c. 2007 Religion News Service

Hotel offers room at the inn for Marys and Josephs

LONDON (RNS) Travelodge, determined to help make amends for that “no room at the inn” business back in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago, is offering free Christmas accommodations to married British couples named Mary and Joseph.

Travelodge, which owns 322 hotels in the United Kingdom, said that starting Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, and lasting to Twelfth Night, Jan. 5, couples matching its criteria will get a one-night stay on the house.

“The phrase `no room at the inn’ is something that resonates with us in the hotel business,” says Travelodge’s operations director, Jason Cotta. “Therefore, this year we have decided to evoke the true spirit of Christmas and invite Mary and Joseph couples as our guests.”

Sandy Leckie, manager of Travelodge’s inn at Covent Garden in London, said there may not be any gold, frankincense or myrrh in the rooms set aside for the Marys and Josephs, but “it’s definitely more comfortable than a stable.”

Travelodge did add that accommodation would, if need be, “definitely have room for a baby and a manger.”

_ Al Webb

Virginia Tech professor named Beliefnet’s Most Inspiring Person

(RNS) The Holocaust survivor who helped save students’ lives before dying during a shooting spree at Virginia Tech last April was named by Beliefnet.com as its Most Inspiring Person of the Year.

Professor Liviu Librescu, 76, was one of 32 killed at the school in Blacksburg, Va., but is credited with preventing more deaths by barricading the door of his classroom and telling students to jump out of windows to avoid the gunman.

“We stand at a moment in time when tragic acts like this week’s shootings in Colorado and the horrible event at Virginia Tech that took Dr. Librescu’s life have become disturbingly familiar,” said Deborah Caldwell, vice president of content and managing editor of Beliefnet.

“It is vitally important that we honor and acknowledge the selfless courage and sure-footed spirituality that guided Liviu Librescu _ inspiring us as they did him _ to be the best we can possibly be.”

Librescu is the eighth person to be honored as Beliefnet’s Most Inspiring Person. Last year, the Amish community of Nickel Mines, Pa., was honored for its forgiving reaction to the murder of five schoolgirls in that community.

_ Adelle M. Banks

Farley wins 2007 Grawemeyer Award

(RNS) Sister Margaret A. Farley, a Roman Catholic nun and former Yale Divinity School ethicist, has been awarded the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Religion by the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the University of Louisville.

A member of the Sisters of Mercy, Farley received the award for her book “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” which was called “an important message in light of all the confusion surrounding sexuality today.”

“The religious right issues stark decrees while the entertainment industry tells us `anything goes,”’ said Louisville seminary professor Susan Garrett, who directs the award program. Farley’s work draws “clear and compelling guidelines from Christian tradition on what makes love `just.”’

Farley, the first woman to teach full-time at Yale Divinity School, is past president of the Society of Christian Ethics and the Catholic Theological Society of America.

Past recipients of the Grawemeyer Award, which comes with a $200,000 cash prize, include novelist Marilynne Robinson, theologian Miroslav Volf and ethicist Larry Rasmussen.

_ Daniel Burke

Rick Warren says church `here to stay’ on AIDS issue

WASHINGTON (RNS) California megachurch pastor Rick Warren, speaking Wednesday (Dec. 12) at a White House discussion on HIV/AIDS, said the church has been a latecomer to addressing the pandemic but is now “here to stay.”

“The church was late to the table on this issue and we have repented of that, but we are here to stay,” he said. “This is not flavor of the week for me. This is a long-term battle, the eradication of HIV/AIDS.”

Warren and his wife, Kay, recently co-hosted an AIDS summit at their Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. They traveled to Washington to join more than 130 ambassadors, federal officials and ministry leaders for a roundtable discussion hosted by the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives.

Speakers cited examples of international and national partnerships between faith-based groups, businesses and governments to work on prevention and treatment of AIDS and urged continued efforts to reduce the stigma some attach to the disease.

“This is a problem that demands our attention, and the local church is among the actors making a big difference,” said Jay Hein, director of the White House faith-based office.

Marty McGeein, the executive director of the Presidential Advisory Council on AIDS, said groups like the Salvation Army and Esperanza, a Hispanic faith-based organization, are working with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on HIV prevention.

“We need faith leaders to address the stigma that continues to allow HIV to spread,” said McGeein, a deputy assistant secretary at HHS.

Dr. Adnan Hammad, director of the ACCESS Community Health & Research Center in Dearborn, Mich., said leaders have to go through a “journey” with religious officials to help them come to a point where they can address the AIDS crisis. Once, he said, mosques burned fliers about AIDS that were left in their buildings.

“Now we screen for HIV in our local mosques,” he said.

_ Adelle M. Banks

Religion writers name evangelicals in election as 2007’s top story

(RNS) The political grappling of evangelicals for a GOP presidential candidate is considered the top religion story of 2007 among the nation’s religion writers.

Members of the Religion Newswriters Association picked the Buddhist monks in Myanmar, who protested in September in support of democracy and were subdued by government forces, as the top religion newsmaker of the year.

The entire Top 10 list includes:

1. Evangelical voters ponder if they can support the eventual Republican candidate due to questions about the leaders’ platforms and/or faith.

2. Leading Democratic presidential candidates make conscious efforts to attract faith-based voters after acknowledging their failure to do so in 2004.

3. The role of gay and lesbian clergy continues to be a deeply divisive issue, with the Episcopal Church’s pledge of restraint on gay issues failing to halt the number of congregations making plans to leave the denomination.

4. Global warming increases in importance among religious groups, with mainline leaders considering it a high priority and evangelical leaders divided over its importance compared to other issues.

5. Illegal immigration is debated by religious groups and leaders, with some taking an active role in affirming undocumented immigrants.

6. Thousands of Buddhist monks in Myanmar lead a pro-democracy protest that is harshly put down after a week.

7. Some conservative Episcopalians in the U.S. realign with Anglican bishops in Africa and other parts of the “Global South,” setting off church property legal disputes.

8. The Supreme Court rules in favor of conservative positions in three major cases: upholding a ban on so-called partial-birth abortions, permitting schools to create some limits on students’ free speech, and denying a challenge to the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives.

9. Deaths among prominent evangelical leaders included the Revs. Jerry Falwell, Rex Humbard and D. James Kennedy, as well as Ruth Graham, wife of evangelist Billy Graham, and Tammy Faye Messner, ex-wife of disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker.

10. The cost of priestly sex abuse to the U.S. Roman Catholic Church exceeds $2.1 billion, with a record $660 million settlement involving the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and earlier settlements in Portland, Ore., and Spokane, Wash.

The survey polled active RNA members via electronic ballot Dec. 7-13. With 80 people responding, there was a 27 percent response rate.

_ Adelle M. Banks

Williams says Episcopalians must be taken at their word

(RNS) The spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion said Friday (Dec. 14) that it would be “unrealistic and ungrateful” to expect the Episcopal Church to make yet another attempt to explain itself.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, in a letter to the heads of the 38 member churches in the Communion, said Anglican churches should accept at face value Episcopal promises not to ordain any more gay bishops.

“It is practically impossible to imagine any further elucidation or elaboration coming from (the Episcopal Church) after the successive statements and resolutions” issued by the U.S. church in the last 18 months, Williams wrote.

The Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of global Anglicanism, has been under fire for electing an openly gay bishop in 2003 and allowing the blessing of same-sex couples in some local dioceses.

American bishops, meeting in New Orleans in September, reaffirmed their promise not to elect any more gay bishops or approve national rites for same-sex unions. Third World conservatives, however, say that’s not enough.

Williams has been trying to broker a fragile peace and said U.S. bishops should be taken at their word. “I do not see how the commitment not to confirm any election … of a partnered gay or lesbian person can mean anything other than what it says,” Williams said.

However, he chided the U.S. church for acting “against the strong, reiterated and consistent” Anglican positions on sexuality. He said a 1998 Anglican resolution that calls homosexual activity “incompatible with Scripture” remains the “only point of reference” adopted by the entire Communion.

At the same time, he criticized Third World bishops for taking American conservatives under their wing, saying the Communion has always said such “interventions are not to be sanctioned.”

Ahead of next year’s once-a-decade Lambeth Conference, Williams said he will sponsor “professionally facilitated conversations” between Episcopal leaders and conservative dissidents to “see if we can generate any better level of mutual understanding.”

And without specifically citing the Episcopal Church, Williams said he will convene a task force to consider whether churches whose positions are “at odds with the expressed mind of the Communion” can fully participate in all levels of decision-making.

_ Kevin Eckstrom

Immigration reform advocates seek cooler candidate rhetoric

(RNS) Christian leaders called on presidential candidates Monday (Dec. 17) to reduce harsh rhetoric about immigration reform and to develop workable solutions instead.

“The debate is very divisive and, unfortunately, our presidential candidates are allowing themselves to be … co-opted into the divisiveness of the debate rather than offering leadership,” said Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando, Fla.

Wenski, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on International Policy, joined Protestant leaders in the Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform movement on a teleconference with reporters on Monday.

The Rev. Derrick Harkins, senior pastor of Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, said candidates who profess to be Christians should avoid speaking about the issue in any way that is destructive or dehumanizing.

“The speech that is inflammatory and destructive and hateful is absolutely counterintuitive, … I believe, to any profession of faith,” he said.

Evangelical Protestant leaders joined in the call for respectful discussion about immigration but acknowledged that evangelicals are divided on the issue.

The Rev. Luis Cortes Jr., president of Esperanza USA, a Hispanic faith-based organization, said he was mostly unsuccessful when he attempted several months ago to get “celebrity” evangelical leaders to issue statements supporting comprehensive immigration reform.

“Most of the TV evangelists avoided the controversy by saying they were not thoroughly versed on the issue,” said Cortes, whose Philadelphia-based organization is meeting with Republican and Democratic presidential candidates.

The Rev. Joel Hunter, senior pastor of Northland Church in Longwood, Fla., said some people have left his church after he criticized some of the comments made by talk-radio personalities about immigration.

“I’ve said to my people, `Look, you got to watch where you get … information on this,” he said. “Talk radio is what really slammed the phone banks in Washington when the whole comprehensive immigration thing came up.”

_ Adelle M. Banks

Canada’s high court awards Jewish woman religious divorce

TORONTO (RNS) In a landmark ruling, Canada’s highest court has sided with a Jewish woman whose husband had refused for 15 years to grant her a get, or religious divorce.

Making a rare foray into religion, the Supreme Court of Canada on Friday (Dec. 14) ruled 7-2 that the civil divorce agreement Jessel Marcovitz signed, agreeing to grant his wife Stephanie Bruker a get, was a valid contract and trumps his claims of freedom of religion.

The court awarded $47,500 to Bruker on the basis that her right to remarry and have more children within her faith was unfairly blocked by her ex-husband.

The Jewish couple from Montreal were married in 1969 and had a civil divorce in 1980. While Marcovitz initially agreed to give his wife a religious divorce as part of the civil divorce agreement, he later changed his mind and refused.

Bruker sued Marcovitz, arguing that without a get, she was prohibited from marrying again in the Jewish faith or having more children.

Marcovitz finally provided Bruker a get in 1995 when she was almost 47, beyond the childbearing age for most women.

“This represented an unjustified and severe impairment of her ability to live her life in accordance with this country’s values and her Jewish beliefs,” the court held.

Protecting equality rights and “the dignity of Jewish women in their independent ability to divorce and remarry,” outweighs Marcovitz’s claim of religious freedom, it added.

In their dissent, two supreme court judges warned that Marcovitz’s promise to provide his wife with a get was a “purely moral obligation,” and that ruling otherwise will drag courts into potentially explosive cases where they have no place.

The high court ruling was closely watched by dozens of Jewish women across Canada whose husbands have refused to grant them the religious divorce they need to remarry within Judaism. They are often called agunot, or “chained” women.

_ Ron Csillag

Quote of the Week: Palestinian carpenter Tawfiq Salsaa

(RNS) “I wanted to give the world an idea of how we live in the Holy Land.”

_ Palestinian carpenter Tawfiq Salsaa, who has created a wooden Nativity scene depicting baby Jesus separated by a wall from the three wise men. Salsaa, who has sold almost 400 hand-carved Nativity scenes caricaturing the West Bank barrier in Israel, was quoted by Reuters.

DSB END RNS