Bruce Nolan
Bruce Nolan is an author at Religion News Service.
All Stories by Bruce Nolan
Baptist Leader Pledges Continued Focus on New Orleans’ Needs
By Bruce Nolan — July 21, 2006
c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) The new leader of the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention toured New Orleans’ vast flood zone this week and, astonished at what he saw, promised to point more volunteers toward the region where tens of thousands of Baptist church members have toiled since the second day after Hurricane Katrina. […]
Katrina `Mercy’ Killings Cross Line, Ethicists Say
By Bruce Nolan — July 20, 2006
c. 2006 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ Conditions were hellish: Electrical power knocked out by Hurricane Katrina. The hospital isolated; its medical staff exhausted, anxious and largely helpless. Profoundly sick patients deteriorating in unbearable heat. But if a doctor and two nurses at Memorial Medical Center purposely injected patients with a lethal dose of […]
Churches Rebuild New Orleans, One House at a Time
By Bruce Nolan — June 15, 2006
c. 2006 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ In the early morning light one day last week, Inman Houston, a Southern Baptist seminary student and staffer at First Baptist Church New Orleans, climbed onto a makeshift table and called for prayer among a crowd of ragtag volunteers gathered in a parking lot in the city’s […]
In New Orleans, No Time or Energy for `Da Vinci’ Fight
By Bruce Nolan — May 20, 2006
c. 2006 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ While the opening of the film “The Da Vinci Code” might once have met boycotts and angry opposition from local churches, it is being engaged here much differently: with quiet counter-education and, where the post-Katrina struggle still dominates life, something like dismissiveness. The movie, which opened Friday […]
Students, Many Motivated by Faith, Clean Up New Orleans on Spring Break
By Bruce Nolan — March 18, 2006
c. 2006 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ Thousands of college students who might have spent spring break sunning in Acapulco or on Florida beaches this year are pouring into New Orleans to sleep in dormitory tents or on classroom floors, eat off paper plates and spend a week of vacation hauling foul muck out […]
New Orleans Episcopalians, Like Catholics, Look to Uncertain Future
By Bruce Nolan — November 19, 2005
c. 2005 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ With blazing morning light slanting through huge windows of the Cabildo museum, 40 Episcopalians prayed the same morning service their forbears offered in that landmark 200 years ago, celebrating both an anniversary and their community’s new beginning in a storm-ravaged city. “We are here, not simply to […]
Christian Gives Ruined Torah Scrolls Jewish Burial
By Bruce Nolan — October 15, 2005
c. 2005 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ Working alone with a shovel in her back yard two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, a Christian woman honored Jewish tradition and carefully buried the ruined sacred Torahs of a flooded New Orleans synagogue, to the relief of its distressed members who could not care for the scrolls […]
Here’s the Church, Here’s the Steeple, but Where Are the People?
By Bruce Nolan — September 21, 2005
c. 2005 Religion News Service BELLE Chasse, La. _ It was shortly after 10:30 a.m. when the Rev. Argile Smith, dressed informally this remarkable Sunday (Sept. 18) in slacks and shirt sleeves, rose before a remnant of his scattered Southern Baptist congregation and summoned them to prayer. The white steeple still stood atop First Baptist […]
NEWS ANALYSIS: Pope’s Funeral Spotlights Kinship Between Catholics and Evangelicals
By Bruce Nolan — April 9, 2005
c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) On a famous day in Houston 45 years ago, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, had to assure a skeptical audience of evangelical clergy that his presidency would not be controlled by the Vatican. On Friday, a U.S. president who is a favorite of evangelicals and two former […]
NEWS ANALYSIS: John Paul II Left Big Shoes for the Pope Who Follows
By Bruce Nolan — April 7, 2005
c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Pity the man _ and it must be a man _ who follows John Paul II to the chair of Peter. He will be measured against a predecessor who was a philosopher, mystic, playwright, scholar, linguist, master communicator and adroit geopolitician _ someone who bent one of the world's […]
NEWS STORY: All Eyes Turn to Rome: A Look at What’s Ahead for the Catholic Church
By Bruce Nolan — April 4, 2005
c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) And now, all eyes turn to Rome. While the world watches, over the next two to three weeks leaders of the 1.1 billion-member Catholic Church will follow a rigorously scripted process of mourning, burial and continuity that first will lay to rest John Paul II, then elect his successor. […]
NEWS STORY: All Eyes Turn to Rome: A Look at What’s Ahead for the Catholic Church
By Bruce Nolan — April 3, 2005
c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) And now, all eyes turn to Rome. While the world watches, over the next two to three weeks leaders of the 1.1 billion-member Catholic Church will follow a rigorously scripted process of mourning, burial and continuity that first will lay to rest John Paul II, then elect his successor. […]
NEWS FEATURE: CSI Jerusalem: Death on an Old Rugged Cross
By Bruce Nolan — March 26, 2005
c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) More than 2 billion Christians commemorate the most famous public execution in history Friday (March 25). Most believers choose to reflect on the lessons their faith draws from the death of Jesus Christ. But a very few with a curious bent have for years sought a more clinical enlightenment. […]
NEWS FEATURE: Ten-Day Trips to Israel Transform Young Jews
By Bruce Nolan — February 9, 2005
c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) There was a time not long ago when young Jody Portnoff was barely aware of her Jewish heritage. Reared in a secular home in Georgia’s Bible Belt, “We did Hanukkah, but we also did Christmas. We did Passover, but we had Easter baskets.” In college she joined a women’s […]
NEWS ANALYSIS: Bush Inaugural Address Links Freedom With God
By Bruce Nolan — January 22, 2005
c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) At the heart of George Bush’s energetic second inaugural promise Thursday (Jan. 20) to spread liberty around the world were two motives: because it will make America safer and because it is a God-given right of people everywhere. That second motive was one friends and critics listened for carefully. […]
