Best wishes for a Good Friday to our Christian friends and a happy Earth Day to our eco-conscious friends, including our eco-conscious Christian friends.
CNN attends a blasphemy trial for Jesus in Richmond, Va., which was intended to call attention to the state’s death penalty system. At least 24 Filipino men were nailed to crosses in the annual Good Friday observances that Catholic hierarchs frown upon (Reuters photo, left). And ever wonder what’s “good” about Good Friday? Here’s an answer.
This one is either entirely appropriate or incredibly offensive during this week of Passover and Good Friday sacrifice: lawmakers in Kyrgyzstan slaughtered seven lambs in a bid to drive out evil spirits from the parliament. Makes you wonder if it could work in Washington, too.
Gov. Rick Perry is asking Texans to spend the weekend praying for rain relief from the wildfires that have ravaged 1.5 million acres across the state. A Canadian toddler at the center of a right-to-life battle is back home after receiving treatment at a Catholic hospital in St. Louis.
Former C Street border Sen. John Ensign, R-Nevada, will resign after multiple scandals and investigations. Iowa GOP lawmakers launched a bid to impeach four members of the state Supreme Court who voted to allow same-sex marriage.
Conservatives are rallying around Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff in his bid to get SCOTUS to rule that memorial crosses (in this case, to fallen police officers) on public land are constitutional.
A federal judge in Minnesota has cleared the way for a suit again a public charter school that the ACLU charges promotes Islam. Over in Michigan, the ACLU is siding with Terry “Anyone Got a Match?” Jones in his bid to hold a protest today outside a mosque in Dearborn; the case heads to trial today.
The Salt Lake Tribune’s Peggy Fletcher Stack knocks down rumors that Mormons are ending their famed door-to-door evangelizing. The NYT’s David Brooks looks at the “rigorous theology” behind Broadway’s “The Book of Mormon.”
NPR’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty probes whether a miracle occurred after family and friends of a Washington state boy prayed to Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha that he be saved from flesh-eating bacteria.
The NYT and CNN go inside Martin Luther King‘s recently restored Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
A movie about a reluctant pope who’s overwhelmed by the demands of the job is making its way across Italy, and drawing (mostly ambivalent) mixed reviews from the hierarchy. Our own Frank Rocca saw it and left the theater profoundly disappointed.
London’s Telegraph reports that 1,000 British Anglicans will have become Catholics by Easter, “the biggest defection to Rome for 20 years.”
— Kevin Eckstrom