President Obama’s pastor at Camp David is the great-nephew of Johnny Cash and doesn’t have nice things to say about Islam. The Catholic bishops say they are not pleased with the health care reform bill that the Senate finance committee passed on Tuesday, but liberal Catholics are thanking Republican Sen. Olympia Snow for her vote. The self-help guru who lead a retreat in which two people died after spending time in a sweat lodge feels “tested,” and a former religion reporter has converted to ministry.
A Mormon elder compared the anti-Mormon backlash after Prop 8 to violence against blacks during the civil rights movement, and Walmart is stocking old “Left Behind” videogames to see how they sell next to standbys like “Donkey Kong.” A Christian legal firm argued against gay marriage in New York’s high court, a Texas court said a Jewish man wasn’t Orthodox enough to be exempted from an autopsy, and Brooklyn prosecutors are bringing more sexual abuse cases against ultra-Orthodox Jews. A Florida judge will order a teenage Christian convert back to her Muslim family in Ohio.
The Postal Service will offer religious stamps for the holidays and Christian Scientists want to be covered under the health care reform bill.
The Vatican’s newspaper says Obama’s Nobel Prize is “premature,” the head of the Unification Church married thousand of couples in what may his last mass wedding, and his successor once passed out after bowing 4,000 times. People are positing a divine purpose behind the break down of a machine designed to discover the “God particle,” the Archbishop of Canterbury said people are losing touch with their humanity, and two British churches have been been told not to sing so loud.