam-inspired terrorism. N.Y. gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio is running a "misleading" ad criticizing his opponent for supporting the mosque, according to the NYT.
Among the people opposing Park51 are members of the government-funded U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, raising questions (again) about whether the commission really only cares about Christians' religious liberties.
Some counter-terrorism experts say the anti-Muslim sentiment kicked up by Park51 plays into extremists hands by demonstrating that America is Islamophobic. The NYT explores the religious roots of stoning. A political battle is brewing in Israel over a museum dedicated to tolerance. Muslims say the planned museum will be built over a Muslim cemetery, Israelis say the tombstones are fake and were moved to the site to disrupt the project.
A California school seeks to become the country's first accredited Muslim college, CNN reports. The U.S. military is coercing soldiers to attend "spiritual fitness" sessions, according to a liberal journalist.
A New York-based Zen group is confronting controversy over its founder's sexual misconduct. The United Methodist Reporter looks at what happens when congregations merge.
American Roman Catholics will begin using a new Roman Missal at Mass next November, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced. A spokeswoman for the bishops says Americans are about to "embark on an educational journey" to prepare for the changes.
The schismatic Catholic Bishop Robert Williamson, who was denounced by Pope Benedict XVI for denying elements of the Holocaust, says fellow members of the Society of Saint Pius X will be readmitted to the church without having to accept the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
Boston's Cardinal Sean O'Malley has blocked archdiocesan employees from viewing conservative blogs critical of him. A Catholic priest in Tennessee has apologized and retracted comments suggesting that Catholics do not have to obey the pope and bishops.
Posted by Daniel Burke at 9:48 am
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