Thu, September 2, 2010, 3:58 pm
More than 50 leading Muslim groups said it is "unethical,
insensitive and inhumane" to oppose the planned Islamic center and
mosque near Ground Zero.
Meanwhile, the Council on
American-Islamic Relations released three public service announcements
highlighting American Muslims' roles in 9/11 as first responders to, and
victims of, the attack. A former military interrogator in Iraq and a national security expert, together with faith leaders, said Park51, as the NYC project is known, would deprive terrorists of a recruiting tool.
More than 90 clergy have signed a public letter castigating the widespread mischaracterizations of President Obama's Christian faith and saying that "the elephant in the room is race."
Obama said Wednesday that he is "cautiously hopeful" about the prospects of a new Middle East peace deal after meeting with leaders at the White House on Wednesday. Before a working dinner with the leaders, Obama mentioned that both Jews and Muslims are celebrating holy months (Elul and Ramadan, respectively), a rare shared period of devotion.
For both, Obama said, it's "a time to reflect on right and wrong; a time to ponder one's place in the world; a time when people of two great religions remind the world of a truth that is both simple and profound, that each of us, all of us, in our hearts and in our lives, are capable of great and lasting change." Then Abbas slipped a whoopee cushion under Netanyahu.
Thousands of Shiite Muslims in Pakistan mourned the 35 victims of a triple bombing that sought to inflame sectarian tensions.
John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, has asked a federal judge to order prison officials to allow him and other Muslims to pray as a group, in accordance with Muslim practice.
Funding a Catholic group through student activity fees at the University of Wisconsin does not violate the Establishment Clause, a federal appeals court ruled. An Illinois city has given up on trying to collect a tax bill from a Hindu woman who refused to remove a tree from her property because she says Hinduism prohibits the needless killing of any living thing.
Dozens of children whose parents were missionaries for a Florida-based organization were sexually and physically abused at an African boarding school, according to a new report.
The Mormon church says it has changed its genealogical database to prevent the names of Jews killed during the Holocaust from being posthumously baptized. But not everyone is convinced the problem is settled, the SLT reports.
The United Methodist Church is using the results of a massive congregational survey to halt a decades-long drops in members. RNS reported on the study last month.
Focus on the Family says schools' anti-bullying and tolerance programs promote political aims like same-sex marriage. The Toronto Vegetarian Association barred the Seventh-day Adventist Church from having a booth at the annual Vegetarian Food Fair because of the church's opposition to homosexuality.
Physicist Stephen Hawking says God wasn't necessary for the creation of the universe.
Wed, September 1, 2010, 4:09 pm
The State Department says the imam planning to build the Islamic center near Ground Zero is wrapping up his diplomatic tour of the Persian Gulf early, returning to the U.S. on Wednesday.
On Tuesday in Dubai, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf told a group of intellectuals that the fight over the mosque is about more than "a piece of real estate" and could shape the future of Muslim relations in the U.S.
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that a state investigation of the finances behind Park51, as the project is known, would set a "terrible precedent." Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., disagreed, saying it is essential to find out who is behind the project. "A number of terror plots have emanated from mosques," King told the AP.
A group of teenagers fired a shotgun at a small-town mosque in western New York during two nights of drive-by harassment, according to authorities. Austria's far right Freedom Party has designed an online video game that has players collect points by shooting mosques, minarets, and muezzins, who call Muslims to prayer.
A new Newsweek poll confirms what last month's Pew and Time magazine polls have already shown: About 20 percent of Americans think President Obama is a Muslim.
The president is opening a new round of Mideast peacemaking today in Washington, as he brings Israeli and Palestinian leaders to the White House for their first face-to-face talks since 2008. On cue, a Palestinian gunman opened fire one a Israeli vehicle in the West Bank, killing four passengers, and Israeli settlers responded by vowing to break a freeze on West Bank settlements.
As expected, the Obama administration on Tuesday asked a federal judge to lift a restraining order blocking federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
A conservative legal group that includes Christians is trying to force California's Gov. Schwarzenegger and attorney general to defend Prop 8 in court. Gay couples cannot divorce in Texas, where they also cannot get married, a state appeals court has ruled.
A federal lawsuit against the new health-care bill alleges that the legislation violates the religious freedom of the plaintiffs by funding abortion and establishing the "secular religion of Socialism."
Pennsylvania law enforcement will not bring charges against a 40-year-old Catholic priest who impregnated a 19-year-old girl; the Vatican, though, is looking into defrocking him. The priest and the girl, who has given birth, are evidently living together now, the AP reports.
James Dobson and Glenn Beck touched their rings together and activated their Wonder Twins powers, Beck said. The conservative commentator noted, though, that several other conservative Christian leaders declined to enlist in his "Black Robe Regiment," saying they'd "lose half their congregation." The RNS story on Beck's courtship of evangelicals is here.
Indonesian Buddhists succeeded in getting a "Buddha Bar" closed, and its owners were fined about $110,000 for causing mental distress, according to Reuters.
Tue, August 31, 2010, 3:41 pm
The developer behind the Islamic cultural center and mosque planned
near Ground Zero said it never occurred to him that his project would
stir up so much controversy.
Sharif El-Gamal has quite a checkered
past, according to the AP, with arrests for disorderly conduct, driving
while intoxicated, petit larceny, patronizing a prostitute, and
trespassing. A former tenant also says El-Gamal roughed him up in 2005
when the tenant was a month late on the rent. "I regret many things
that I did in my youth," El-Gamal said in a statement.
A new poll finds that 71 percent of New Yorkers want the Park51 project moved further away from Ground Zero. The same number want NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to investigate funding of the project.
A 21-year-old film student was indicted on Monday on charges of attempted murder and assault as hate crimes for slashing a Muslim taxi driver last week. A suspicious fire at a mosque construction site in Tennessee has local Muslims worried that their project has been dragged into the Ground Zero debate. The Council on American-Islamic Relations is suing the Illinois State Police on behalf of a local Muslim cleric whose chaplaincy appointment was revoked last month. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a suit on behalf of Somali Muslims who were denied prayer time and faced harassment.
U.S. Muslim leaders say they are stepping up efforts to unify their communities and get them politically involved to counter the recent spate of anti-Muslim sentiment.
The man suspected of gunning down a lay Mormon bishop in California was mentally ill and believed the church wronged him when he was a member back in the 1980s, family members told the AP. Mormon officials are in talks with China to secure religious freedom for Mormons living in the communist country.
In yet another Obama-Lincoln parallel, a New York University law professor says that just as some Americans suspect Obama is a closet Muslim, a handful in the 1860s believed Honest Abe was a secret Catholic.
Glenn Beck sought the imprimatur of 20 heavyweight evangelicals like James Dobson at a secret meeting weeks before he went all Billy Graham on us, according to WaPo. He wants to lead, but will evangelicals follow? One Southern Baptist dean dismissed Beck's message as "just Fox News at prayer."
A Belgian Cardinal who told a sex abuse victim to hush up says he was "naive" to get involved. Germany's Catholic bishops approved new guidelines that require church officials report to prosecutors suspected cases of sexual abuse of minors. An Oregon couple pleaded not guilty to manslaughter charges in the faith-healing death of their infant son.
A new study says that American women derive more happiness from religious services on Sunday than shopping. The Dalai Lama has condemned cage confinement for hens.
Mon, August 30, 2010, 4:01 pm
President Obama marked the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on Sunday with a visit to the recovering city and a quote from the Book of Job.
"`There is hope for a tree if it be cut down that it will sprout again, and that its tender branch will not cease,' " Obama said, drawing from Job 14.
Fortunately, he stopped there, because the rest of the chapter, like a lot of Job, is pretty grim. For example, a following verse says that, unlike trees, "man dies and is laid low; he breathes his last and is no more."
In his first comments on the polls that showed nearly 20 percent of Americans believe he is Muslim, Obama told NBC Nightly News, "the facts are the facts" and blamed the mistaken rumours on "a network of misinformation that in a new media era can get churned out there constantly."
In a fiery Sunday sermon in Arkansas, Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, said people who wrongly believe Obama is Muslim are catering to the president's political foes.
Neither speeches are likely to please conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who sharply criticized (again) Obama's religious beliefs in his "Restoring Honor" rally this weekend in Washington.
Beck's own language was remarkably faith-fueled, a kind of civil religion on steroids, as he enlisted and exhorted his "black-robed regiment." Does that mean he's going to recruit Catholic priests? Southern Baptist political guru Richard Land says he was "stunned" by Beck's missionary rhetoric, saying "he sounded like Billy Graham."
Back to Katrina, the NYT looks at how churches in black neighborhoods still haven't recovered from the storm, calling the Lower Ninth Ward "a desolated disgrace." The AP writes about a Catholic priest still missing after five years.
In the wake of a wave of hate crimes against U.S. Muslims, a coalition of religious groups, including Baptists, Jews, Christians and Muslims are meeting with Department of Justice officials. The FBI is investigating a fire at a Tennessee mosque construction site that had drawn anti-Islamic protests. The Council on American-Islamic Relations also says a mock pig emblazoned with the message "No Mosque in NYC" was left in a California mosque's mailbox.
The chairwoman of a NYC committee that approved the Islamic cultural center to be built blocks from Ground Zero says an interfaith center should be added to the blueprints. The imam spearheading the project, who is on a diplomatic tour of the Middle East, told an Abu-Dhabi newspaper that the "election season" has had an adverse impact on the debate about Park51. The AP says, "Whatever the outcome, the uproar over a planned Islamic center near the former World Trade Center site is shaping up as a signal event in the story of American Islam."
A lay bishop at a Mormon church was fatally shot as he was was doing administrative paperwork on Sunday between services.
The former leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium urged a victim of serial sexual abuse by a bishop to keep silent for a year, until the bishop - the victim's own uncle - could retire, according to tapes made by the victim last April and published over the weekend in two Belgian newspapers.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, founder and now spiritual head of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas Party, declared that God should send a plague to strike down the Palestinians and their leader, Mahmoud Abbas. Shas is a member of the current Israeli governing coalition, whose leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is about to enter into formal peace talks with Abbas.
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's attempt to convert dozens of young women to Islam during a visit to Italy drew an angry reaction from Italian media. A motorist fired pepper spray Saturday at a group of demonstrators from Westboro Baptist Church outside a funeral for a U.S. Marine in Nebraska.
More than 1,000 documents, including some dating back to the beginning of the Nation of Islam, have been found in Detroit, the city where the movement started 80 years ago.
An Arizona federal district court dismissed a complaint by a Quaker that the use of his federal income tax payments for military spending substantially burdens his religious exercise. The Kentucky Supreme Court held that the Medi-Share Program operated by the American Evangelistic Association and the Christian Share Ministry is subject to regulation by the state.
Fri, August 27, 2010, 3:18 pm
CNN says some (semi) high-profile evangelicals are under fire for their participation in tomorrow's "Restore Honor" rally hosted by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin in DC; some Christians are nervous about Beck's Mormon faith, even though they worked with Mormons to outlaw gay marriage in California.
Conservatives are happy, though, that the FCC will appeal a federal judge's ruling that struck down its policy against "fleeting expletives" on TV.
The NYT profiles the developer of the Park51 Islamic center and finds that he "has yet to secure financing, hire an architect, incorporate the nonprofit entity that will run the center, start its fund-raising, recruit its board members, or present formal feasibility studies and business plans to community meetings."
WaPo looks into the widespread hostility directed at U.S. Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan. The Muslim cab driver who was stabbed by a drunken 21-year-old met with NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg as Hizzoner tries to calm tensions in Gotham. Muslim leaders say they're concerned about growing "anti-Muslim hysteria."
Conservatives -- and not a lot of others -- are pushing back against a proposed bill that wouldn't let them hire and fire based on religion if they receive government grants. An "Episcopal" school that's really conservative Anglican in Fort Worth, Texas, has denied admission to a 4-year-old because she has two mommies. The strippers are back outside an Ohio church whose members picketed the ladies' strip club.
The U.S. ambassador to Malta, Doug Kmiec -- a Catholic Republican who endorsed President Obama -- is said to be in stable condition following a car wreck in California that killed an elderly nun and injured a priest. Speaking of stable condition, a new study says doctors with deep religious beliefs are more likely to take steps to keep you alive, while those who aren't religious are more willing to pull the plug.
Pope Benedict XVI praised Mother Teresa on her 100th birthday as an "exemplary model of Christian virtue." In New York last night, a few hundred outraged Catholics rallied outside the Empire State Building to vent their anger that building managers wouldn't light the iconic spire in Mother T's blue and white (it was red, white and blue to celebrate the anniversary of women's suffrage).
The 33 trapped miners in Chile have asked for statues of saints and a crucifix to create a shrine in their underground encampment. Egyptian Muslims are steaming (almost literally) about consecutive powers failures at the height of Ramadan. A South African pastor angered his flock for saying "Jesus had HIV" (he was trying to take away the HIV stigma, he says). A Saudi cleric was told to stop issuing fatwas after a recent edict told Muslims to stay away from supermarkets with female cashiers.
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