Alan Chambers
Alan Chambers is an author at Religion News Service.
All Stories by Alan Chambers
NEWS STORY: Presbyterian decisions back gays
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service NEWARK, N.J. _ A Presbyterian Church (USA) tribunal ruled Monday (Nov. 22) that a group of South Jersey churches did not violate church laws by accepting a gay man as a candidate for ordination. The ruling, which conservatives vowed to appeal, keeps alive the vicious infighting over homosexuality that has […]
NEWS FEATURE: Falun Dafa practitioners say movement is no threat to China
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service NEWARK, N.J. _ In a courtyard between twin downtown high-rise apartment buildings, two dozen Chinese immigrants sit in a deep meditative trance, rising periodically to stretch and relax. The ritual seems harmless enough here, but the same exercises are causing alarm in China. Practitioners of a fast-growing spiritual movement called […]
NEWS FEATURE: Centuries-old monastic lifestyle failing to attract recruits
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service NEWARK, N.J. _ In the dining hall of Newark Abbey, black-clad monks eat their meals in silence at simple wood tables while a member of their community reads from the 1,500-year-old rule of St. Benedict. By day, most of these men teach at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, the comeback institution […]
NEWS FEATURE: Centuries-old monastic lifestyle failing to attract recruits
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service NEWARK, N.J. _ In the dining hall of Newark Abbey, black-clad monks eat their meals in silence at simple wood tables while a member of their community reads from the 1,500-year-old rule of St. Benedict. By day, most of these men teach at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, the comeback institution […]
NEWS FEATURE: Catholics signing on for round-the-clock prayer
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service NEWARK, N.J. _ With the bells of St. Lucy’s Church chiming the noon hour, Barbara Ombaldo walked hurriedly from the marble sanctuary to the lobby and added her name to a ledger already filled with signatures. She joined two other women in silent prayer, kneeling before a shining monstrance in […]
NEWS FEATURE: African cardinal considered likely pope material
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service EZIOWELLE, Nigeria _ Beside a rutted road of red clay in this rural farming village, a single-story house with a tin roof and no electricity or running water speaks to the humility of a man who could be the first black pope in modern history. Cardinal Francis Arinze was born […]
NEWS FEATURE: Christianity and Islam in Africa: Can both flourish and also co-exist?
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1999
c. 1999 Religion News Service KANO, Nigeria _ On the outskirts of this ancient northern city, the Rev. Anthony Anike pulled his beat-up Peugeot off a paved road cut through scrub vegetation and onto a rutted path alongside two rows of partially completed mud-block houses. Seventy-five Catholics waiting patiently near a lone flame tree lined […]
NEWS FEATURE: McNally’s `Corpus Christi’ _ blasphemy or art?
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1998
c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ Faith was Michelangelo’s inspiration when he spent four years painting the Sistine Chapel and countless hours chipping marble into biblical figures at the behest of Renaissance-era popes. The Roman Catholic Church still recognizes art’s spiritual dimension, but the tension between religious and artistic communities today is palpable. In […]
NEWS STORY: Catholic meeting on gay ministries stirs debate
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1998
c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ It was intended to be a mild, middle-ground conference on homosexuality, a September gathering sanctioned by Roman Catholic bishops and designed to help priests make gays feel welcome in the church without condoning their sexual behavior. But the organized protests that have flared over the meeting, set for […]
NEWS STORY: Top U.S. church leaders to delay Cuba trip to protest abortion
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1998
c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ When Pope John Paul II arrives in Cuba on Jan. 21 for what could be one of the most historic visits of his papacy, the top leadership of the U.S. Catholic Church won’t be there to greet him. All six active U.S. cardinals making the trip will arrive […]
NEWS STORY: Catholic and financial leaders discuss world debt relief
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1998
c. 1998 Religion News Service SOUTH ORANGE, N.J. _ In the 1970s, when Zambia’s copper mines were pumping out money and the country was one of Africa’s richest, Archbishop Medaro Mazombwe saw nothing but promise. A new road system was built, hospitals were well-stocked and new schools were being completed. These days, having gone through […]
NEWS FEATURE: A quiet revolution lifts role of women in Catholic Church
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1998
c. 1998 Newhouse News Service EDGEWATER, N.J. _ Most Sundays you can find Ana Lopo at Holy Rosary Church here, reading the Gospel in Spanish as a lector, offering the communion host to parishioners or worshipping in the pews. Lopo, a Cuban immigrant and public relations executive who serves part-time as a volunteer Eucharistic minister, […]
NEWS STORY: Newark’s Episcopal bishop leads uphill fight for gay rights
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1998
c. 1998 Religion News Service CANTERBURY, England _ Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark, N.J., the American leading the fight against conservative Anglican bishops seeking to have homosexuality declared a sin and to keep gays from church leadership, concedes he doesn’t have the votes at the church’s Lambeth Conference to enact a gay rights […]
NEWS FEATURE: A quiet revolution lifts role of women in Catholic Church
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1998
c. 1998 Religion News Service EDGEWATER, N.J. _ Most Sundays you can find Ana Lopo at Holy Rosary Church here, reading the Gospel in Spanish as a lector, offering the communion host to parishioners or worshipping in the pews. Lopo, a Cuban immigrant and public relations executive who serves part-time as a volunteer Eucharistic minister, […]
NEWS FEATURE: Celibacy contributes to shrinking numbers of nuns
By Alan Chambers — January 1, 1998
c. 1998 Religion News Service JERSEY CITY, N.J. _ The older nuns at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, which stands like an ancient fortress on a tough street here, remember the 1940s, when 1,200 Irish children packed the classrooms of the adjacent elementary school. In those days, every teacher was a nun in black habit. […]
