Thursday's Religion News Roundup: Assessing Catholic sex abuse reforms; Plan B pill, take 2; Raymond Bradbury's Zen

Ten years after the sexual abuse scandal convulsed the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S., has anything changed? Our David Gibson surveys the landscape and finds that it has, but not in ways you might expect. 

The politically charged debate over morning-after pills and abortion may be rooted in incorrect scientific hypotheses about how the Plan B pill works, the NYT reports. 

Chinese travel agencies say that foreigners are temporarily banned from traveling to central Tibet, likely a reaction to the 38 Tibetan Buddhists who have lit themselves on fire in protest of Chinese rule.  

The Vatican's newspaper has launched a monthly supplement for women, which will tackle “prejudices and preconceived ideas about the Catholic Church and its attitude towards women,” L'Osservatore Romano said in a front-page editorial. The first article is about Joan of Arc. 

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The AP browses the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's website, which uses a Google Earth ap to show the souls it has saved as pinpricks of light.

A Kentucky Internet evangelist who preached that The End is near lived that way too, according to reports, refusing to pay taxes and spending lavishly. 

A longtime member of the Crystal Cathedral says its sale to the Catholic church cursed it with “criminal, spiritual and religious indignity,” and is suing for $30 billion.

A Filipino bishop says priests' boring sermons are driving Catholics away. 

A Sikh TSA worker won a $30,000 settlement against the Department of Homeland Security, which had forbidden him from displaying his sacred wristband. 

The boyhood home of Malcolm X and the neighborhood where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was born have been named “endangered” historic places.

Miss America Laura Kaeppeler has a fantasy gig, but her heart is with children whose parents are imprisoned. 

Idaho says it now will sell Five Wives Vodka, after a DC lawyer threatened to sue. The lawyer, Jonathan Turley, also represents the polygamists from the reality series “Sister Wives.”  Correlation or coincidence? 

Ray Bradbury, who said Buddhist impulses ran through his writing of classic Sci-Fi books like “Fahrenheit 451,” died on Tuesday.

“I don’t think about what I do. I do it,” he told CNN. “That’s Buddhism. I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down.”

Those were some beautiful wings. 

Yr hmbl aggrgtr,

Daniel Burke