After a European court rules against crucifixes in Italian schoolrooms, Italians from across the political spectrum decry an assault on the country's Roman Catholic identity.

Christian Science Monitor, By Nick Squires, November 3

Rome - Italians reacted with outrage on Tuesday after a European court ruled that displaying crucifixes in the country's schools violated the principle of secular education.

Italy's education minister condemned the judgment by the European Court of Human Rights, saying that the Christian cross was a symbol of the country's Roman Catholic religion and cultural identity.

Nick Pisa | Nov 4

DailyMail UK - Catholic convert Tony Blair is among several world leaders being invited to attend a top level summit with Pope Benedict XVI to discuss the role of the Church in politics.

The two-day summit will be held at the Vatican and will include other Catholic politicians from all over the world, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, U.S. vice president Joe Biden, former Spanish PM Jose Maria Aznar, and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Church officials have been quietly working on the conference, which will be called 'Witnesses of Christ in the Political Community', for several months.

Marina Hyde | The Guardian

While Hubbard's cult gets ever more exposed, it's a shame other religions are not forced to justify their own doctrinal lunacies

Draw near, infidels, for these are dark days for the Knights of Hubbard. Do not despair entirely – the Church of Scientology remains insanely rich, has excellent and rapacious lawyers, and according to the International Scientology News, "every minute of every hour, someone reaches for L Ron Hubbard technology … simply because they know Tom Cruise is a Scientologist". So unless the world's supply of troubled fools is melting away quicker than the Arctic ice cap, they can probably hold off trying to lure disaffected Kabbalists into their cultish communion, after the fashion of Pope Benedict and the Anglicans. And yet, all things considered, it has not been the best of weeks for our operating thetans.

In France, Scientology was found guilty of defrauding its followers after a judge effectively debunked the idea of the church's trusty e-meter, a crude polygraph whose readings are used to encourage Scientologists to purchase everything from books to extreme sauna courses. In Los Angeles, the Oscar-winning (even if it was only for the abysmal Crash) director Paul Haggis cut his ties with Scientology in protest at what he branded their tolerance of homophobia, adding for good measure that the church's claim that they do not tell people to "disconnect" from unsupportive family members was untrue – his own wife had been ordered to do so. Meanwhile, Scientology's chief spokesman Tommy Davis stormed out of a television interview with Martin Bashir, after the latter pressed him on what we might delicately term "certain articles of faith". The alien stuff, basically.

What has caused these synchronous events? Naturally, one's initial assumption is that the everlasting battery which provides the force field which holds the intergalactic tyrant Xenu captive in an unspecified mountain here on Earth is not as everlasting as billed, or was perhaps commandeered when the battery went in some vast cosmic remote control. In humanoid households, of course, a TV remote is the appliance for which all other batteries must be yielded up – including those in the smoke alarm – and the same hierarchy holds true on a galactic scale.

Graham Keeley & Richard Owen | Madrid / Rome | October 31

The Times - When Victoria Romero, 6, dressed up as a witch for a Hallowe’en party this week she could hardly have imagined that she was provoking the wrath of God by attending a celebration akin to a Black Mass — at least in the eyes of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church in Spain.

Wearing skeleton suits, dressing up as vampires, witches or goblins or slapping on fake blood is not far removed from communing with the Devil, according to the country’s bishops.

However, the bishops, with Vatican backing, have reserved their venom for the millions of parents who allowed their children to celebrate this “pagan” festival.

Whatever else you might say about Yale Political Philosophy lecturer Jim Sleeper, you have to admit he makes you think. I have yet to read an article, jeremiad, or opinion piece penned by Sleeper that did not contain some shimmering jewel of erudition that made me desire, deeply, that I could spend the rest of my mortal days perusing volumes of Thomas Aquinas, Cotton Mather, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Why dawdle, a liberal reader might wonder, with religious traditions that weren’t friendly to republicanism even when they were gestating it and that are now completely alien to the republican tradition?

One answer is that the republic is in trouble for reasons Puritans could have parsed with sophistication even though they bear some responsibility for its travails. They’d have understood that liberalism depends on virtues and beliefs which the liberal state and “free” markets themselves cannot nourish or defend. They’d have understood that, somehow, good liberal leaders have to be nourished and trained all the more intensively, in ways that harness collective responsibility and personal obligation for ever higher common purposes.

@ Hitchens recently down under

many of those who put their faith in revelation and prophecy and prayer are feeling the need to give an account of themselves. This is a wholly good development, and it is part of the pluralism and polycentrism that distinguish the sort of society that we have to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Guy Tridgell | Alsip, IL | Oct 25

southtownstar.com -
The Rev. Dan Willis is passing the collection plate in reverse. He will give you money to go to church.

For the last three weeks, his Lighthouse Church of All Nations in Alsip has raffled a combined $1,000 to attendees at the three Sunday services.

Big surprise, but attendance has shot through the chapel roof.

"It is gimmicky. It is totally gimmicky. I make no bones about that," Willis said. "But if I could get someone who would not normally come to church, why not?"

If the lure of free money has you breaking out the Sunday best, be prepared for some testimony from the preacher on how to spend that money.

You will hear of the glory of paying down debt, the revelation that comes with living on a budget and the miracle of compound interest.

For Willis, the cash is a mere carrot to get you through the doors. By sowing the seeds of the responsible personal finance, he hopes to create a few converts.

"I was worried how people were going to respond," Willis said. "I thought they might be, 'Oh, yeah, a classic preacher.'

"We've been blown away by the response. (read the rest)

Rachel Donadio & Laurie Goodstein | Vatican City | OCtober 20

NYT - In an extraordinary bid to lure traditionalist Anglicans en masse, the Vatican on Tuesday announced that it would make it easier for Anglicans who are uncomfortable with their church’s acceptance of women priests and openly gay bishops to join the Roman Catholic Church.

A new canonical entity will allow groups of Anglicans “to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony,” Cardinal William Levada, the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said at a news conference here.

Nobel laureate Jose Saramago:

The Bible is a manual of bad morals (which) has a powerful influence on our culture and even our way of life. Without the Bible we would be different, and probably better people

at the at the launch of his new book Cain - an ironic retelling of the Bible story of Cain, Adam and Eve's elder son who kills his brother Abel. AP

A friend told me a couple of days ago that she avoids political blogs because most of them are less about dialogue than about spitfire opinion. She is right, of course; most political blogs are online opinion columns. Of those I read, my favorites are those where the writers think hard about issues and where readers and commenters do as well, whether there is agreement or not.

I think my own trajectory about discourse has moved, over the past 10 years or so, more and more toward trying to muster the energy of people of good will toward the pursuit of progressive (generally leftward) social change and away from the notion of more purely even-handed exchange, which is where I think I was when my first book, the original Race Manners, came out in 1999. I guess, like a lot of civil rights and racial justice advocates, I reached a point where I felt my energy was better used in service of those ready to carry out actual social change than in trying to pull in those who are invested in resisting it. To be blunt about it, I think history gives us pretty vivid evidence (abolitionism, women's suffrage, black and gay civil rights) that there is generally a majority that stands around watching while a committed minority doggedly pursues change until it is achieved.

Anyway, just after I had this conversation about blogs and discourse, I received a note from my friend Rob Levy pointing me toward an October 15 manifesto by Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, a fiercely liberal church reformer and author of, among other works, Why Christianity Must Change or Die.

Duke Helfand | Porter Ranch, CA | October 11

LAT - The state has more megachurches than anywhere else in the country, with the majority in the suburbs between Los Angeles and San Diego. Their upbeat approach is luring thousands each weekend.

Once again, the Sunday faithful have packed the cavernous sanctuary at Shepherd of the Hills Church in the San Fernando Valley, clapping and swaying for Jesus as a band rocks the hall.

"Come bless the Lord," the worshipers sing. "Praise his name to the ends of the Earth."

Most churches would be thrilled to fill their sanctuaries any day of the year.

Peter Griffiths | London | October 9

Reuters - The Church of England could restrict the powers of some women bishops under a plan designed to end a rift between traditionalists who want to keep the all-male senior clergy, and liberals demanding equality.

The proposal has reignited the long-running debate over a supposed ecclesiastical "stained-glass ceiling" that stops women from attaining the most senior roles in the church.

Oct 9

BBC -

Switzerland's biggest city, Zurich, has allowed the use of a controversial poster which urges a ban on the building of minarets in the country.

The poster shows a woman dressed in a burka in front of black minarets standing on a Swiss flag.

But Zurich city council said campaign posters were protected by free speech.

The advert is being used by the far-right Swiss People's Party (SVP) ahead of next month's referendum on whether to ban the building of new minarets.

The Swiss Federal Commission Against Racism said earlier this week that the poster was "tantamount to the denigration and defamation of the peaceful Swiss Muslim population".

Some media reports have said the minarets resemble missiles.

Zurich city council said on Thursday that although it disapproved of the "negative and dangerous" poster, it had to be accepted as part of political free speech ahead of the 29 November national referendum.

Peter Beaumont | October 8

The Guardian - Islam may be most closely associated with the Middle East, where it emerged in Arabia in the seventh century, but today the region is home to only one in five of the world's Muslims, according to a study of the religion's global distribution.

The world's Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly one in four people practice Islam, according to the US Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which published the survey. This compares to 2.25 billion Christians.

The top five Muslim countries in the world include only one in the Middle East ‑ Egypt ‑ behind Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, in that order. Russia, the survey shows, has more Muslims than the populations of Libya and Jordan combined. Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon. China has a bigger Muslim population than Syria.

The Bible 2.0, now with more smiting! ~ FDL

and

Fighting the 'contraceptive mentality'/ The Quiverfulls

Yano, they are really starting to make the Taliban look moderate ;)

Philip Pullella | Rome | Oct 5

Reuters - An archive negative image of the Shroud of Turin (L) is shown next to one recreated by an Italian scientist and released in Pavia October 5, 2009.

An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ's burial cloth is a medieval fake.

The shroud, measuring 14 feet, 4 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches bears the image, eerily reversed like a photographic negative, of a crucified man some believers say is Christ.

"We have shown that is possible to reproduce something which has the same characteristics as the Shroud," Luigi Garlaschelli, who is due to illustrate the results at a conference on the para-normal this weekend in northern Italy, said on Monday.

A professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia, Garlaschelli made available to Reuters the paper he will deliver and the accompanying comparative photographs.

The Shroud of Turin shows the back and front of a bearded man with long hair, his arms crossed on his chest, while the entire cloth is marked by what appears to be rivulets of blood from wounds in the wrists, feet and side.

Carbon dating tests by laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Arizona in 1988 caused a sensation by dating it from between 1260 and 1390. Sceptics said it was a hoax, possibly made to attract the profitable medieval pilgrimage business.

But scientists have thus far been at a loss to explain how the image was left on the cloth.

Garlaschelli reproduced the full-sized shroud using materials and techniques that were available in the middle ages.

Riazat Butt & Anushka Asthana | Sept 29

The Guardian - The Vatican has lashed out at criticism over its handling of its paedophilia crisis by saying the Catholic church was "busy cleaning its own house" and that the problems with clerical sex abuse in other churches were as big, if not bigger.

In a defiant and provocative statement, issued following a meeting of the UN human rights council in Geneva, the Holy See said the majority of Catholic clergy who committed such acts were not paedophiles but homosexuals attracted to sex with adolescent males.

Alexei Barrionuevo | São Paolo | September 14

NYT - The atmosphere was electric at Reborn in Christ Church on “Extreme Fight” night. Churchgoers dressed in jeans and sneakers, many with ball caps turned backward, lined a makeshift boxing ring to cheer on bare-chested jujitsu fighters.

They screamed when a fan favorite, Fabio Buca, outlasted his opponent after several minutes. They went wild when Pastor Dogão Meira, 26, took his man down, pinning him with an armlock just 10 seconds into the fight.

Bridgeport, CT | August 25

NBC Connecticut - Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg dealt the Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport a major blow Tuesday. The church wants to hang on tight to 12,000 pages of documents from more than 20 lawsuits against priests. Ginsberg declined to keep those sealed while nation's high court decides whether it will review the case.

The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that those documents should be unsealed, but while the case is under review by the U.S. Supreme Court, Ginsburg decision to continue a stay effectively said the documents should be released.

The records could reveal details on how retired New York Cardinal Edward Egan handled allegations when he was bishop in Bridgeport from 1988 to 2000.

Laurie Goodstein | Fort Worth, TX | August 15

NYT - Onstage before thousands of believers weighed down by debt and economic insecurity, Kenneth and Gloria Copeland and their all-star lineup of “prosperity gospel” preachers delighted the crowd with anecdotes about the luxurious lives they had attained by following the Word of God.

Private airplanes and boats. A motorcycle sent by an anonymous supporter. Vacations in Hawaii and cruises in Alaska. Designer handbags. A ring of emeralds and diamonds.

Robert Pigott | Aug 9

BBC - When the Vatican began an inquiry seven months ago into the "soundness" of American nuns, it adopted a discreet approach.

But as details have emerged about the investigation into the beliefs held by nuns - and of the way they worship - the disquiet and irritation felt in religious communities has started to spill into the public arena.

A working paper delivered recently by the Vatican to the leaders of American nuns was interpreted by many as a sign that the hierarchy in Rome is worried about a liberal drift among them.

oh noes, libereel nuns, run and hide!

Kris Wernowsky | Aug 5

pnj.com -

A federal judge has cleared the way for the government's seizure of a creationism theme park in Pensacola owned by a couple convicted of tax fraud.

A ruling by U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers states that the nine properties that make up Dinosaur Adventure Land as well as two bank accounts associated with the park will be used to satisfy $430,400 owed to the federal government.

Kent Hovind, who founded the park and a ministry, Creation Science Evangelism, is serving 10 years in federal prison for failing to pay the Internal Revenue Service more than $470,000 in employee taxes.

He was found guilty in November 2006 on 58 counts, including failure to pay employee taxes and making threats against investigators.

The conviction culminated 17 years of Hovind sparring with the IRS. Saying he was employed by God and his ministers were not subject to payroll taxes, he claimed no income or property.

August 2, 2009

BBC - A Roman Catholic bank in Germany has apologised after admitting it bought stocks in defence, tobacco and birth control companies.

Der Spiegel newspaper discovered the bank had invested 580,000 euros (£495,310, $826,674) in British arms company BAE Systems.

It also invested 160,000 euros in American birth control pill maker Wyeth and 870,000 euros in tobacco companies.

The bank apologised for behaviour "not in keeping with ethical standards".

Pax Bank has previously advertised ethical investment funds, specifically claiming to avoid arms and tobacco companies along with organisations that do not adhere to Catholic beliefs.

Sainshand, Mongolia | August 1

BBC - Rare Buddhist treasures, not seen for more than 70 years, have been unearthed in the Gobi Desert.

The historic artefacts were buried in the 1930s during Mongolia's Communist purge, when hundreds of monasteries were looted and destroyed.

Michael Seaver | Dublin | July 28

CSM - After years of decreasing influence for religion in public life, Ireland’s new blasphemy law has free speech campaigners worried.

After decades of increasing secularization, Irish President Mary McAleese signed into law last week fresh penalties for the ancient crime of blasphemy, befuddling a general public that didn't see the need and infuriating free speech campaigners.

The Roman Catholic church, which once wielded great social power here, didn't seek the new law, nor was any other apparent constituency pushing for it. Justice Minister Dermot Ahern, the law's strongest advocate, said that Ireland would be better off without it shortly after he introduced the bill to parliament.