History > 2006 > USA > Faith, Sects (II)

A Choice for New York Priests

in Abuse Cases

August 31, 2006
The New York Times
By ANDY NEWMAN

As the Roman Catholic Church struggles to repair itself and its image in the wake of the sex abuse scandals, one of the more confounding questions church leaders face is what to do with priests accused of abuse.

Some priests whose crimes fell within statutes of limitation are in jail. Some have been defrocked.

But others — because they are elderly, because of the nature of their offenses, or because they have had some success fighting the charges — cannot be defrocked under canon law. These priests occupy a sort of shadow world, stripped of most duties but still financially supported by the church and fairly free to move about, both angering the critics of the church and exposing the diocese to further liability.

Cardinal Edward M. Egan, head of the New York Archdiocese, is trying something new. Since June, he has offered seven priests that the archdiocese believes have been credibly accused of sexually abusing children a choice.

They can spend the rest of their lives in closely supervised housing, where, in addition to receiving regular therapy, they must fill out a daily log of their comings and goings. Or they can leave the priesthood and the lifetime security net that comes with it.

Priests who agree to enter the program move temporarily to a handsome, ivy-covered retreat house on Long Island Sound in a mansion-filled corner of Larchmont, N.Y., in Westchester County, a place where priests with troubles have long been sent.

The building, Trinity Retreat House, flanked by the sound on one side and an inlet on the other, is, unlike its neighbors, nearly invisible from the road, hidden behind leafy trees and an ivy-covered wall. In a few months, the priests are transferred to permanent housing elsewhere, said Joseph Zwilling, Mr. Egan’s spokesman.

So far, five of the seven priests who received the letters have resigned rather than submit to monitoring. One priest has moved into the retreat house, and the other is on his way, Mr. Zwilling said.

It is difficult to determine how many other dioceses have a supervised-living program like the new one in New York. In the Chicago Archdiocese, nine priests accused of sex abuse live in a retreat house on the grounds of a seminary and are carefully monitored, officials there said, adding that they also planned to install surveillance cameras and keep the priests locked in the building during some hours.

A spokesman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, William A. Ryan, said, “There are several other dioceses that have similar programs, but unfortunately, none of them are willing to talk about it.”

In the New York Archdiocese, the priests who received the letter fall into one of several categories, Mr. Zwilling said.

Some have been convicted in a canonical trial but determined to be too elderly or infirm to endure being defrocked and are instead sentenced to a life of prayer and penance. Others have had the accusations against them referred to an archdiocesan advisory board consisting mostly of laypeople, including psychologists and lawyers. The board, which can interview the priest but does not have to, issues a recommendation to the cardinal on whether the priest should continue to minister.

The archdiocese notifies law enforcement authorities of all allegations that could result in criminal charges. But in many cases, with the accusations decades old, statutes of limitations had long since run out.

Those who defend priests have said the New York policy is too harsh, especially since the board that decides whether an accusation is credible does not have to give the priest a chance to defend himself. But Mr. Zwilling said the archdiocese was doing what it had to do.

“If there has been a finding and a belief that a cleric has misbehaved, we want to do all that we can to protect against such misbehavior occurring in the future,” Mr. Zwilling said this week.

The letter to the priests states, “The continued safety of our children and young people, the protection of the reputation and patrimony of the archdiocese, and your own well-being dictate that you enter this program and residence.”

The Rev. John P. Bambrick, a priest in the Trenton Diocese who says he was abused as a youth by a priest in Yonkers and who is now an advocate for victims, said that the program seemed in part like an attempt to force out abusive priests so that the church is no longer accountable for their actions.

“I don’t think the archdiocese is doing this out of their great concern for children,” he said. “There’s a liability issue here, and the archdiocese’s lawyers have come up with this brilliant plan, which is either to corral them and control them or to force them to leave.”

He added that if the archdiocese really wanted to protect the public, it would publish the names of abusive priests and former priests. “Unleashing them on society is not the responsible thing to do,” he said.

Mr. Zwilling said the program was not an attempt to drive out problem priests. “Our goal was to have them all participate in this program,” he said. “They are people who can make choices on their own, and this is what they have chosen.”

Mr. Zwilling added that he did not believe the archdiocese could legally notify the neighbors of abusive priests if the men were not convicted of any crime, though it does notify the local district attorney. The archdiocese covers New York City and five other downstate counties.

David Clohessy, the executive director of SNAP, the Survivors’ Network of Those Abused by Priests, said community notification should not pose a problem: “If a bishop can publicly say, ‘Father Bob has been accused of child sexual abuse,’ ” — the archdiocese does tell parishioners in a priest’s own parish when he has been removed because of abuse allegations — “that same bishop can say ‘Father Bob now lives at this address and here’s why.’ ”

Before the new program, called the Shepherd Program, was put into effect, most accused priests lived on their own, as they do in much of the country, barred from functioning as priests but required only to tell the archdiocese every few months where they lived, Mr. Zwilling said.

It is typically difficult for laypeople to find out where abusive priests are living, said Paul Baier, co-director of bishopaccountability.org. “Here in Boston they’ve removed 150 of them, and no one knows where they are,” he said. “In Los Angeles they have 200 or 300 of them, and no one knows where they are.”

But the Rev. Michael Sullivan, chairman of the canonical board of Justice for Priests and Deacons, a national organization that helps clerics accused of sexual offenses, said that New York’s program was one of the strictest he had heard of.

“I don’t read in their policy that the person has an opportunity for a different job within the church unless they accept laicization,” Father Sullivan said, referring to the conversion of priests to laymen. “My sense is that if the canonical courts cannot prove anything, that that becomes overly restrictive, and that’s unjust.”

While the letter to the priests mandates psychotherapy, it does not speak of rehabilitation or of leaving the program. “That was the situation we found ourselves in the past, where individual clerics would go through intensive therapy and would be judged able to return to ministry, and it didn’t work,” Mr. Zwilling said. “They relapsed — that led to all the charges about shuffling priests around. With what we know today, I don’t think that can be an alternative.”

Priests who agree to enter the program may not say Mass in public, dress as a priest, be alone with children or “inappropriately use computers,” the letter says. They must receive therapy and spiritual counseling. And they must fill out a logbook every day, have it signed by a monitor and be prepared to document their claims.

Over the years, Trinity Retreat House, on Pryer Manor Road, has provided a temporary home for priests with all kinds of problems, including sex abuse. Several residents of Larchmont said they knew about the retreat house and were not bothered by it or by the new program.

“I think this shows that the cardinals are making an effort,” said Jeanne Murray, a retired teacher leaving Mass on Tuesday at St. Augustine’s Church, less than a mile from the retreat house. “What would we do with people who are not priests who make mistakes? We would try to help them.”

At the retreat’s office, the secretary showed a reporter the door. “It’s nothing to publicize,” she said. “It’s a retreat house for priests. Period. End of story.”

In the retreat house itself, a man answered the door, and three others inside got up from couches and scattered. There will be no interviews, he said.

Laurie Goodstein and Anahad O’Connor contributed reporting for this article.

    A Choice for New York Priests in Abuse Cases, NYT, 31.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/nyregion/31priest.html?hp&ex=1157083200&en=77f397f81527291c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Leader of Polygamist Mormon Sect Is Arrested

August 30, 2006
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON

DENVER, Aug. 29 — Warren Jeffs, the polygamist leader of a Mormon-offshoot sect and a symbol of the government’s hardened line against plural marriage in the West, was arrested late Monday after a routine traffic stop near Las Vegas.

Mr. Jeffs, 50, who is wanted in Utah and Arizona on charges of arranging marriages between underage girls and older men, had with him an assortment of wigs and $50,000 in cash, but no weapons, police officials said. He was traveling with a wife and a brother, both of whom were questioned and released.

The arrest, four months after Mr. Jeffs was put on the F.B.I.’s 10-most-wanted list, brings to a head many of the issues that have been simmering in the deeply isolated polygamist communities of Utah and Arizona where Mr. Jeffs’s outlaw stance — and ability to evade arrest — had bolstered his claim to be an untouchable prophet of God.

Law enforcement officials and people close to the polygamist community said that even while Mr. Jeffs was on the lam, he continued to lead a group called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The group split from the main-line Mormon church decades ago when it disavowed polygamy. The fundamentalist church has about 10,000 members, mostly in and around Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz.

“Part of his mystique was that God was protecting him and he couldn’t be taken,” said Mark Shurtleff, the Utah attorney general, who has led the crackdown there.

“Our hope is that those who fear him will see he’s not as fearsome as they thought, and maybe they can come forward now and provide evidence to us,” he said.

Mr. Jeffs could face up to five years to life on each of the two most serious counts: that he was an accessory to rape for arranging marriages to two under-age brides in Utah. Law enforcement officials said it was still being determined whether Utah or Arizona would get a first crack at prosecuting Mr. Jeffs.

To some extent, law enforcement officials and former church members say, the church structure that Mr. Jeffs dominated has already fractured. A former teenage bride has cooperated with investigations against him, Utah prosecutors said. In addition, in a series of trials in Arizona, former church members — some of them excommunicated by Mr. Jeffs — are testifying for the prosecution regarding sect members’ sexual conduct with under-age wives.

A judge in Utah has appointed an outsider as fiduciary, given the power to oversee church lands that Mr. Jeffs once controlled through a trust.

“Warren has told them to do nothing, say nothing and sign nothing with the fiduciary,” said Bruce R. Wisan, the fiduciary, an accountant in Salt Lake City who was appointed last year.

Mr. Wisan — echoing comments by law enforcement officials in Utah and Arizona — said he doubted Mr. Jeffs had even established enough of a structure to lead the church towns in his absence.

“Warren has got such a control over the people, and seems to be such a dictatorial or control-type individual, I have a hard time believing he’s got an organization in place to take over,” Mr. Wisan said in a telephone interview.

One former church member in Utah said people in the sect were not sure yet what to do or think.

“It could be a relief to some of the people, or they could feel they’re under siege and hunker down,” said the man, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is working with outsiders and feared that his effectiveness in the community would be compromised. “For now, it’s very quiet.”

Legal intrusion into the world of polygamy has had its own rocky history. Federal officials cracked down on the Mormon church — the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — in the late 1800’s until it abolished polygamy in 1890. In 1953, Arizona officials led a raid against the fundamentalist offshoot that law enforcement officials now regard as a disaster because of the acrimony and mistrust it engendered.

After years of reluctance to prosecute the church members, Utah and Arizona have reinvigorated the level and number of prosecutions in the last few years. They have dealt with crimes associated with polygamy, like sexual contact with minors, but not bigamy itself.

Legal scholars say the crackdown came in part because mainstream Mormons have grown increasingly tired of the lingering association with polygamy.

“Many contemporary Mormons complain that everybody associates them with polygamy, and in fact they’re the most antipolygamy people you could meet,” said Sarah Barringer Gordon, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who teaches religious history and the law of church and state.

Mr. Jeffs was arrested without a struggle, police officials said.

According to George Togliatti, the director of Nevada’s Department of Public Safety, a state trooper pulled over Mr. Jeffs’s red 2007 Cadillac Escalade because its temporary Colorado tag was obstructed.

The trooper thought a passenger in the Escalade resembled Mr. Jeffs, whom he had seen on the F.B.I. list. Mr. Jeffs at first gave an alias, Mr. Togliatti said, then acknowledged he was Warren Jeffs and was taken into custody just after 9 p.m. on Monday.

Steve Martinez, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Las Vegas field office, said a search of the vehicle uncovered laptop computers, cellphones, the wigs and $50,000.

John Dougherty contributed reporting from Phoenix for this article, and Cathy Scott from Las Vegas.

    Leader of Polygamist Mormon Sect Is Arrested, NYT, 30.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/us/30polygamy.html?hp&ex=1156996800&en=354dcf5a4cd8fe23&ei=5094&partner=homepage

American Album

For 56 Years, Battling Evils of Hollywood With Prayer

August 28, 2006
The New York Times
By CHARLIE LeDUFF

HOLLYWOOD — Sister Mary Pia, wearing a threadbare habit, spoke from behind the bars of her gated parlor about the boundless power of prayer.

“Hollywood is the Babylon of the U.S.A.,” she said. “For people who need prayers, we have to be here.”

Just two long blocks from her monastery, you are in the thick of the electric lights of Hollywood Boulevard: among the dopers, the runaways, the surgically augmented, the homeless, the sex salesmen.

Sister Mary Pia, as pale and innocent as an uncooked loaf, prays for all of them, while knowing virtually nothing about them. There is nothing ironic about this, she believes: “One doesn’t need to be of it to know of it.”

Indeed, in her 56 years at the Monastery of the Angels, she has ventured out no more than a few dozen times to attend religious retreats or make preparations for dying loved ones. Rarely has she set a shoe onto the stained sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard.

Yet the signs of iniquity are everywhere. Police helicopters routinely hover over the cloister. There is the dull roar of the Hollywood Freeway. The head of the monastery’s statue of St. Martin de Porres has been stolen twice. Neighbors recently complained so loudly about the belfry’s morning chimes to prayer that the authorities forced the peals silent.

“I think we pricked their conscience,” she said of the neighbors. “Is 7 o’clock too early to get up?”

Sister Mary Pia is one of 21 Dominican nuns cloistered in this walled complex of stucco and steel. From a distance, the place looks more like a loading dock than a religious retreat.

They do no missionary work here, canvass no alleys, cook in no soup kitchen. Prayer is the occupation. Until recently there were 23 nuns, but Sister Mary the Pure Heart and Sister Mary Rose were sent to a convalescent home because there were not enough youthful and vigorous nuns to care for them.

The sisterhood is a dying way of life in America. Forty years ago, the United States had about 180,000 nuns. Today there are perhaps 70,000. Fewer than 6,000 are younger than 50. There are estimated to be about 5,000 cloistered, contemplative nuns, a piece of women’s history that may be on the way out.

Reasons for the collapse can be traced to the mid-1960’s: the flowering of the women’s movement, which broadened opportunities beyond secretary, housewife, nurse, teacher and nun. But the Roman Catholic Church unintentionally inflicted damage on itself when it ratified the Second Vatican Council.

“Basically it said that religious women were no more holy than lay women,” said Sister Patricia Wittberg, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. “It was devastating.”

Still, the sisters of the Angels, frail and birdlike, go on with a vocation to which they sacrificed their youth: perhaps never to have known a man, never to have rowed the banks of the Seine, never to have taken a moonlight drive. High heels and self-adornment were given up after high school graduation.

As a young woman, Sister Mary Pia might have become an opera singer. Sister Mary St. Peter, 78, the daughter of a Protestant, thought of becoming a nurse. Sister Mary St. Pius was good at photography. They gave away these things, without regret, for something they say is incalculable.

The average age at the Monastery of the Angels is about 70. From this generation also came feminists like Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug. Hugh Hefner, too, is of their era, as was the centerfold pinup Bettie Page. This generation helped create the cultural chasm that divides America today.

“It’s a materialistic age,” said Sister Mary Pia, gray now, her eyes milky with years. “For young women, religion is far down on the list.”

Sister Mary Pia grew up in the Wilshire District of Los Angeles and joined the monastery at 17, despite the tears of her parents. Prayer, she said, had delivered her brother home from the South Pacific battlefields, and so, seeing the power in it, she dedicated her life to God. She became a novitiate in 1950, years before the birth of rock ’n’ roll.

“I’ve heard of Alex Presley,” she offered. “But I wouldn’t know his music.”

Sister Mary St. Peter gave over her life in 1947, six years before the founding of Playboy magazine. “I never heard of Hugh Hefner,” she said with a shrug in the cloister’s front garden.

Sister Mary St. Pius, who arrived in 1953 from a small town in the Mojave Desert, does not know the work of the political satirist Jon Stewart. But after a brief moment, she squealed: “Martha Stewart? Oh, yes!”

Asked about Father John Geoghan, the Boston priest and serial molester who was the catalyst of the sex scandal that rocked the Catholic Church, the sisters went blank-eyed.

When told about him, Sister Mary Pia’s eyes became flinty, flashing defiance. She said she believed that one of the last respectable prejudices in America was that against the Catholics, and that the news coverage of abusive priests had been excessive, almost joyful.

“You get a little tired of all the bad news,” she said. “The media,” she wrinkled her nose, as if catching a whiff of a bad onion. “They never write about the good things.”

The important thing, then, is that there are still old women in America with the charity to care about something more than themselves, about strangers, even if they do not know those strangers’ manias and motivations. But take a walk down the boulevard any evening, and one wonders whether their prayers are reaching the intended destination.

“That’s the meaning of faith,” Sister Mary Pia said.

    For 56 Years, Battling Evils of Hollywood With Prayer, NYT, 28.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/us/28album.html

Evolution Fight Shifts Direction in Kansas Vote

August 3, 2006
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY and RALPH BLUMENTHAL

TOPEKA, Kan., Aug. 2 — Less than a year after the Kansas Board of Education adopted science standards that were the most wide-reaching in the nation in challenging Darwin’s theory of evolution, voters on Tuesday ousted the conservative majority on the board that favored those guidelines.

Several of the winners in the primary election, whose victories are virtually certain to shift the board to at least a 6-to-4 moderate majority in November, promised Wednesday to work swiftly to restore a science curriculum that does not subject evolution to critical attack.

They also said they would try to eliminate restrictions on sex education passed by the current board and to review the status of the education commissioner, Bob Corkins, who they said was hired last year with little background in education.

In a state where a fierce fight over how much students should be taught about the criticism of evolution has gone back and forth since 1999, the election results were seen as a significant defeat for the movement of intelligent design, which holds that nature by itself cannot account for life’s complexity.

Defenders of evolution pointed to the results in Kansas as a third major defeat for the intelligent design movement across the country recently and a sign, perhaps, that the public was beginning to pay attention to the movement’s details and, they said, its failings.

“I think more citizens are learning what intelligent design really is and realizing that they don’t really want that taught in their public schools,” said Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education.

In February, Ohio’s board of education dropped a mandate that 10th-grade biology classes include critical analysis of evolution. Last year, a federal judge ruled that teaching intelligent design in the schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional. But Ms. Scott said that opponents of evolution were hardly finished.

“They’ve had a series of setbacks,” she said, “but I don’t think for one moment that this means the intelligent design people will fold their tents and go away.”

Supporters of intelligent design and others who had favored the Kansas science standards said they were disappointed in Tuesday’s outcome, but they said they had also won a series of little-noticed victories in other states, including South Carolina. There, supporters said, state officials decided this summer to require students to look at ways that scientists use data “to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.”

John G. West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a group in the forefront of the intelligent design movement, said any repeal of the science standards would be a disservice to students here, and an effort to censor legitimate scientific challenges to Darwin’s theories. Still, he said, no local political skirmish will ultimately answer the broad issue.

“The debate over Darwin’s theory will be won or lost over the science,” he said.

It is not clear, however, that the Kansas vote necessarily reflected a widespread change in thinking around the state. The overall turnout in Tuesday’s election was 18 percent, the lowest here in at least 14 years, a fact some local political experts attributed to low-key races statewide and painfully steamy weather.

Several groups that favored the teaching of evolution had worked to turn out moderate voters. The groups included the Kansas Alliance for Education, which raised more than $100,000 to campaign against the current majority and the science guidelines, and Kansas Citizens for Science.

If future school board elections turn out a different group of motivated voters, the results could shift again, as they have in previous elections.

Five seats were at stake in Tuesday’s vote, four of them held by the board’s conservative Republican majority. Two conservatives lost to moderates in the Republican primary, ensuring a shift in control on the 10-member state board. Both winners will face Democratic opponents in November, but the Democrats are both considered moderates as well.

“We need to teach good science and bring the discussion back to educational issues, and not continue focusing on hot-button issues,” said Jana Shaver, a teacher and college trustee from Independence.

Ms. Shaver is one of the moderate winners in the Republican primary. She ran far ahead of the conservative candidate, Brad Patzer, who was trying to claim the seat of his mother-in-law, Iris Van Meter, who did not seek re-election.

Reached by telephone on Wednesday, Ms. Van Meter refused to speak to a reporter. “I have nothing to say to you,” she said.

Connie Morris, a former teacher and author who had described evolution as “a nice bedtime story,” also lost in the Republican primary, to Sally Cauble, another teacher.

Ms. Cauble, a local school board member from Liberal, said she favored returning to what she considered a more traditional science curriculum drawn up by a committee of science experts.

The Kansas standards, which were to take effect in classrooms in 2007, do not specifically require or prohibit discussion of intelligent design. They call for students to learn about “the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory, but also to learn about areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of the theory.”

The guidelines also say that evolution “has no discernable direction or goal.” Experts say that language goes beyond the general requirement for critical analysis of evolution as adopted by some other states.

Some members of the state school board, who supported the guidelines and were not up for election, seemed frustrated at the prospect that the board would once again revisit the guidelines.

“If the liberals take over in January, which appears likely, then I am going to have very little to say about it,” said Steve E. Abrams, the board chairman.

Kathy Martin, a board member and supporter of the standards, said: “I assume we will go back over that stuff. I don’t see a need for it, but there you have it.”

Kansas has been over this ground before. In 1999, the state made national headlines by stripping its curriculum of nearly any mention of evolution. Two years later, voters removed several conservative board members, and the curriculum change was reversed.

Then, a conservative majority took hold in 2004 and revived the issue, leading to the bitter 6-to-4 vote last year, in which the board adopted the current standards.

Monica Davey reported from Topeka for this article, and Ralph Blumenthal from Houston.

    Evolution Fight Shifts Direction in Kansas Vote, NYT, 3.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/us/03evolution.html?hp&ex=1154664000&en=c43df5486e76b157&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Evolution Opponents Lose Kansas Board Majority

August 2, 2006
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Kansas voters on Tuesday handed power back to moderates on the State Board of Education, setting the stage for a return of science teaching that broadly accepts the theory of evolution, according to preliminary election results.

With just 6 districts of 1,990 yet to report as of 8 a.m. Central time today, two conservatives — including incumbent Connie Morris, a former west Kansas teacher and author who had described evolution as “a nice bedtime story” — appear to have been defeated decisively by two moderates in the Republican primary elections. One moderate incumbent, Janet Waugh from the Kansas City area, held on to her seat in the Democratic primary.

If her fellow moderates prevailed, Ms. Waugh said last week, “we need to revisit the minutes and every decision that was 6-4, re-vote.”

Ms. Morris lost to Sally Cauble, a teacher from Liberal, who has favored a return to traditional science standards.

Taking another seat from the conservatives in the Republican primary was Jana Shaver of Independence, a former teacher and administrator, who ran far ahead of Brad Patzer. Mr. Patzer is the son-in-law of the current board member Iris Van Meter, who did not seek reelection.

In another closely fought Republican race, in the Kansas City-Olathe district, Harry E. McDonald, a retired biology teacher, lost to the conservative incumbent John W. Bacon, an accountant.

The results seem likely to give the moderates a 6-4 edge on the 10-member board when it takes over in January. Half the members of the board are elected every two years. The election results are not final until certified by the Kansas Secretary of State, Ron Thornburgh, following an official canvas.

Both moderate Republican winners face Democratic opponents in November, but the Democrats are moderates as well, favoring a return to the traditional science standards that prevailed before a conservative majority elected in 2004 passed new rules for teaching science. Those rules, enacted last November, called for classroom critiques of Darwin’s theory. Ms. Waugh, the Democrat, does not face a Republican opponent in the general election.

The changes in the science standards, favored by advocates of intelligent design who believe life is too complex to be have been created by natural events, put Kansas at the vanguard of efforts by religious advocates critical explanations of the origin of life that do not include a creator. But intelligent design was not referenced in the Kansas standards.

The curriculum changes, coming after years of see-sawing power struggles between moderates and conservatives, drew widespread ridicule and, critics complained, threatened Kansas’s high standing in national education circles. But Steve E. Abrams, the chairman of the board and a veterinarian from Arkansas City, said the changes only subjected evolution to critical scientific scrutiny.

    Evolution Opponents Lose Kansas Board Majority, NYT, 2.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/us/02cnd-kansas.html?hp&ex=1154577600&en=938d196883854b8d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Evolution’s Backers in Kansas Mount a Counterattack

August 1, 2006
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

KANSAS CITY, Kan., July 29 — God and Charles Darwin are not on the primary ballot in Kansas on Tuesday, but once again a contentious schools election has religion and science at odds in a state that has restaged a three-quarter-century battle over the teaching of evolution.

Less than a year after a conservative Republican majority on the State Board of Education adopted rules for teaching science containing one of the broadest challenges in the nation to Darwin’s theory of evolution, moderate Republicans and Democrats are mounting a fierce counterattack. They want to retake power and switch the standards back to what they call conventional science.

The Kansas election is being watched closely by both sides in the national debate over the teaching of evolution. In the past several years, pitched battles have been waged between the scientific establishment and proponents of what is called intelligent design, which holds that nature alone cannot explain life’s origin and complexity.

Last February, the Ohio Board of Education reversed its 2002 mandate requiring 10th-grade biology classes to critically analyze evolution. The action followed a federal judge’s ruling that teaching intelligent design in the public schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.

A defeat for the conservative majority in Kansas on Tuesday could be further evidence of the fading fortunes of the intelligent design movement, while a victory would preserve an important stronghold in Kansas.

The curriculum standards adopted by the education board do not specifically mention intelligent design, but advocates of the belief lobbied for the changes, and students are urged to seek “more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”

Though there is no reliable polling data available, Joseph Aistrup, head of political science at Kansas State University, said sharp ideological splits among Republicans and an unusual community of interest among moderate Republicans and some Democrats were helping challengers in the primary.

Kansas Democrats, moreover, have a strong standard-bearer in the incumbent governor, Kathleen Sebelius, who has distanced herself from the debate.

“And if a conservative candidate makes it through the primary, there’s a Democratic challenger waiting” in the general election, Professor Aistrup said.

Several moderate Republican candidates have vowed, if they lose Tuesday, to support the Democratic primary winners in November. With the campaign enlivened by a crowded field of 16 candidates contending for five seats — four held by conservatives who voted for the new science standards last year — a shift of two seats could overturn the current 6-to-4 majority. The four-year terms are staggered so that only half the 10-member board is up for election each two years.

The acrimony in the school board races is not limited to differences over the science curriculum but also over other ideologically charged issues like sex education, charter schools and education financing. Power on the board has shifted almost every election since 1998, with the current conservative majority taking hold in 2004.

“Can we just agree God invented Darwin?” asked a weary Sue Gamble, a moderate member of the board whose seat is not up for re-election.

The chairman of the board, Dr. Steve E. Abrams, a veterinarian and the leader of the conservative majority, said few of the opposition candidates were really moderates. “They’re liberals,” said Dr. Abrams, who is not up for re-election.

He said that the new science curriculum in no way opened the door to intelligent design or creationism and that any claim to the contrary “is an absolute falsehood.”

“We have explicitly stated that the standards must be based on scientific evidence,” Dr. Abrams said, “what is observable, measurable, testable, repeatable and unfalsifiable.”

In science, he said, “everything is supposedly tentative, except the teaching of evolution is dogma.”

Harry E. McDonald, a retired biology teacher and self-described moderate Republican who has been going door to door for votes in his district near Olathe, said the board might have kept overt religious references out of the standards, “but methinks they doth protest too much.”

“They say science can’t answer this, therefore God,” Mr. McDonald said.

Connie Morris, a conservative Republican running for re-election, said the board had merely authorized scientifically valid criticism of evolution. Ms. Morris, a retired teacher and author, said she did not believe in evolution.

“It’s a nice bedtime story,” she said. “Science doesn’t back it up.”

Dr. Abrams said his views as someone who believes that God created the universe 6,500 years ago had nothing to do with the science standards adopted.

“In my personal faith, yes, I am a creationist,” he said. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with science. I can separate them.” He said he agreed that “my personal views of Scripture have no room in the science classroom.”

Dr. Abrams said that at a community meeting he had been asked whether it was possible to believe in the Bible and in evolution, and that he had responded, “There are those who try to believe in both — there are theistic evolutionists — but at some point in time you have to decide which you’re going to put your credence in.”

Last year’s changes in the science standards followed an increasingly bitter seesawing of power on the education board that began in 1998 when conservatives won a majority. They made the first changes to the standards the next year, which in turn were reversed after moderates won back control in 2000. The 2002 elections left the board split 5-5, and in 2004 the conservatives won again, instituting their major standards revisions in November 2005.

Critics said the changes altered the science standards in ways that invited theistic interpretations. The new definition called for students to learn about “the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory, but also to learn about areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of the theory.”

In one of many “additional specificities” that the board added to the standards, it stated, “Biological evolution postulates an unguided natural process that has no discernable direction or goal.”


John Calvert, manager of the Intelligent Design Network in Shawnee Mission and a lawyer who wrote material for the board advocating the new science standards, said they were not intended to advance religion.

“What we are trying to do is insert objectivity, take the bias out of the religious standard that now favors the nontheistic religion of evolution,” Mr. Calvert said.

Janet Waugh, a car dealer and the only moderate Democrat on the board whose seat is up for election, said that just because some people were challenging evolution did not mean their views belonged in the curriculum.

“When the mainstream scientific community determines a theory is correct, that’s when it should be in the schools,” Ms. Waugh said. “The intelligent design people are trying to cut in line.”

The races have been hard-fought. With the majority of the 100,000 registered Republicans in Mr. McDonald’s northeast Kansas district usually ignoring primary elections, a few hundred ballots could easily be the margin of victory.

So Mr. McDonald, who with $35,000 is the lead fund-raiser among the candidates, printed newsletters showing his opponent, the conservative board member John W. Bacon, with a big red slash through his face and the slogan, “Time to Bring Home the Bacon.” Mr. Bacon did not respond to several calls for a response.

But many of the homeowners Mr. McDonald visited Friday night showed little interest in the race. Jack Campbell, a medical center security director, opened the door warily, and when Mr. McDonald recited his pitch, seemed disappointed. “I thought I won some sweepstakes,” Mr. Campbell said.

Last Thursday night at Fort Hays State University, Ms. Morris debated her moderate Republican challenger, Sally Cauble, a former teacher, and the Democratic candidate, Tim Cruz, a former mayor of Garden City, whom Ms. Morris once accused of being an illegal immigrant. (He said he was third-generation American, and Ms. Morris apologized.)

The audience asked about Kansas being ridiculed across the country for its stance on evolution.

“I did not write the jokes,” Ms. Morris said.

Spectators split on the winner.

“There are so many more important issues in Kansas right now,” said Cheryl Shepherd-Adams, a science teacher. “The issue is definitely a wedge issue, and I don’t want to see our community divided.”

    Evolution’s Backers in Kansas Mount a Counterattack, NYT, 1.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/us/01evolution.html?hp&ex=1154491200&en=bb3d3e73e4d597cd&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Parents of Man Charged in Seattle Shooting Issue Appeal and Apology to Jews

August 1, 2006
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

SEATTLE, July 31 — The parents of a Muslim man accused of shooting to death a woman and injuring five other people at a Jewish nonprofit organization last week wrote letters to Jewish groups on Monday saying “they don’t want this to be seen as anything but the act of an ill person,” a lawyer for the family said.

“It’s basically telling the people that they’re very sorry for the tragedy that happened, that they’re praying for them,” said the lawyer, Larry C. Stephenson. “They don’t want this to be seen as creating any hatred between Jewish and Muslim people. The Haqs are very religious people.”

The Seattle police say the Haqs’ son, Naveed Afzal Haq, 30, opened fire Friday afternoon in the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, north of downtown, after forcing his way inside by holding a young girl at gunpoint. Pamela Waechter, 58, the federation’s director of annual giving, was killed. Three other victims remained in serious condition on Monday.

Dan Donohoe , a spokesman for the King County prosecuting attorney’s office, said Mr. Haq would be formally charged this week. Mr. Haq is being held on one count of homicide and five counts of attempted homicide; his bail is $50 million. The F.B.I. is also investigating to determine if he committed a hate crime, said Frederick Gutt, a special agent in the bureau’s Seattle office.

Mr. Haq told an emergency dispatcher moments after the shootings that he had attacked the offices because of his anger toward Jews and the United States, according to the police and an arrest affidavit.

Mr. Stephenson said that Mr. Haq had suffered from mental illness for about a decade and that he took medication, including lithium, for a bipolar disorder. The shooting “was a result of a mentally ill person,’’ the lawyer said. “It was not a rational act at all.”

Before the shooting, Mr. Haq was facing a charge of lewd conduct for allegedly exposing himself in a shopping mall near his family’s home in Pasco, about 180 miles from Seattle in southeastern Washington. He has pleaded not guilty in that case.

Mr. Donohoe said of the claim that Mr. Haq was mentally ill: “I don’t think we’ve received any information about any history, so I don’t think that figures in. I don’t think that would play a role at this point.”

Mian Haq, Mr. Haq’s father, is from Pakistan. He and his wife, Nahida, had been active in the Muslim community around Pasco for three decades, friends said.

Naveed Haq is an American. He graduated in 1998 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., with a degree in biology, according to university records. He attended the University of Pennsylvania’s school of dentistry but dropped out “when his mental illness became a problem,” Mr. Stephenson said.

“He stopped going to classes,’’ the lawyer said. “His moods were all over the place.”

But Mr. Haq later enrolled at Washington State University and earned a second degree, in electrical engineering, in 2004, Mr. Stephenson said. Since then, he had been unable to find a steady job in engineering and had recently worked at a Lowe’s in the Seattle area.

Mr. Stephenson said Mr. Haq’s mother had tried to stop him from going to Seattle last week, but only because she was concerned about him in general and not because she knew of his plans.

“His mother was very good about reading him,’’ he said.

Mr. Stephenson said the Haqs’ letter was being faxed Monday to the federation’s offices in Seattle and to Temple B’nai Torah in Bellevue, where funeral services were held for Ms. Waechter on Monday. Mian Haq hand-delivered a letter to Congregation Beth Sholom in Richland, he said.

Esther Herst, executive director of Temple B’nai Torah, said the temple had received the letter.

Nancy Geiger, the interim director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, said the rabbi who presided over Ms. Waechter’s funeral said she “died in sanctified service to the Jewish people.”

    Parents of Man Charged in Seattle Shooting Issue Appeal and Apology to Jews, NYT, 1.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/us/01seattle.html

Police Describe Seattle Shooting as a Hate Crime

July 30, 2006
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

SEATTLE, July 29 — A day after a gunman killed one woman and wounded five others in the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, the police identified a Muslim man on Saturday as the suspect and said he used the Internet to select the federation as a random target for his anger toward Jews.

As Jewish groups across the Puget Sound region moved to increase security on Saturday, the police identified the suspect as Naveed Afzal Haq, 30, whose family lives in Pasco, in southeast Washington, about 180 miles from Seattle.

At a court hearing on Saturday, a judge ordered Mr. Haq held on $50 million bail at the King County Jail pending formal charges of murder and attempted murder, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Haq entered the courtroom in handcuffs, chains and leg shackles, and a white jail shirt that labeled him an “ultra security inmate.”

The police are treating the shooting as a hate crime based on what they say Mr. Haq told a 911 dispatcher shortly before surrendering.

“He said he wanted the United States to leave Iraq, that his people were being mistreated and that the United States was harming his people,” Chief R. Gil Kerlikowske of the Seattle Police said Saturday at a news conference. “And he pointedly blamed the Jewish people for all of these problems. He stated he didn’t care if he lived.”

The chief said the gunman apparently selected the federation as a target by randomly searching the Internet for Jewish organizations in the area. The police confiscated at least three computers, he said.

Chief Kerlikowske described an intense and violent scene inside the federation, with some of the 18 people present jumping out of second-story windows and one young pregnant woman crawling to call 911 after being shot in the arm as she covered her abdomen. When the gunman later encountered her on the phone with emergency dispatchers, she refused to hang up.

“She was able to get him to take the telephone,” the chief said, calling her “a hero.”

A neighbor of Mr. Haq’s family in Pasco said Mr. Haq had spoken of Jews as recently as 10 days ago, sometimes using stereotypes about Jewish influence in the United States.

“He was saying he wasn’t trying to be racial about it but how they had control over a lot of the newscasts and things, ownership and stuff,” said the neighbor, Caleb Hales, 21.

Colleagues of the victims said the gunman had identified himself as “a Muslim-American” who was “angry at Israel.”

The A.P., citing a statement of probable cause, reported that Mr. Haq had told a 911 dispatcher, “These are Jews and I’m tired of getting pushed around and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East."

The Seattle Times reported Saturday that Mr. Haq was also facing a charge of lewd conduct in Benton County, in southeast Washington, accused of exposing himself in public.

The police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have said they believe Mr. Haq was acting alone.

The chief said the Mr. Haq “was so enraged at first” but later calmed down and followed the emergency dispatchers’ instructions to leave the building with his hands up. He surrendered to the police at the federation offices near downtown 12 minutes after the shootings were first reported to 911.

The police have not released the names of the victims, all women. Three of the survivors were in serious condition on Saturday and two were in satisfactory condition, according to the media relations office at the Harborview Medical Center. They range in age from their early 20’s to 40’s and had gunshot wounds in the knee, groin, abdomen and arm. Federation officials said the woman who was killed was Pam Waechter, 58, its director of annual giving.

Federation officials identified the wounded women as Dayna Klein, 37; Cheryl Stumbo, 43; Layla Bush, 23; and Carol Goldman, 35; and Christina Rexroad, whose age was not known.

Asked to describe her group’s general relations with area Muslim groups, Amy Wasser-Simpson, the federation’s vice president, said, “We have had no negative interactions with the Muslim community whatsoever.”

Robert S. Jacobs, regional director for the Pacific Northwest Region of the Anti-Defamation League, who knew several of the victims, said that the three with serious injuries are not Jewish, including Cheryl Stumbo, the federation’s marketing director.

“These were really good, hard-working people who cared about the community and cared about their jobs,” he said.

The gunman apparently hid behind a plant at the federation’s offices and waited for someone to enter the building, and then forced his way inside at gunpoint when a teenager opened a locked door, Chief Kerlikowske said. The gunman had two semiautomatic pistols.

A half-hour before the shooting, Mr. Haq was ticketed for a minor traffic infraction on Third Avenue, the same street where the federation has its offices, the chief said.

Mr. Hales, the neighbor of Mr. Haq’s family, said he spoke with Mr. Haq on July 20,. Mr. Hales, whose family is Mormon, said Mr. Haq had talked about finding a job, perhaps in engineering. The conversation wandered, Mr. Hales said, with Mr. Haq expressing curiosity about Mr. Hales’s religion. “He told me he would stay up late up at night reading about people’s religions and cultural backgrounds,” Mr. Hales said.

His mother, Maureen Hales, said she believed that the Haqs were originally from Pakistan and that Mr. Haq’s father, Mian Haq, was an engineer who worked at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

    Police Describe Seattle Shooting as a Hate Crime, NYT, 30.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/us/30seattle.html

Our Lady of Discord

July 30, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN HANSEN

IT takes a singular sense of purpose to turn a lone Michigan pizza joint into a multibillion-dollar global brand. Yet the founder of Domino’s Pizza, Thomas S. Monaghan, certainly had it more four decades ago, when he bought his first restaurant in Ypsilanti, Mich., near Detroit — and he has brought that same sense of mission to the task of giving his pizza fortune away.

Since netting about $1 billion from the 1998 sale of Domino’s to Bain Capital, Mr. Monaghan, 69, has become one of the leading philanthropists in the country and the biggest benefactor of conservative Catholic institutions.

In the past eight years, his Ave Maria Foundation, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., has donated $140 million to promote conservative Catholic education, media and other organizations, including Detroit-area parochial grade schools, a law school and small regional colleges in Michigan and Nicaragua, along with radio stations and a fellowship group for Catholic business leaders.

His boldest charitable venture by far, however, is Ave Maria University, a four-year liberal arts campus under construction 30 miles northeast of Naples, Fla., to which Mr. Monaghan has donated or pledged $285 million so far. Along with the university, which enrolled its first students three years ago on a temporary campus, he and a local developer are building an adjoining new town called Ave Maria.

The bar for the school has been set high, with plans to eventually attract up to 6,000 students to what supporters, including Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, predict will be a top-tier academic institution devoted to the Catholic faith.

Mr. Monaghan, who has called the Florida campus and town “God’s will,” has even loftier intentions. He has said that he sees the university, which says it adheres to a strict interpretation of Catholic doctrine, as a chance to save souls. “I’m a businessman. I get to the bottom line,” Mr. Monaghan, who declined to be interviewed for this article, told The Orlando Sentinel in 2004. “And the bottom line is to help people get to heaven.”

Yet as he aims for the divine, Mr. Monaghan has been facing some unexpected earthly trials, including a revolt at his law school in Ann Arbor and sharp criticism by many of the conservative Catholics who once supported his foundation’s projects.

In many ways, Mr. Monaghan’s troubles illustrate how difficult it can be for wealthy, driven entrepreneurs to make the transition to full-time philanthropy, particularly when they have single-minded ideas about how they want their money spent. Traits that make successful business leaders — ego, ambition, determination, even a touch of imperiousness — do not necessarily go over well in charitable work, causing even the most well-intentioned projects to founder.

As the legendary investor Warren E. Buffett recently noted when he donated most of his $40 billion fortune to an established foundation rather than create one of his own, making a mint — as difficult as that is — can be easier than giving it away.

As he tries to build a new university and town in his own image, Mr. Monaghan has been experiencing some of those difficulties firsthand. Faculty members, students and parents tied to his Detroit-area schools have complained that he runs his charitable foundation like a sole proprietorship, starting and abandoning projects as whim strikes him. And they characterize his new Florida university as a vanity venture that could well prove to be a colossal waste of cash.

“It all belongs to Tom Monaghan; that’s the problem,” said Therese M. Bower of Cincinnati, whose son attended Ave Maria College, one of the schools Mr. Monaghan founded in Michigan. His foundation moved to close the school’s Ypsilanti campus to focus on building his university in Florida.

“If Tom were a real philanthropist,” said Jay W. McNally, the former director of communications and advancement at the college, “he would donate his money and step off.” Mr. McNally said the school let him go after he told federal officials that some financial aid for students in Michigan had been diverted to Florida; Ave Maria University later returned $259,000 in federal money.Mr. Monaghan’s many defenders, including Bowie K. Kuhn, the former baseball commissioner, and Michael Novak, a Catholic theologian, dismissed much of the criticism as carping by academics. “If it weren’t Monaghan, it would be dissatisfaction with whomever,” says Mr. Novak, an Ave Maria University trustee.

Mr. Kuhn, who is on the board of the Ave Maria School of Law, said Mr. Monaghan had every right to use his money as he wished. “Tom makes very good judgments, and he sticks to his guns,” he said.

Mr. McNally, a former editor of the Detroit archdiocese’s newspaper, said he too had admired Mr. Monaghan’s determination. Back in the 1980’s, Mr. McNally recalled, he and other conservative Catholics cheered Mr. Monaghan’s donations to anti-abortion causes and his refusal to withdraw that support even when abortion-rights groups called for a boycott of Domino’s.

He and other conservative Catholics were equally enthusiastic when Mr. Monaghan’s foundation began its push into higher education eight years ago, starting Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti and the Ave Maria School of Law in neighboring Ann Arbor, and taking over the administration of St. Mary’s College in nearby Orchard Lake, Mich.

Many Detroit-area Catholics said they gave up jobs and teaching posts elsewhere to work at the schools, with some faculty members moving from hundreds of miles away because, as a former Ave Maria College biology professor, Andrew J. Messaros, recalled, they were committed to promoting a faithful version of core Catholic teachings.

“I bought into the whole vision lock, stock and barrel,” Professor Messaros said. He added that he took a $16,000 pay cut from a tenure-track position at the West Virginia University School of Medicine to teach at Ave Maria in mid-2003.

Mr. Monaghan had considered building Ave Maria University, along with a 250-foot crucifix, in Ann Arbor Township, but local officials denied him the necessary zoning changes in 2002. That fall, he announced that the Barron Collier Company, a Florida developer, had donated 750 acres of farmland to the university on the northwest edge of the Everglades. His new plan was to build Ave Maria University in Florida, while investing another $50 million in a separate partnership with Barron Collier to build the adjoining Ave Maria town.

NICHOLAS J. HEALY JR., who was president of Ave Maria College in Michigan and is now president of the Florida university, promptly set up a temporary campus near Naples. It opened with about 100 students in a retirement complex in fall 2003; enrollment has grown to nearly 400 students.

“We’ve tried to create an environment traditional Catholics can be comfortable with,” Mr. Healy said, adding that the devotion to the faith was put into action in many ways: from single-sex dorms and daily rosary walks to a scholarship that the school, in keeping with what it describes as its strong pro-life ethic, recently began offering in the name of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose husband won a bitter court fight in 2004 to authorize doctors to stop life support.

While Mr. Healy was opening the Florida university, financing for Mr. Monaghan’s projects in Michigan began to disappear. In late 2002, the foundation said it would no longer support St. Mary’s. An expected shutdown of the school was averted only when another Catholic institution, Madonna University in nearby Livonia, Mich., agreed to take it over.

In Ypsilanti, the news that Ave Maria College would be merged into the new university in Florida went down a little easier — at least initially — given that Mr. Monaghan pledged to keep the Michigan campus open until 2007, so that the school’s 230 students could stay and finish their degrees.

Despite that assurance, however, Professor Messaros said that by the fall of 2003 school officials were pressuring him and other faculty members to move to Florida quickly — or risk losing their jobs. “Their attitude was, ‘This is what we’re going to do. Take it or leave it,’ ” he said.

Mrs. Bower, whose son Paul was a junior at Ave Maria College when the move to Florida began to accelerate, said she became concerned that the Michigan campus was being deserted. She grew more anxious in 2004 when word got out that school administrators in Florida had tried to have most of the books at the Michigan campus’s library shipped to Naples.

“I thought, ‘Wait! There are still students there. They can’t just take all the stuff,’ ” said Mrs. Bower, who created a Web site — geocities.com/aveparents — to help keep the Michigan campus intact.

Another parent — Edward N. Peters, who taught canon law in a theology program now based at Ave Maria University — threatened to sue if the campus was dismantled.

“It has become clear that Tom Monaghan regards Ave Maria not as a kind of public trust but rather as his personal domain which he can effectively treat however he wants,” Professor Peters, whose son attended the college, wrote in a June 2004 letter to the college board. He added that since Mr. Monaghan shifted his attention to Florida, he had cut support for several of his Michigan projects, including a weekly Catholic newspaper and a new convent. “Ironically, the very legacy that was being built up with Monaghan’s help is now being torn down at his will,” Professor Peters wrote. “It is a tragic and scandalous waste of the human and financial resources given by God.”

In late 2004, Father Neil J. Roy, Ave Maria College’s academic dean, actually did sue Mr. Monaghan and the school’s trustees in a bid to stall the Michigan campus’s closure, but a state court judge dismissed the suit last September. The exodus of faculty and students to Florida and elsewhere continued, and last year school officials began making cash buyout offers to the 30 or so students who had planned to continue studies on the Ypsilanti campus in 2007.

Paul R. Roney, executive director of Mr. Monaghan’s foundation, said he understood that the decision to shift resources to Florida was difficult for some in Ypsilanti to accept. But he added that Mr. Monaghan had honored his promise to keep the campus operating through 2007 — albeit now with just three students and a handful of professors. “Any pledges that were made have been more than fulfilled,” Mr. Roney said.

Despite all the criticism, Mr. Healy, Ave Maria University’s president, said that most professors in Michigan happily relocated to Florida.

For a while, the Ave Maria School of Law seemed immune to the strife. Its enrollment, now about 380, was growing, and the American Bar Association had granted it full accreditation. But Mr. Monaghan wants to relocate that school to Florida, too, upsetting teachers, students and alumni. Opponents say it is crazy to leave an intellectual center like Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, for an undeveloped outpost on the edge of the Everglades.

“There’s nothing there yet, with all due respect,” said Chris McGowan, a law school alumnus who noted that students in Ann Arbor have easy access to a federal courthouse and many local internship opportunities.

He and others who are fighting the move said the only reason the school’s board was even considering it was that Mr. Monaghan, the chairman, had invested more than $330 million in the Florida university and town and wanted the law school there to shore up that investment.

One veteran board member — Charles E. Rice, an emeritus professor of law at Notre Dame University — tried to make the case against the move. But he said that Mr. Monaghan and other board members, including the law school’s dean, Bernard Dobranski, “did not want a contrary voice,” so last fall they adopted term-limit bylaws and ejected him from the board.

Dean Dobranski denied the bylaws change was directed at Professor Rice, noting that three other members left the board at the same time.

Faculty members, students and alumni rallied around Professor Rice, however, and since last fall they have mounted a campaign that has included pointed attacks against Mr. Monaghan and resolutions calling on Dean Dobranski to resign.

“The bigger issue is school governance,” said Jason B. Negri, president of the law school’s alumni association. Specifically, he criticized Mr. Monaghan’s insistence on operating the school like a private business and what he said was the board’s failure to stand up to him.

MR. KUHN rejected that criticism. “This is not a bunch of trained dogs,” he said of his fellow directors, adding that the board would not make any decision on relocating the law school to Florida until a feasibility study on the move was completed and members had seen the results.

“The key question is where we will thrive in the long term,” said Dean Dobranski. He pointed out that Mr. Monaghan had given the law school $50 million, so “it’s not unreasonable for him to say ‘I think the move is a good idea.’ ” Dean Dobranski added, “He’s to be commended for how he’s used his wealth.”

At the university’s construction site in Florida, the fruits of Mr. Monaghan’s generosity are coming into view. Miles of pipes and electricity lines have been laid, and buildings are going up. Mr. Healy, the president, said the school should be out of its temporary home and on the new campus by August 2007.

Not that the process has been easy — or cheap. Mr. Healy said damage from hurricanes last year and the year before, along with strong demand for raw materials in China has sent labor, cement and steel prices soaring — nearly doubling building costs and eating up Mr. Monaghan’s money faster than expected. Indeed, in the next year, Mr. Roney said, the Ave Maria Foundation’s assets might drop to as little as $15 million from $251 million in 1999.

As a result, school officials have had to scale back plans. For now, they have settled for putting up only about half of the 14 buildings they originally intended to complete in the first phase of campus construction. Mr. Healy is counting on more money from Mr. Monaghan as houses are sold in the adjoining town, because Mr. Monaghan has promised to donate his share of profits, expected to exceed $100 million, to the university. “Very few schools have this kind of start-up capital,” Mr. Healy said.

But it could be several years or more before the university sees much of that cash, given that home sales will not start until later this year, amid a cooling housing market, and the whole town — which has been planned to include 11,000 homes, a retail district and an 18-hole golf course — will not be completed until around 2015.

IN the meantime, Mr. Novak, the Ave Maria trustee, said the university would have to raise millions of dollars to cover salaries and other operating expenses and to keep construction, expected to cost at least $1 billion over the next 50 years, moving forward. The school has raised about $20 million in the last three years and is now expanding efforts to sell “naming opportunities” for campus buildings. Mr. Novak said he was hopeful that that initiative would attract some major donors, but he added, “until you actually get them in the door you don’t have them.”

Kate Cousino, the 2004 salutatorian of Ave Maria College, said she would not be writing any checks. In fact, she said that she and other Ave Maria graduates recently started an alternative alumni group because they didn’t want fund-raisers for the Florida campus asking them for donations.

She and other critics of Mr. Monaghan say that other like-minded Catholics will hesitate to hand over money now that, at least in conservative Catholic circles, word of his troubles has gotten out. “I think he’s really turned off a lot of his target market,” said Terrence L. McKeegan, an Ave Maria law school graduate.

Mr. McKeegan, who now works for a human-rights group at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, said recent fund-raising letters suggested that the university may be facing a cash crunch. One letter signed by Mr. Monaghan, for example, said that steeper construction costs had hampered the university’s ability to buy books for its library, and urgently appealed for donations. Mr. McKeegan and others predicted that the university would wind up amounting to far less than the first-rate institution Mr. Monaghan has envisioned in spite of all the money he has put into it.

Professor Messaros called the millions that Mr. Monaghan has spent “mind-numbing.” His fortune could have been spent helping the poor or assisting established universities or on any number of better causes, instead of on building what he called “a ‘Citizen Kane’ monument to waste,” Professor Messaros added.

Mr. Healy, the university president, and Mr. Novak, the trustee, denied that that the controversy had hurt fund-raising efforts. “We haven’t seen any decline in our support at all,” Mr. Healy said, adding that the extra attention could even help. “The more publicity there is,” he said, “the better off you are.”

Mr. Novak said that many of the difficulties Mr. Monaghan and university officials have faced are not surprising. “All good things are fraught with troubles,” he said. “You just have to work through them.” The school already has a standout theology program, a strong sacred music program and a devoted student body, he said. He said he had faith the university would thrive over time.

“I feel very strongly,” Mr. Novak said, “that this is something the Lord wants.”

    Our Lady of Discord, NYT, 30.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/business/yourmoney/30monaghan.html

Conservative Pastor Steers Clear of Politics, and Pays

July 30, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

MAPLEWOOD, Minn. — Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing — and the church’s — to conservative political candidates and causes.

The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute “voters’ guides” that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?

After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.

But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share.

“Most of my friends are believers,” said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist and church member, “and they think if you’re a believer, you’ll vote for Bush. And it’s scary to go against that.”

Sermons like Mr. Boyd’s are hardly typical in today’s evangelical churches. But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.

At least six books on this theme have been published recently, some by Christian publishing houses. Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Barnard College and an evangelical, has written “Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America — an Evangelical’s Lament.”

And Mr. Boyd has a new book out, “The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church,” which is based on his sermons.

“There is a lot of discontent brewing,” said Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the “emerging church,” which is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.

“More and more people are saying this has gone too far — the dominance of the evangelical identity by the religious right,” Mr. McLaren said. “You cannot say the word ‘Jesus’ in 2006 without having an awful lot of baggage going along with it. You can’t say the word ‘Christian,’ and you certainly can’t say the word ‘evangelical’ without it now raising connotations and a certain cringe factor in people.

“Because people think, ‘Oh no, what is going to come next is homosexual bashing, or pro-war rhetoric, or complaining about ‘activist judges.’ ”

Mr. Boyd said he had cleared his sermons with the church’s board, but his words left some in his congregation stunned. Some said that he was disrespecting President Bush and the military, that he was soft on abortion or telling them not to vote.

“When we joined years ago, Greg was a conservative speaker,” said William Berggren, a lawyer who joined the church with his wife six years ago. “But we totally disagreed with him on this. You can’t be a Christian and ignore actions that you feel are wrong. A case in point is the abortion issue. If the church were awake when abortion was passed in the 70’s, it wouldn’t have happened. But the church was asleep.”

Mr. Boyd, 49, who preaches in blue jeans and rumpled plaid shirts, leads a church that occupies a squat block-long building that was once a home improvement chain store.

The church grew from 40 members in 12 years, based in no small part on Mr. Boyd’s draw as an electrifying preacher who stuck closely to Scripture. He has degrees from Yale Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary, and he taught theology at Bethel College in St. Paul, where he created a controversy a few years ago by questioning whether God fully knew the future. Some pastors in his own denomination, the Baptist General Conference, mounted an effort to evict Mr. Boyd from the denomination and his teaching post, but he won that battle.

He is known among evangelicals for a bestselling book, “Letters From a Skeptic,” based on correspondence with his father, a leftist union organizer and a lifelong agnostic — an exchange that eventually persuaded his father to embrace Christianity.

Mr. Boyd said he never intended his sermons to be taken as merely a critique of the Republican Party or the religious right. He refuses to share his party affiliation, or whether he has one, for that reason. He said there were Christians on both the left and the right who had turned politics and patriotism into “idolatry.”

He said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.

“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview.

Patriotic displays are still a mainstay in some evangelical churches. Across town from Mr. Boyd’s church, the sanctuary of North Heights Lutheran Church was draped in bunting on the Sunday before the Fourth of July this year for a “freedom celebration.” Military veterans and flag twirlers paraded into the sanctuary, an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the stage, and a Marine major who had served in Afghanistan preached that the military was spending “your hard-earned money” on good causes.

In his six sermons, Mr. Boyd laid out a broad argument that the role of Christians was not to seek “power over” others — by controlling governments, passing legislation or fighting wars. Christians should instead seek to have “power under” others — “winning people’s hearts” by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did, Mr. Boyd said.

“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.

“I am sorry to tell you,” he continued, “that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”

Mr. Boyd lambasted the “hypocrisy and pettiness” of Christians who focus on “sexual issues” like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public.

“Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,” he said. “And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.”

Some Woodland Hills members said they applauded the sermons because they had resolved their conflicted feelings. David Churchill, a truck driver for U.P.S. and a Teamster for 26 years, said he had been “raised in a religious-right home” but was torn between the Republican expectations of faith and family and the Democratic expectations of his union.

When Mr. Boyd preached his sermons, “it was liberating to me,” Mr. Churchill said.

Mr. Boyd gave his sermons while his church was in the midst of a $7 million fund-raising campaign. But only $4 million came in, and 7 of the more than 50 staff members were laid off, he said.

Mary Van Sickle, the family pastor at Woodland Hills, said she lost 20 volunteers who had been the backbone of the church’s Sunday school.

“They said, ‘You’re not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way,’ ” she said. “It was some of my best volunteers.”

The Rev. Paul Eddy, a theology professor at Bethel College and the teaching pastor at Woodland Hills, said: “Greg is an anomaly in the megachurch world. He didn’t give a whit about church leadership, never read a book about church growth. His biggest fear is that people will think that all church is is a weekend carnival, with people liking the worship, the music, his speaking, and that’s it.”

In the end, those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites, church staff members said. In their place, the church has added more members who live in the surrounding community — African-Americans, Hispanics and Hmong immigrants from Laos.

This suits Mr. Boyd. His vision for his church is an ethnically and economically diverse congregation that exemplifies Jesus’ teachings by its members’ actions. He, his wife and three other families from the church moved from the suburbs three years ago to a predominantly black neighborhood in St. Paul.

Mr. Boyd now says of the upheaval: “I don’t regret any aspect of it at all. It was a defining moment for us. We let go of something we were never called to be. We just didn’t know the price we were going to pay for doing it.”

His congregation of about 4,000 is still digesting his message. Mr. Boyd arranged a forum on a recent Wednesday night to allow members to sound off on his new book. The reception was warm, but many of the 56 questions submitted in writing were pointed: Isn’t abortion an evil that Christians should prevent? Are you saying Christians should not join the military? How can Christians possibly have “power under” Osama bin Laden? Didn’t the church play an enormously positive role in the civil rights movement?

One woman asked: “So why NOT us? If we contain the wisdom and grace and love and creativity of Jesus, why shouldn’t we be the ones involved in politics and setting laws?”

Mr. Boyd responded: “I don’t think there’s a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don’t slap the label ‘Christian’ on it.”

    Conservative Pastor Steers Clear of Politics, and Pays, NYT, 30.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/us/30pastor.html?hp&ex=1154232000&en=fc81bfdd0ee7feb1&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Families Challenging Religious Influence in Delaware Schools

July 29, 2006
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

GEORGETOWN, Del. — After her family moved to this small town 30 years ago, Mona Dobrich grew up as the only Jew in school. Mrs. Dobrich, 39, married a local man, bought the house behind her parents’ home and brought up her two children as Jews.

For years, she and her daughter, Samantha, listened to Christian prayers at public school potlucks, award dinners and parent-teacher group meetings, she said. But at Samantha’s high school graduation in June 2004, a minister’s prayer proclaiming Jesus as the only way to the truth nudged Mrs. Dobrich to act.

“It was as if no matter how much hard work, no matter how good a person you are, the only way you’ll ever be anything is through Jesus Christ,” Mrs. Dobrich said. “He said those words, and I saw Sam’s head snap and her start looking around, like, ‘Where’s my mom? Where’s my mom?’ And all I wanted to do was run up and take her in my arms.”

After the graduation, Mrs. Dobrich asked the Indian River district school board to consider prayers that were more generic and, she said, less exclusionary. As news of her request spread, many local Christians saw it as an effort to limit their free exercise of religion, residents said. Anger spilled on to talk radio, in letters to the editor and at school board meetings attended by hundreds of people carrying signs praising Jesus.

“What people here are saying is, ‘Stop interfering with our traditions, stop interfering with our faith and leave our country the way we knew it to be,’ ” said Dan Gaffney, a host at WGMD, a talk radio station in Rehoboth, and a supporter of prayer in the school district.

After receiving several threats, Mrs. Dobrich took her son, Alex, to Wilmington in the fall of 2004, planning to stay until the controversy blew over. It never has.

The Dobriches eventually sued the Indian River School District, challenging what they asserted was the pervasiveness of religion in the schools and seeking financial damages. They have been joined by “the Does,” a family still in the school district who have remained anonymous because of the response against the Dobriches.

Meanwhile, a Muslim family in another school district here in Sussex County has filed suit, alleging proselytizing in the schools and the harassment of their daughters.

The move to Wilmington, the Dobriches said, wrecked them financially, leading them to sell their house and their daughter to drop out of Columbia University.

The dispute here underscores the rising tensions over religion in public schools.

“We don’t have data on the number of lawsuits, but anecdotally, people think it has never been so active — the degree to which these conflicts erupt in schools and the degree to which they are litigated,” said Tom Hutton, a staff lawyer at the National School Boards Association.

More religion probably exists in schools now than in decades because of the role religious conservatives play in politics and the passage of certain education laws over the last 25 years, including the Equal Access Act in 1984, said Charles C. Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, a research and education group.

“There are communities largely of one faith, and despite all the court rulings and Supreme Court decisions, they continue to promote one faith,” Mr. Haynes said. “They don’t much care what the minority complains about. They’re just convinced that what they are doing is good for kids and what America is all about.”

Dr. Donald G. Hattier, a member of the Indian River school board, said the district had changed many policies in response to Mrs. Dobrich’s initial complaints. But the board unanimously rejected a proposed settlement of the Dobriches’ lawsuit.

“There were a couple of provisions that were unacceptable to the board,” said Jason Gosselin, a lawyer for the board. “The parties are working in good faith to move closer to settlement.”

Until recently, it was safe to assume that everyone in the Indian River district was Christian, said the Rev. Mark Harris, an Episcopal priest at St. Peter’s Church in Lewes.

But much has changed in Sussex County over the last 30 years. The county, in southern Delaware, has resort enclaves like Rehoboth Beach, to which outsiders bring their cash and, often, liberal values. Inland, in the area of Georgetown, the county seat, the land is still a lush patchwork of corn and soybean fields, with a few poultry plants. But developers are turning more fields into tracts of rambling homes. The Hispanic population is booming. There are enough Reform Jews, Muslims and Quakers to set up their own centers and groups, Mr. Harris said.

In interviews with a dozen people here and comments on the radio by a half-dozen others, the overwhelming majority insisted, usually politely, that prayer should stay in the schools.

“We have a way of doing things here, and it’s not going to change to accommodate a very small minority,’’ said Kenneth R. Stevens, 41, a businessman sitting in the Georgetown Diner. “If they feel singled out, they should find another school or excuse themselves from those functions. It’s our way of life.”

The Dobrich and Doe legal complaint portrays a district in which children were given special privileges for being in Bible club, Bibles were distributed in 2003 at an elementary school, Christian prayer was routine at school functions and teachers evangelized.

“Because Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, I will speak out for him,” said the Rev. Jerry Fike of Mount Olivet Brethren Church, who gave the prayer at Samantha’s graduation. “The Bible encourages that.” Mr. Fike continued: “Ultimately, he is the one I have to please. If doing that places me at odds with the law of the land, I still have to follow him.”

Mrs. Dobrich, who is Orthodox, said that when she was a girl, Christians here had treated her faith with respectful interest. Now, she said, her son was ridiculed in school for wearing his yarmulke. She described a classmate of his drawing a picture of a pathway to heaven for everyone except “Alex the Jew.”

Mrs. Dobrich’s decision to leave her hometown and seek legal help came after a school board meeting in August 2004 on the issue of prayer. Dr. Hattier had called WGMD to discuss the issue, and Mr. Gaffney and others encouraged people to go the meeting. Hundreds showed up.

A homemaker active in her children’s schools, Mrs. Dobrich said she had asked the board to develop policies that would leave no one feeling excluded because of faith. People booed and rattled signs that read “Jesus Saves,” she recalled. Her son had written a short statement, but he felt so intimidated that his sister read it for him. In his statement, Alex, who was 11 then, said: “I feel bad when kids in my class call me ‘Jew boy.’ I do not want to move away from the house I have lived in forever.”

Later, another speaker turned to Mrs. Dobrich and said, according to several witnesses, “If you want people to stop calling him ‘Jew boy,’ you tell him to give his heart to Jesus.”

Immediately afterward, the Dobriches got threatening phone calls. Samantha had enrolled in Columbia, and Mrs. Dobrich decided to go to Wilmington temporarily.

But the controversy simmered, keeping Mrs. Dobrich and Alex away. The cost of renting an apartment in Wilmington led the Dobriches to sell their home here. Mrs. Dobrich’s husband, Marco, a school bus driver and transportation coordinator, makes about $30,000 a year and has stayed in town to care for Mrs. Dobrich’s ailing parents. Mr. Dobrich declined to comment. Samantha left Columbia because of the financial strain.

The only thing to flourish, Mrs. Dobrich said, was her faith. Her children, she said, “have so much pride in their religion now.”

“Alex wears his yarmulke all the time. He never takes it off.”

    Families Challenging Religious Influence in Delaware Schools, NYT, 29.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/us/29delaware.html

Catholic Group Urges Candidates to Return Cash

July 25, 2006
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE STROM

The Missouri Catholic Conference is urging candidates for state offices to return contributions from a nonprofit organization that advocates for stem cell research and other medical analysis and testing.

The request has inspired a complaint to the Internal Revenue Service, arguing that it violates prohibitions on political activity by nonprofit organizations.

“It constitutes illegal political interference,” said Marcus S. Owens, a tax lawyer, who filed the complaint on behalf of a client he declined to identify.

The Missouri conference sent the request to more than 50 candidates for state offices who received donations from the organization, Supporters of Health Research and Treatments.

Lawrence A. Weber, executive director and general counsel of the Missouri conference, said he heard about the complaint over the weekend but did not see Mr. Owens’s letter until a reporter faxed it to him on Monday.

“Obviously, it’s something we take seriously and are in the process of looking into,” Mr. Weber said.

Representatives for Supporters of Health Research could not be reached.

Missouri legislators are considering an amendment to the State Constitution that would ban human cloning but would prohibit the state and local governments from discouraging stem cell research, which is allowed under federal law.

The Missouri conference opposes that amendment. In April, Mr. Weber sent a letter to several dozen state legislators who were reported to have received campaign contributions from Supporters of Health Research.

“The Missouri Catholic Conference is committed to informing Missouri voters about campaign contributions promoting human cloning and embryonic stem cell research,” Mr. Weber wrote, “and will report to Missouri voters regarding candidates who choose to associate themselves with this and similar organizations that promote such unethical practices.”

He added that if candidates returned contributions from Supporters of Health Research, the conference would report that to diocesan newspapers so long as documentation was provided.

This month, the St. Louis Review Online, a diocesan Web site, reported that eight candidates had returned money to organizations that support stem cell research. On Monday, Mr. Weber said that “quite a few” candidates had returned such contributions.

State Representative Jim Guest, a Republican from northwest Missouri, said he was stunned by the letter’s tone. “I’m not sure if extortion is the right word,” Mr. Guest said, “but they basically threatened me if I didn’t return the money, and that’s certainly stepping across the line.”

Mr. Guest has not returned the money. “I was going to work for the issue anyway, but it almost made me feel like working harder,” he said.

    Catholic Group Urges Candidates to Return Cash, NYT, 25.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/washington/25threat.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

On Public Land, Sunday in the Park With Prayer

July 24, 2006
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

COWANS GAP STATE PARK, Pa. — This is what church looked like to Deana Wingert on a recent Sunday: the wind ruffled the lake behind the pulpit, evergreens towered above the pews, a yellow butterfly danced over a sunny patch of grass, and the scent of lighter fluid wafted through, followed by the smell of meat grilling.

Most members in the congregation did not know one another. They had come, like the Wingerts, to Cowans Gap, about 100 miles southwest of Harrisburg, to camp, swim and picnic. But it was Sunday, and for the 100 or so Christians with baseball caps and bug spray who wanted to worship, the park offered itself as their church.

“This is the day that the Lord has made,” the congregation sang to the cloudless sky, as the chaplain, Bruce Carriker, strummed the guitar and began the service. “We shall rejoice and be glad in it.”

From Memorial Day to Labor Day, 42 state, national and private parks in Pennsylvania hold nondenominational Christian worship services. It is the only state with such a program, said the Rev. Paul L. Herring of the Pennsylvania Council of Churches. The chaplains come from local towns and faraway states, as do the worshipers, mostly Protestants. Last year, 18,000 people attended services in Pennsylvania parks.

Cowans Gap usually has about 85 people at Sunday service — not a bad turnout for what is essentially a small-town church. Many people come because they would never go a Sunday without hearing God’s Word. But they are also drawn by the beauty and novelty of praying outdoors, and they become open, they say, to understanding their place in the world in a deeper way.

“It is enriching to be here,” said Ms. Wingert, 34, from nearby Fort Loudon, Pa., who comes regularly to the service with her husband and two young sons. “Your mind wanders a bit, but it focuses, too: on the fact that you’re in it, you’re in God’s creation, and that there is so much beyond your control.”

Although the services are held on state land, the chaplaincy program is financed with private money from local churches and denominational bodies. The program began 46 years ago when the Parks Department approached the Pennsylvania Council of Churches because many denominations wanted to preach and evangelize in the parks.

The council developed a program in which the chaplains conduct nondenominational worship services, and they are prohibited from proselytizing, said Mr. Herring, the council’s coordinator of leisure ministries.

Over the years, some people have objected to the religious services being held on public lands, but there has never been a formal complaint or organized opposition, said Mr. Herring’s administrative assistant, Audrey Crawford.

This year, 27 chaplains are working in the parks, Mr. Herring said. About half are ordained ministers; the rest are college and divinity school students and lay people.

Full-time chaplains usually live in trailers in nearby private parks, in apartments or in local homes. They receive $4,000 for the 15 weeks they serve in the program.

For Mr. Carriker, an intense, bustling man whose gray hair curls down to his shoulders, his only previous experience in Pennsylvania had consisted of two trips on the turnpike.

But after being checked out by the program’s selection committee (and the state police), the 49-year-old retired infantry officer and former minister in the Church of the Nazarene was assigned to Cowans Gap three years ago. At home in Kansas City, Mo., he works with juvenile offenders. Here, he said, he satisfies his itch to preach. He lives next to forested hills and a shimmering lake. He is a small-town pastor.

“After I came here,” Mr. Carriker said after a recent service, “I finally understood the idea of coming home to a place you had never been before.”

Over the summer, people use the parks as they would their own churches. At French Creek State Park, a large Alcoholics Anonymous group meets outdoors, many members arriving on their motorcycles. They like having the chaplain there, but the members run the meeting, Mr. Herring said.

Mr. Carriker holds a movie night on Fridays, and for reasons unknown to him, he must attend a sand castle fest on the lake’s shores on Saturdays. But mostly, he walks through the campgrounds and lets people know he is there to listen and pray.

And they turn to him. People like the couple whose son committed suicide years ago but loved the park like no other place. Or the veteran who asked Mr. Carriker to pray for his son in Iraq. Or the woman whose granddaughter is struggling with anorexia, as is Mr. Carriker’s older daughter.

“Sometimes the best thing you can do is keep your mouth shut and cry,” Mr. Carriker said. “You may read a Psalm once in a while, but sometimes there are no words you can speak.”

Though they have some guidance from the council, chaplains fashion their own services, and in general they are more informal than those in a traditional church setting. At Cowans Gap, the service is usually held at an amphitheater at the lake, and when it rains the service is in a nature center with displays of stuffed foxes and birds. People bring their own Bibles, sometimes their own chairs, and Mr. Carriker provides the songbooks.

Mr. Carriker uses the lectionary, a three-year cycle of readings from Scripture of the main teachings of Jesus, as the basis of his services. He always places a small wooden cross before him.

On a rainy Sunday, Mr. Carriker read passages from the Gospel of Mark, in which a storm on the Sea of Galilee threatens a boat carrying Jesus and the disciples. Jesus calms the storm and rebukes the disciples for their fear.

Mr. Carriker was a stranger to most of those before him. But he used the homily to share his life and to show that he knew theirs. He told them that though people strive for control of their lives, a storm always rises. It may be the dark spot on the X-ray, or the drugs found in an honor student’s locker, or a daughter’s anorexia, he said, his voice cracking just a little. It takes a lot of courage to have faith in the face of such storms, he said.

“But through faith, we can always figure out who is in the boat with us,” Mr. Carriker said, “because he is enough. He is always enough.”

John Morrow, 77, a retired Presbyterian minister from Acme, Pa., had heard homilies on the passage before, but none as good as in the nature center of this small park, he said. Mr. Morrow had heard something new, and the surprise fed his faith.

“When you’re traveling, it’s easy to assume that you’re alone in your faith,” he said. “But with all these people here together, you realize you are not alone, and it’s reinforcing.”

    On Public Land, Sunday in the Park With Prayer, NYT, 24.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/us/24worship.html?hp&ex=1153800000&en=da56b7ab5c2c8a02&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Feeling Strains, Baptist Colleges Cut Church Ties

July 22, 2006
The New York Times
By ALAN FINDER

GEORGETOWN, Ky. — The request seemed simple enough to the Rev. Hershael W. York, then the president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. He asked Georgetown College, a small Baptist liberal arts institution here, to consider hiring for its religion department someone who would teach a literal interpretation of the Bible.

But to William H. Crouch Jr., the president of Georgetown, it was among the last straws in a struggle that had involved issues like who could be on the board of trustees and whether the college encouraged enough freedom of inquiry to qualify for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Dr. Crouch and his trustees decided it was time to end the college’s 63-year affiliation with the religious denomination. “From my point of view, it was about academic freedom,’’ Dr. Crouch said. “I sat for 25 years and watched my denomination become much more narrow and, in terms of education, much more interested in indoctrination.’’

Georgetown is among a half-dozen colleges and universities whose ties with state Baptist conventions have been severed in the last four years, part of a broad realignment in which more than a dozen Southern Baptist universities, including Wake Forest and Furman, have ended affiliations over the last two decades. Georgetown’s parting was ultimately amicable. But many have been tense, even bitter.

In Georgia and Missouri, disputes over who controls the boards of Baptist colleges led to prolonged litigation. In Tennessee, a clash over whether Belmont University in Nashville could appoint non-Baptists to its board led the Tennessee Baptist Convention to vote in May to remove the entire board. Belmont’s trustees are still running the university, and while negotiations are continuing, the battle for control could end up in court.

“The future of Baptist higher education has rarely been more fragile,’’ R. Kirby Godsey, the former president of Mercer University in Macon, Ga., said in a speech in Atlanta in June. The Georgia Baptist Convention voted last November to sever ties with Mercer.

The issues vary from state to state. But many Southern Baptist colleges and their state conventions have been battling over money, control of boards of trustees, whether the Bible must be interpreted literally, how evolution is taught, the propriety of some books for college courses and of some plays for campus performances and whether cultural and religious diversity should be encouraged.

At the root of the conflicts is the question of how much the colleges should reflect the views of their denomination. They are part of the continuing battle among Southern Baptists for control of their church’s institutions.

More than 20 years ago, theological and cultural conservatives gained control over moderates in the Southern Baptist Convention, the denomination’s broadest body, representing more than 16 million worshipers. Similar shifts then occurred in many, but not all, state Baptist conventions, which have considerable independence.

The struggle has continued. Last month, the Southern Baptist Convention elected a president who promised to be “a big-tent conservative” and defeated candidates supported by the convention’s establishment.

Southern Baptist colleges are affiliated with the state conventions, and it does not make sense to many members of the conventions to provide significant annual subsidies to Baptist colleges that they view as out of tune with conservative positions on central religious tenets, including how to interpret the Bible. “I did feel that Georgetown was not on the same page as most Kentucky Baptists,’’ said Dr. York, who was president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention last year.

But efforts to rein in what many Southern Baptists see as inappropriate departures from religious orthodoxy have looked to many professors and college administrators like efforts to limit academic freedom.

“The convention itself in its national and state organizations has moved so far to the right that previous diversity on the faculty and among the trustees is no longer possible,’’ said Bill Leonard, dean of the Divinity School at Wake Forest. “More theological control of the curriculum and the faculty has been the result.’’

David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology at Emory, put it more starkly. “The real underlying issue is that fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist form is incompatible with higher education,’’ Professor Key said. “In fundamentalism, you have all the truths. In education, you’re searching for truths.’’

The state conventions do not own the colleges, but in most cases they approve trustees and provide annual subsidies. Their power over the boards has often been at the center of contention, with the stakes often involving academic direction.

“We don’t want to cut our ties,’’ said R. Alton Lacey, president of Missouri Baptist University, which has been fighting the Missouri Baptist Convention in court since 2002 over who controls the university’s board. “We just don’t want the conventions politicizing our boards.’’

The Georgia Baptist Convention’s severing of ties with Mercer University followed an unsuccessful effort by the state convention, which did not have the authority to appoint the university’s trustees, to gain that power. Many Baptist leaders were also troubled by a forum at Mercer on issues affecting gay men and lesbians, Dr. Godsey, the university’s former president, said.

Officials at Georgetown had long been concerned that differences with state Baptists might become irreconcilable. In 1987, college officials negotiated an agreement with state Baptist leaders that allowed either side to end the affiliation, with four years’ notice. Both sides said that they had wanted to continue the relationship, but that the strains had recently become acute.

Georgetown asked the Kentucky Baptist Convention two years ago to allow 25 percent of the college’s trustees to be non-Baptist, but the proposal was rejected. Only about half of Georgetown’s students are Baptist, and less than half of the alumni are Baptist, Dr. Crouch, the college’s president, said.

“I realized that our fund-raising depended on getting non-Baptists on our board,’’ Dr. Crouch said.

Then, a year ago, the Kentucky convention turned down a nominee for Georgetown’s board for the first time. Around the same time, Dr. York asked the college to look for a religion professor who would teach theologically conservative positions.

“You ought to have some professor on your faculty who believes Adam and Eve were the first humans, that they actually existed,’’ Dr. York said.

Dr. Crouch and Georgetown’s trustees decided it was time to exercise their escape clause. The college and the convention wanted to avoid the kind of contention becoming common in neighboring states.

“I think the fear was that I was going to lead a kind of takeover,’’ said Dr. York, a professor and associate dean at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. “But I’m only going to fight a battle that I can win and that I want to win.’’

Kentucky convention delegates voted overwhelmingly in November to approve a separation; the group agreed to phase out its $1.4 million annual contribution to Georgetown over four years, and the college became self-governing.

Dr. Crouch noted that some Baptist universities that severed ties with state conventions in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s have become essentially secular. He hopes that will not happen at Georgetown.

“We call ourselves a Christian college grounded in historic Baptist principles,’’ he said.

Georgetown continues to pursue serious academic ambitions, like pursuing a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the college honor society. Only 270 colleges and universities have Phi Beta Kappa chapters, and there are rigorous standards for new ones. Among the most important requirements are freedom of inquiry and expression on campus, along with respect for religious, ethnic and racial diversity.

A Georgetown requirement that tenured professors be Christian could pose problems with the honor society. The college must also improve on a number of specific standards, including increasing the number of books in its library and reducing professors’ course loads. Phi Beta Kappa considers applications over a three-year cycle, and Dr. Crouch hopes Georgetown will be ready to reapply in 2009.

“Phi Beta Kappa is the gold standard,’’ said Rosemary Allen, the Georgetown provost.

Some of the few students on campus this summer said they supported Georgetown’s decision to become independent and to improve its academic standing, although they acknowledged they had not followed events closely.

“It’s good to go to a college that’s religious, but it doesn’t really matter to me,’’ said John Sadlon, a sophomore. “What matters to me is getting my education.’’

    Feeling Strains, Baptist Colleges Cut Church Ties, NYT, 22.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/education/22baptist.html?hp&ex=1153627200&en=6d7fde21bc163e72&ei=5094&partner=homepage

House votes to protect "under God" in pledge

Wed Jul 19, 2006 7:34 PM ET
Reuters
By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a move intended to preserve a reference to God in an oath recited by millions of Americans each day, the House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to prevent U.S. courts from hearing challenges to the Pledge of Allegiance.

The 260-167 vote, largely along party lines, was one of several hot-button topics brought to the House floor by Republican leaders aiming to highlight differences between the parties before November's congressional elections.

In the Senate, a similar bill has not advanced since it was introduced a year ago.

Conservatives have sought to keep the phrase "under God" in the pledge since an appeals court ruled in 2002 it amounted to an endorsement of religion in violation of the U.S. Constitution. An atheist had challenged the pledge being recited in his daughter's school. Schoolchildren across the nation commonly pledge allegiance to the flag each morning.

The Supreme Court struck down the appeals court decision on procedural grounds but left the door open for another challenge, causing Republicans to say the pledge must be placed off-limits before "activist judges" tamper with it again.

"We're creating a fence. The fence goes around the federal judiciary. We're doing that because we don't trust them," said Missouri Rep. Todd Akin.

The California man who has led the challenge against the phrase "under God" vowed to fight the new legislation if it became law and said it provided him with new legal arguments against the pledge.

"This is the greatest thing that could have happened," Michael Newdow, who is both a lawyer and a doctor, said by telephone. "They are showing the courts that this is a huge issue and that they want their religious view espoused by our government which is exactly what the Constitution forbids."

Akin and other Republicans said the reference to God, added to the pledge in 1954, did not endorse any specific religion but referred to the philosophy of the country's founders that rights such as freedom of speech were granted by a divine being, not a government.

Democrats said the measure would deprive the courts of their ability to oversee an important form of personal rights.

(Additional reporting by Adam Tanner in San Francisco)

    House votes to protect "under God" in pledge, R, 19.7.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-07-19T233353Z_01_N19253852_RTRUKOC_0_US-CONGRESS-FLAG.xml

Report Faults Safeguards in Religion Program

July 19, 2006
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

WASHINGTON, July 18 — The Bush administration’s program of financing social service initiatives run by religiously affiliated groups lacks adequate safeguards against religious discrimination and has yet to measure the performance of the groups, a new Congressional report says.

The report, by the Government Accountability Office, did not find evidence of a widespread diversion of government money to religious activity from social services, which had been a concern of some critics of such religion-based initiatives.

But in looking at 10 federal programs, the researchers found that only four gave an explicit statement to religious organizations about protecting the religious liberties of the people they serve.

“The Bush administration has a responsibility to make sure that federal taxpayer dollars are not being sent to organizations that discriminate, but it is failing to uphold that responsibility,” said Representative George Miller of California, the senior Democrat on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, in a written statement. “As a result, we don’t know if Americans who are eligible for services are missing out on them because of their religious beliefs.”

Alyssa J. McClenning, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said the program protected the separation of church and state.

“Grantees are provided with an explicit statement of the safeguard prohibiting the use of direct federal funds for inherently religious activities,” Ms. McClenning said by e-mail.

Mr. Miller and Representative Pete Stark of California, the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Health of the Ways and Means Committee, requested the report in September 2004.

Robert W. Tuttle, a law professor at George Washington University who is an expert on religion-based initiatives, said the report described problems that many had anticipated.

The Bush administration, Professor Tuttle said, has declined to provide clear information about what constitutes so-called “inherently religious” activities that would violate the separation of church and state.

In 2001, the administration created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. In the 2005 fiscal year, the federal government awarded more than $2.1 billion to religious organizations, according to Mr. Stark’s office.

Part of the administration’s argument for broadening the participation of religious groups in social services has been that they perform as well as or better than their secular counterparts, experts on the initiatives said. But the accountability office report found that only one of 15 pilot programs examined had completed an evaluation of its outcomes.

“Congress didn’t put enough emphasis’’ on measuring results, said Representative Mark E. Souder, Republican of Indiana, who is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, which oversees the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. “The administration has been lax on this, but it is improving.”

The report found that the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development and Labor took issue with a recommendation that articulates safeguards against religious discrimination.

“They stated that such a requirement would involve singling out faith-based organizations for greater oversight and monitoring than other program participants on the basis of presumed or confirmed religious affiliation,” the report stated. “In our view, creating a level playing field for faith-based organizations does not mean that agencies should be relieved of their oversight responsibilities relating to the equal treatment regulations.”

    Report Faults Safeguards in Religion Program, NYT, 19.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/washington/19faith.html

Advocates quietly push for slavery repayment

Posted 7/9/2006 3:54 PM ET
The Associated Press
USA Today

Advocates who say black Americans should be compensated for slavery and its Jim Crow aftermath are quietly chalking up victories and gaining momentum.

Fueled by the work of scholars and lawyers, their campaign has morphed in recent years from a fringe-group rallying cry into sophisticated, mainstream movement. Most recently, a pair of churches apologized for their part in the slave trade, and one is studying ways to repay black church members.

The overall issue is hardly settled, even among black Americans: Some say that focusing on slavery shouldn't be a top priority or that it doesn't make sense to compensate people generations after a historical wrong.

Yet reparations efforts have led a number of cities and states to approve measures that force businesses to publicize their historical ties to slavery. Several reparations court cases are in progress, and international human rights officials are increasingly spotlighting the issue.

"This matter is growing in significance rather than declining," said Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor and a leading reparations activist. "It has more vigor and vitality in the 21st century than it's had in the history of the reparations movement."

The most recent victories for reparations advocates came in June, when the Moravian Church and the Episcopal Church both apologized for owning slaves and promised to battle current racism. The Episcopalians also launched a national, yearslong probe into church slavery links and into whether the church should compensate black members. A white church member, Katrina Browne, also screened a documentary focusing on white culpability at the denomination's national assembly.

The Episcopalians debated slavery and reparations for years before reaching an agreement, said Jayne Oasin, social justice officer for the denomination, who will oversee its work on the issue.

Historically, slavery was an uncomfortable topic for the church. Some Episcopal bishops owned slaves — and the Bible was used to justify the practice, Oasin said.

"Why not (take these steps) 100 years ago?" she said. "Let's talk about the complicity of the Episcopal Church as one of the institutions of this country who, of course, benefited from slavery."

Also in June, a North Carolina commission urged the state government to repay the descendants of victims of a violent 1898 campaign by white supremacists to strip blacks of power in Wilmington, N.C. As many as 60 blacks died, and thousands were driven from the city.

The commission also recommended state-funded programs to support local black businesses and homeownership.

The report came weeks after the Organization of American States requested information from the U.S. government about a 1921 race riot in Tulsa, in which 1,200 homes were burned and as many as 300 blacks killed. An OAS official said the group might pursue the issue as a violation of international human rights.

The modern reparations movement revived an idea that's been around since emancipation, when black leaders argued that newly freed slaves deserved compensation.

About six years ago, the issue started gaining momentum again. Randall Robinson's "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks," was a best seller; reparations became a central issue at the World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa; and California legislators passed the nation's first law forcing insurance companies that do business with the state to disclose their slavery ties. Illinois passed a similar insurance law in 2003, and the next year Iowa legislators began requesting — but not forcing — the same disclosures.

Several cities — including Chicago, Detroit and Oakland — have laws requiring that all businesses make such disclosures.

Reparations opponents insist that no living American should have to pay for a practice that ended more than 140 years ago. Plus, programs such as affirmative action and welfare already have compensated for past injustices, said John H. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

"The reparations movement is based on a fallacy that cripples the thinking on race — the fallacy that what ails black America is a cash problem," said McWhorter, who is black. "Giving people money will not solve the problems that we have."

Even so, support is reaching beyond African-Americans and the South.

Katrina Browne, the white Episcopalian filmmaker, is finishing a documentary about her ancestors, the DeWolfs of Bristol, R.I., the biggest slave-trading family in U.S. history. She screened it for Episcopal Church officials at the June convention.

"Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North," details how the economies of the Northeast and the nation as a whole depended on slaves.

"A lot of white people think they know everything there is to know about slavery — we all agree it was wrong and that's enough," Browne said. "But this was the foundation of our country, not some Southern anomaly. We all inherit responsibility."

She says neither whites nor blacks will heal from slavery until formal hearings expose the full history of slavery and its effects — an effort similar to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid collapsed.

    Advocates quietly push for slavery repayment, UT, 9.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-09-slavery-reparations_x.htm

Before the Downfall of a Priest, a Fondness for the Good Life

July 9, 2006
The New York Times
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

DARIEN, Conn., July 8 — The Rev. Michael Jude Fay had his hair highlighted each spring at a local salon at prices of $85 or more, his hairdresser said. His vacation getaway was an ocean-view condominium in Florida that he owned with a close friend from Philadelphia. And he repeatedly spent thousands of dollars on luggage, jewelry and designer clothes, even though his salary was a modest $28,000 a year.

To many of his parishioners at St. John Roman Catholic Church in Darien, Father Fay's lavish ways came as a shock nearly two months ago when the Diocese of Bridgeport demanded his resignation because of questions about his suitability for the priesthood, his lifestyle and his financial stewardship of the church.

To those parishioners, he was the dutiful son of a New Jersey police officer and an advocate for the poor in wealthy Fairfield County. At times aloof, he was also sensitive in dealing with grief-stricken parishioners and showed flair in producing Broadway-style plays with local talent.

"People loved him," said Richard Manegio, a Darien businessman whose ex-wife relied on Father Fay when she was battling cancer.

But a handful of parishioners, current and former employees and local merchants had nursed suspicions for years about the longtime pastor. In interviews, they — and investigators, lawyers and church officials who came into the case more recently — said Father Fay's taste for the gilded life seemed to have spun out of control in recent years.

"He was the most high-class priest I've ever seen," said Frank Colandro, the owner of a deli across the street from the church, mentioning Father Fay's expensive-looking shoes and watches. And the more Father Fay spent, his critics say, the more autocratic and secretive he became about the church's finances.

Parishioners say there were warning signs about his spending, such as a black-tie bash he threw for himself at the Pierre Hotel, one of the premier hotels in Manhattan, in May 2003 to commemorate his 25th anniversary in the priesthood. But the Bridgeport Diocese did not pressure him to step aside until this year, after private investigators hired by the parish's bookkeeper and associate pastor documented at least $200,000 in questionable spending by Father Fay.

Now, F.B.I. agents are investigating his case, and parish officials have been passing the plate at services with extra pleas for offerings to ease the parish's debt load.

The diocese, which violated its own policy by not auditing the parish's finances for more than five years, has said it will not comment on Father Fay until its own investigation is done.

Father Fay has not commented publicly, nor have the two lawyers who have told investigators they represent him. Attempts to obtain a comment from Father Fay were unsuccessful.

His 85-year-old mother, Mildred Fay, said in a brief interview, "He's a wonderful person, and he's been wrongly accused."

Even people who thought they knew him well now say Father Fay, 55, has become a riddle to them. "This is a shock," said Ken Bruno, a building inspector in Palisades Park, N.J., whose children were confirmed by Father Fay about eight years ago. "I'm still trying to make sense of it."

Father Fay's story begins in Palisades Park, a tight-knit, working-class town that barely covers one square mile. His father, Martin Terrance Fay, was a co-captain of the football team at St. Cecilia High School in Englewood, N.J., just as a new assistant coach, Vince Lombardi, was taking the team to new heights.

Martin Fay served in the Marine Corps during World War II and played minor-league football briefly until an injury sidelined him. Joining the Palisades Park police force in 1946, he ultimately became its chief. And when he died 10 years ago, the borough mourned, according to Frank A. Patti, a mortician who doubled until recently as the town historian.

Father Fay "comes from good stock," Mr. Patti said.

Michael James Fay, the third of the Fays' five children, attended the local parish school, was active in Catholic youth organizations and appeared in a school play.

None of Father Fay's siblings responded to requests for interviews.

After a stint at St. Francis University in Loretto, Pa., he earned a degree from St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore in 1977, adopted the middle name Jude and earned a Master of Arts degree in 1986 from Manhattan College, according to school records.

After being ordained in 1978, he worked as parochial vicar at some of Connecticut's most prosperous parishes, including St. Paul in Greenwich and St. Aloysius in New Canaan.

In 1991, he was put in charge of another wealthy parish, St. John, Darien's oldest Roman Catholic church. Parishioners say he urged them to show compassion to the needy, and they obliged by putting $10,000 or more a week into the church's collection baskets.

Parishioners also appreciated the spirited theatrical productions he helped direct at the church, including "Nunsense," "Guys and Dolls" and "Fiddler on the Roof."

Starting in 2000, Father Fay's star seemed to rise. Sacred Heart University honored him for community service in 2002, and the Bridgeport Diocese appointed him to a sexual misconduct review board that year.

For all his outward success, it was evident that Father Fay had an appetite for little luxuries, such as the blond highlights his Darien hairdresser said he put in his hair.

A small bridal shower he threw for a Sunday school teacher had a three-piece combo and jaw-dropping flower arrangements, a person who attended said.

Parishioners said he spent thousands of dollars sprucing up the church and expanding the house where the priests lived. When one parent questioned the cost of a tapestry, Father Fay cut her off by saying, "What makes you think it wasn't a gift?" said Regina Damanti, a parishioner who heard the exchange.

Investigators say that friends and family of Father Fay seemed to receive special privileges or favors from the parish. For instance, the church paid last fall to fly another priest from Baltimore to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where Father Fay owns a condominium, parish records show.

Father Fay also asked the church's caretaker to paint his mother's home in New Jersey and to repair the bungalow he once owned in western Connecticut, on church time, the investigators said.

Ellen Patafio, who was the parish's secretary from November 2004 until she quit in February, said Father Fay "really changed a lot over the time I worked there."

Parishioners would call the office, wanting to discuss their problems with the priest, she said, and "every time Jude would get on the phone, he'd roll his eyes."

Over time, she and others said, they noticed that he left more of the pastoral work to his parochial vicar, the Rev. Michael J. Madden.

Father Fay learned he had prostate cancer, but Ms. Patafio and other parishioners said he cited problems from the cancer to avoid duties he disliked. He called it playing his "cancer card," they said.

Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport told a recent gathering of parishioners that he may have given Father Fay latitude because he assumed the priest was in dire health. The severity of Father Fay's cancer problems is not known.

Father Fay did not relinquish his tight control over the church's finances, however, according to accounts provided by Ms. Patafio; the church's bookkeeper, Bethany D'Erario; her lawyer, Mickey Sherman; and the investigators she and Father Madden hired in May to look into possible improprieties at the church.

Father Fay typically kept donations to the church in his desk drawer instead of promptly depositing them in the church's bank account, making it difficult to track how the funds were used, said Vito Colucci Jr., one of the investigators hired by Father Madden.

In recent years, Father Fay also picked the members of the church's lay boards rather than let parishioners cast ballots, as they once did. None of the members of the parish's finance council returned calls seeking comment.

At least one member of the finance council, William Besgen, attended the black-tie event that Father Fay had at the Pierre Hotel in 2003, according to a seating list and Mr. Besgen's lawyer.

In the spring of 2005, Father Fay and his friend from Philadelphia, Cliff Fantini, a wedding consultant, jointly bought a $449,100 condo in Fort Lauderdale, property records show. Furnishings and monthly cable bills were charged to the parish, church records show.

The two men are also listed as tenants of a luxury apartment on East 63rd Street in Manhattan, the building's staff said. Mr. Fantini, known professionally as Cliff Martell, also stayed at the rectory for extended periods, Ms. Patafio said.

Ms. Patafio said Father Fay showered gifts, meals and trips on Mr. Fantini. "Jude was always chasing after him," she said.

Mr. Fantini did not respond to multiple messages left at his home.

In April, the bookkeeper and Father Madden took their concerns to the diocese. Father Fay appeared before the bishop on May 9 to respond to the allegations but left without being relieved of his duties.

Frustrated, the bookkeeper and Father Madden asked Mr. Colucci and Wendy Kleinknecht, another investigator, to review records the bookkeeper had copied. On May 17, the investigators took their findings to the Darien police. The bishop asked Father Fay to resign and to leave the premises that same day.

Parishioners say they have not seen him since, although his sister Kathleen showed up recently to retrieve his personal belongings, including a cabinet full of Waterford crystal he left behind.

Alain Delaquérière and Nate Schweber contributed reporting for this article.

    Before the Downfall of a Priest, a Fondness for the Good Life, NYT, 9.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/nyregion/09priest.html

Center Stage for a Pastor Where It's Rock That Usually Rules

July 8, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN LELAND

CHICAGO — At the Logan Square Auditorium here one recent night, Rob Bell arrived in a rock band tour bus and strode past posters for Cheap Sex, a punk band performing at the hall later this summer. Following a T-shirted bouncer through the sold-out crowd of about 450, Mr. Bell hopped onto the stage.

"In the beginning God created the heavens and earth," he began, without introduction. "Now, it's a very old book."

This, Mr. Bell believes, is what church can look like. For the hall's bartenders, it was the start of a slow night.

Mr. Bell, 35, is the pastor and founder of Mars Hill Bible Church, an independent evangelical congregation in Grandville, Mich., outside Grand Rapids. The church has a weekly attendance of 10,000 and meets in a former mall.

His performance here was the first in a monthlong tour of 21 cities — joined by one roadie, a whiteboard and his wife and two sons — taking him to venues usually presenting rock bands. His 100-minute talk, billed as "Everything Is Spiritual," features no music or film clips, no sound other than his voice and the squeak of his marker, filling the board with Hebrew characters, diagrams, biblical interpretation and numbers.

He wore black pants and shirt, and spoke with the awed enthusiasm of someone describing a U2 concert, moving from a gee-whiz discussion of physics to questions of how God might move in other dimensions, like those discovered by mathematical string theorists.

"When you get to the subatomic level, everything we know about the basic makeup of the universe falls apart," he told the audience. "They use phrases like 'we don't know.' So high-end quantum physicists are starting to sound like ancient Jewish poets."

For Mr. Bell, who in past summers has spoken at giant Christian music festivals, the tour is an opportunity to talk at length to an audience that may not already be in the evangelical tent, about ideas too discursive for sermons.

"I just thought, What are the places my brother and I like to go to?" he explained. "And it's nightclubs and places where bands play. That's where people go to hear ideas in our culture."

The Chicago audience had come from throughout the Midwest to see a figure many knew from the new media of evangelical outreach. Though Mr. Bell does not preach on Christian television and radio, his innovative series of short films called Nooma (a phonetic spelling of the Greek "pneuma," or "spirit") has sold more than 500,000 DVD's in four years, and podcasts of his sermons are downloaded by 30,000 to 56,000 people a week. His book, "Velvet Elvis," which combines memoir with an exploration of the Jewish traditions in the New Testament, has sold 116,000 copies in hardcover since last July.

"Rob Bell is a central figure for his generation and for the way that evangelicals are likely to do church in the next 20 years," said Andy Crouch, an editor at Christianity Today magazine. "He occupies a centrist place that is very appealing, committed to the basic evangelical doctrines but incredibly creative in his reinterpretive style."

Eric Chapman, who had traveled to Chicago by car and train from Peoria, Ill., said he had learned about the show from his minister, who did not approve.

"He didn't think pastors should get this much publicity," Mr. Chapman said. "But I was like, 'He's going on tour? Cool. I got to see this guy.' I like how he takes huge ideas and says them in a new way that makes it seem obvious."

The tour, which is scheduled to stop at Symphony Space in Manhattan on July 25, sells tickets for about $10. (Mr. Bell's profits go to WaterAid, an antipoverty charity.)

The idea for the journey began with a conversation between Mr. Bell and a friend in the band Jimmy Eat World, which plays a style of alternative rock called emo. That conversation led to the band's booking agent, Tim Edwards, who says some venues declined to book Mr. Bell.

"I got some places who said they'd have protesters from the right, and some that said from the left," Mr. Edwards said.

Mr. Bell sang in a rock band while attending a Christian college in Wheaton, Ill. He then went to Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., and entered the ministry through the nondenominational Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, which is conservative both theologically and politically. Ed Dobson, the church's senior pastor, helped write the agenda for the Moral Majority and was a personal assistant to Jerry Falwell.

At his own church and in his videos, Mr. Bell avoids controversial topics like same-sex marriage, abortion rights and school prayer, and in his talk here he offhandedly dismissed "any spiritual institution that says you should vote a certain way."

Explaining afterward, he said: "It's against what Jesus had in mind when it becomes about how much power we can have as a voting bloc. The way of Jesus is serving the voiceless."

Instead of politics, the talk bounced from the Book of Genesis and the Hebrew word "Elohim," meaning "God," to "This Is Spinal Tap," the World Cup and the value of turning your cellphone off one day a week in modern observance of the Sabbath. Mr. Bell argued at several points that science and faith were complementary, not contradictory systems of information.

"He's figured out how to convey basic Christian doctrine in a highly skeptical culture," said Quentin J. Schultze, a professor of communication at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, who has studied Mr. Bell. "He's very challenging in his sermons. There's no appeal for money. You get a sense of intellectual substance and depth of the faith."

At the Chicago performance, a middle-aged Tom Fell and his friends were left cold.

"I thought it was very creative, but if it was targeted at Christians, he missed the point," said Mr. Fell, who considers Mr. Bell a celebrity preacher. "When I was 18, we'd get high and talk about stuff like that."

His friend John Duval, 42, agreed. "He didn't tell us how to go out and be disciples," Mr. Duval said.

But Alex Beh, 23, who lined up an hour early for the performance, said it had left him exhilarated.

"It's more like Jesus' teaching than the church's teaching," said Mr. Beh, adding: "I loved that there was beer available. The church needs to go more in that direction, more culture-friendly rather than sectarian, or dividing people."

At 1 a.m., Mr. Bell boarded the bus for an overnight drive to Minneapolis. It had marble floors, a mirrored refrigerator and a laundry. "It's pretty pimped," he said apologetically. Stephen Stills gets the bus when Mr. Bell is done.

Mr. Bell said he hoped the tour would instill a sense of awe in his listeners.

"We've got everything material we could want, but there's a loss of innocence and wonder," he said. "I grew up on David Letterman, whose answer to everything is 'yeah, right.' But the people who really move us, like Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa, at the end of the day have this innocence."

    Center Stage for a Pastor Where It's Rock That Usually Rules, NYT, 8.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/08/us/08minister.html

Anglican Plan Threatens Split on Gay Issues

June 28, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and NEELA BANERJEE

In a defining moment in the Anglican Communion's civil war over homosexuality, the Archbishop of Canterbury proposed a plan yesterday that could force the Episcopal Church in the United States either to renounce gay bishops and same-sex unions or to give up full membership in the Communion.

The archbishop, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, said the "best way forward" was to devise a shared theological "covenant" and ask each province, as the geographical divisions of the church are called, to agree to abide by it.

Provinces that agree would retain full status as "constituent churches," and those that do not would become "churches in association" without decision-making status in the Communion, the world's third largest body of churches.

Conservatives hailed the archbishop's move as an affirmation that the American church stepped outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy when it ordained a gay bishop three years ago.

The archbishop wrote, "No member church can make significant decisions unilaterally and still expect this to make no difference to how it is regarded in the fellowship."

Leaders of the Episcopal Church — the Communion's American province, long dominated by theological liberals — sought to play down the statement's import, saying it was just one more exchange in a long dialogue they expected to continue within the Communion.

The archbishop said his proposal could allow local churches in the United States to separate from the Episcopal Church and join the American wing that stays in the Communion. But that process could take years, and some American parishes are already planning to break from the Episcopal Church. Entire dioceses may announce their intention to depart, as soon as today.

The 38 provinces that make up the global Communion have been at odds since 2003, when the Episcopal Church ordained Bishop V. Gene Robinson, a gay man who lives with his partner, as bishop of the diocese of New Hampshire.

The archbishop's statement is the most solid official step yet in a long march toward schism. Twenty-two of the 38 provinces had already declared their ties with the American church to be "broken" or "impaired," but until now the Communion had hung together, waiting for guidance from the Archbishop of Canterbury. He is considered "the first among equals" in the Communion but does not dictate policy as the pope does in the Roman Catholic Church.

For the proposal to be enacted would take at least half a dozen major church meetings spread out over at least the next four years, the Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon, secretary general of the Anglican Communion, said in a telephone interview.

What should be included in a covenant could become the next focus of debate. The idea of a covenant was first proposed in the "Windsor Report," issued in 2004 by a committee commissioned by the archbishop. Canon Kearon said, "Many churches welcome the idea of a covenant, but they didn't particularly welcome the text that was proposed." He said he did not regard the archbishop's proposal as a step toward schism but as a means to clarify "identity and common decision-making procedures" in the Communion.

Church liberals said that any "covenant" would be crafted with the participation of the American church and other provinces that favored full inclusion of gay people.

"I think the archbishop takes a long view and underscores the fact that we are involved in a process rather than a quick fix," Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold of the Episcopal Church said in a telephone interview.

Several church officials in communication with the archbishop's office said he wrote his six-page communiqué, which he called a "reflection," after the close of the Episcopal Church's convention last Wednesday in Columbus, Ohio.

At the convention, the church fell short of the demands in the Windsor Report for an explicit apology and a full "moratorium" on ordaining gay bishops. Instead, the church approved a conciliatory statement encouraging American dioceses to refrain from ordaining gay bishops.

But the convention also offended the conservatives by electing a new presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori of Nevada, who has been an outspoken advocate of full inclusion for gay people and who allows gay union ceremonies in churches in her diocese.

Bishop Jefferts Schori, who takes office after Bishop Griswold retires in November, will represent the American church in meetings with the world's primates, some of whom do not approve of women as priests or bishops.

She said in an interview yesterday that she was heartened by Archbishop Williams's comments in the letter that he would not be able to mend rifts over sexuality single-handedly.

"There were expectations out there that he would intervene or direct various people and provinces to do certain things, and he made it quite clear that it's not his role or responsibility to do that," Bishop Jefferts Schori said.

The Anglican Communion has about 77 million members in more than 160 nations. Members in conservative provinces far outnumber those in the liberal provinces. The Episcopal Church has about 2.3 million members but contributes a disproportionate amount to Anglican Communion administration, charities and mission work. The Anglican Communion Network, a group leading the conservative response, said it had 200,000 members last year.

The archbishop's proposal was greeted with satisfaction by conservative leaders in the United States, who had formed a powerful alliance with prelates in many of the provinces in Africa and in Asia, and in some parts of Latin America. The conservatives have insisted all along that it is the American church that destabilized the Anglican ship and should be pushed overboard if it will not relent.

The Rev. Canon David C. Anderson, president of the conservative American Anglican Council, said: "We really believe that the Episcopal Church wants to follow a course that takes it out of both Anglicanism and Christianity, as Christianity is historically known. So a two-tier approach looks good in theory."

Canon Anderson said the plan could be difficult in actuality, because many parishes and dioceses were ready to sever ties with the Episcopal Church now, years before the archbishop's plan for reorganization could take effect. He said that churches and dioceses had already asked to be put under the authority of bishops in Africa and Latin America and that many more would do so in coming months.

"The floodgates are starting to open," he said.

The division has already led to legal battles over church property. Under Episcopal Church bylaws, parish assets belong to the dioceses, but churches in some states have challenged that in court.

Archbishop Williams said in his statement, "The reason Anglicanism is worth bothering with is because it has tried to find a way of being a church that is neither tightly centralized nor a loose federation of essentially independent bodies."

But that decentralization will continue to be a cause of conflict unless it is addressed, he said, adding, "What our Communion lacks is a set of adequately developed structures which is able to cope with the diversity of views that will inevitably arise in a world of rapid global communication and huge cultural variety."

    Anglican Plan Threatens Split on Gay Issues, NYT, 28.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/us/28episcopal.html?hp&ex=1151553600&en=c430e21d859b78d0&ei=5094&partner=homepage

    Related http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/41/50/acns4161.cfm

Christian Science church aims for growth amid struggles

Posted 6/25/2006 2:10 PM ET
Associated Press
By Jay Lindsay
USA Today

BOSTON — The church was founded after a fall that left Mary Baker Eddy bedridden and turning to the Bible in her suffering. It is said that a revelation she received while reading about Christ's healings was so powerful, Eddy walked away from her bed, instantly healed.

The Christian Science church she left behind hasn't been as quick to cure its problems.

The church has recently faced major job cuts and a sell-off of historic properties. It's also struggled with low membership at a time when its core principle of healing through prayer is criticized as obsolete.

Meanwhile, its own members accuse church leaders of betraying its founder with foolish expenditures or diluted teachings meant to accommodate modern times.

"It's obvious," said Maryfrances Cassell, a church member who has criticized its leadership. "It's withering on the vine."

Church officials acknowledge recent difficulties, but speak with conviction about a brighter future. The church's finances have stabilized, said treasurer Ned Odegaard, who said the church has a $66 million surplus in its general fund and no debt.

Decisions to sell real estate, including two of Eddy's historic homes, were more of a spiritual than financial necessity, church officials said. One of every four dollars was being spent on the church's real estate holdings, and that was detracting from its healing mission — which church leaders say will demonstrate the church's power and lead to growth.

"I just feel we're at the cusp of something very special here," said Phil Davis, head of the church's Committee on Publications.

Reminders of the church's problems are found around its expansive headquarters, which spreads over 14 acres in Boston's Back Bay.

Its 26-story office tower is 75% vacant after the church cut 300 jobs — about 35% of its workforce — in the last two years. Officials are moving church workers out and considering leasing the space.

The $26 million Mary Baker Eddy library, opened in 2002, pays tribute to the church's founder, and, some say, the folly of the leadership's financial decisions.

Inside the same building, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Christian Science Monitor newspaper operates with a mandate to be profitable by 2009 as the church reduces financial subsidies in an attempt to make the paper independent and profitable.

The church, officially called the First Church of Christ, Scientist, was established in 1879, 13 years after Eddy's revelation.

She taught that God is all, that men and women are His reflection, and that the material world is an illusion, including the sickness people experience. Healing, both of the body and soul, comes by recognizing through good works and prayer that the only true reality is a good and perfect God, and that illness is an error in thought.

The church is supported primarily by its members through contributions, legacies and other gifts. The church has no clergy, and considers its pastors the Bible and Eddy's book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Lessons based on the books are developed by a church committee and read on Sundays at about 2,000 branch churches in 80 countries worldwide.

Eddy was castigated by skeptics of her time, including Mark Twain, who portrayed Eddy as dim and greedy. "I do not think that she has ever allowed a dollar that had no friends to get by her alive," Twain wrote in 1907.

But Eddy gained enormous influence. Her church grew from just under 9,000 members in 1890 to nearly 269,000 worldwide in 1936, according to a 1998 study by former University of Washington sociologist Rodney Stark.

Stark's study was a rare attempt to quantify membership at the church, which does not track it but acknowledges a recent "downward trend." According to Stark's study, by 1990, worldwide membership was at 106,000, and shrinking. By comparison, the midsized Roman Catholic diocese in Worcester, Mass. estimates 350,000 current members.

At the annual meeting, Nathan Talbot, chairman of the church's five-member board of directors, acknowledged its limited reach.

"There are about 6 billion people on this planet and yet there are just a little handful of us who have caught a glimpse of this revelation," he said.

Church observers and members offer contradictory assessments of its problems.

Stark blamed the church's decline on factors including inadequate missionary efforts, low birth rates and an inability to keep their young people from leaving. Caroline Fraser, who grew up in the church and criticized it in her book, God's Perfect Child, said modern medicine has robbed the church of its purpose.

"It was developed as a viable, spiritual alternative to medicine when medicine had very little to offer people," she said. Today, science offers a treatment for just about anything, so discarding medicine "seems insane, if not impossible," she said.

Some say the message remains powerful, but the church has suffered by not being loyal to Eddy's writings. Cassell, who refers to herself as part of a "remnant" of true Christian Scientists, said the sudden death of the church president-elect, David Reed, who was stricken at this month's annual meeting in Boston, was a divine message that the church had strayed.

She accuses church leaders of trying to broaden its appeal by diluting its principles. The worst example, she said, is the church's increasing acceptance of members who routinely turn to medical care, she said.

"We're working at odds with each other," Cassell said. "It's either one or the other."

Denis Glover, a church member from Chatham, said that Eddy did not want any buildings named after her, but the church still built The Mary Baker Eddy library in a failed attempt for publicity.

"Everything about it was flawed from the start," Glover said.

Church officials defend the library as a necessary to preserve Eddy's writings and make them more widely available.

"It can become the writings of a club, or people who subscribe to it, but it's for the world," Davis said.

Norm Bleichman, a spokesman for the church, denies the leadership has deviated from Eddy's teachings. And he said although the church has never prohibited members from seeing doctors, it also doesn't pretend that when they receive medical care, they're practicing Christian Science.

But the church has been distracted by things like the real estate and administrative operations, he said. With its operations streamlined, the church's focus and its road to better health are clear.

"Do you know what we need to do?" he said. "We need to be better healers."

    Christian Science church aims for growth amid struggles, UT, 25.6.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2006-06-25-christianscience_x.htm

As Barrier Comes Down, a Muslim Split Remains

June 25, 2006
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

SAN FRANCISCO, June 24 — During Friday prayers at San Francisco's largest downtown mosque, Sevim Kalyoncu, a young Turkish-American writer, used to resent that the imam never addressed the women, as if his message was not intended for them. But the sermons underwent a sudden change when the Islamic Society of San Francisco took the controversial step of tearing down the barrier separating male and female worshippers.

"He was always addressing the brothers during the Friday sermon," Ms. Kalyoncu said. "Now we hear 'brothers and sisters' because he can see us. Before, I felt very distant, but now it seems that women are part of the group. It's a first step."

Even after the slapdash, 8-foot wall across the back of the Darussalam mosque was demolished as part of a renovation last fall, however, the 400-member congregation remained divided.

After the demolition, a small knot of veiled women marched in brandishing a hand-lettered cardboard sign that read "We Want the Wall." Several men who pray at the mosque — on the third floor of an old theater in a particularly sleazy stretch of the city's Tenderloin district — are still grumbling, and some of them even decamped for a rival mosque. But the wall stayed down.

The norm in the United States and Canada — not to mention in the larger Muslim world — is to separate the women, if not bar them entirely. A small if determined band of North American Muslims, mostly younger women, have been challenging the practice, however, labeling the separation of men and women imported cultural baggage rather than a fulfillment of a religious commandment. They argue that while Muslims brag that Islam grants more rights to women than other religions do, the opposite is true.

"I am positive there will be an American Islamic identity that is separate from what you see in the Middle East and the rest of the Islamic world," said Souleiman Ghali, a founding member of the Islamic Society of San Francisco and the main force behind the wall's removal.

"We can discuss things that would be taboo in different countries," added Mr. Ghali, 47, a Palestinian who immigrated to the United States from Lebanon when he was 20 and now runs a copy business in downtown San Francisco. "Here we can challenge ideas or change them, and there is no religious authority to come in with the power of the government to shut us down, accusing us of being infidels contradicting thousands of years of the religious norm."

In Regina, Saskatchewan, Zarqa Nawaz was so incensed when her 200-member mosque shunted the women into a small, dark room behind a one-way mirror that she made a documentary on the subject.

The film, "Me and the Mosque," was financed by the National Film Board of Canada and broadcast on Canadian national television in April. It will appear on two American satellite channels, Link TV and Free Speech TV, starting July 16.

Mrs. Nawaz said the issue had broader implications.

"The barriers have become a metaphor for keeping the women secluded in other ways, to having no role in running the community," she said.

In 2001, a survey by the Council on American-Islamic Relations of more than 1,200 mosques found that 66 percent of them required women to pray behind a partition or in a separate room, up from 52 percent in 1994. Another study, spearheaded by the Islamic Social Services Association of Canada, found that mosques generally "relegate women to small, dingy, secluded, airless and segregated quarters with their children."

Islamic scholars and women activists say they believe the trend has accelerated since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, attributing it to a newly pervasive insecurity on the part of North American Muslims who have counteracted it through a staunch adherence to tradition.

"There is a sense that there is a crusade out there against Islam, that Islam is under siege and we have to hold steadfast to our righteous ways more than ever," said Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a prominent Islamic jurist known for his moderate interpretations.

Dr. Abou El Fadl said the practice began in 18th-century Saudi Arabia, where the austere Wahhabi sect of Islam started walling off or banning women from mosques. (He added that the modern spread of Wahhabism is one facet of the pervasiveness of Saudi financial support for Muslim institutions worldwide.)

Mrs. Nawaz's film takes an alternately light-hearted and serious look at the arguments on both sides.

"In Islam, mixing is not encouraged; there is no mixing between sexes, and there are all kinds of reasons for that," Ghassan Joundi, the president of the Manitoba Islamic Association, says in the film. In Dr. Joundi's mosque, the men first erected a barrier with shutters, then nailed them shut.

At the Darussalam mosque, the dispute over the wall was just one skirmish in a larger battle over the entire tenor of the mosque. Mr. Ghali and other leaders at the mosque fired an imam they deemed overly militant, not least because he wanted to make the barrier between the sexes even more pronounced. The imam went to court, winning more than $400,000 in a wrongful dismissal suit, and then opened a competing mosque around the corner, where the women still worship behind a wall.

But Mr. Ghali and other mosque leaders say they believe North America provides fertile ground for melding the best of all cultural traditions because the Muslim population is so diverse.

"You can't take a tradition in Pakistan, Somalia or Egypt and bring it to America and make it part of the law; it doesn't make sense," said Mr. Ghali, who resigned as president of the mosque's board in February. "It's one of those cultural things that many immigrants brought from overseas without giving it much thought. It's time to get rid of those bad habits."

That outlook incited an exodus by some worshippers, and some who stayed have complained that a clique of "ayatollahs" who brook no dissent now run Darussalam.

"I don't want to be distracted by ladies in the back when I am praying," said Adel al-Dalali, 40, a Yemeni cab driver who prays at Darussalam, noting that mosques in his homeland were built with a mezzanine reserved for women. "Even if it is more culture than religious tradition, we feel it's needed."

At the back of the mosque, some of the roughly 30 women worshippers agreed. "As a Muslim woman, I was more at peace praying behind the wall," said Zeinab al-Andea, a 50-year-old Yemeni who spoke only Arabic. "As a veiled woman, I don't want to mix with men. It's a beautiful mosque, but I wish there was a wall."

The mosque occupies the top floor of a building that was filled mostly with sweatshops until 1991, when the Islamic Society moved in. The recent renovations turned the mosque into one large room flooded with light. Broad green stripes on the red carpet show the faithful where to line up, and, in a nod to tradition, men and women still do not pray shoulder to shoulder.

The wall across the back was replaced with small printed signs reading "Sisters Prayer Area Only Behind This Sign." The aim of knocking down the wall was not for the sexes to mingle, but to have comparable access to the imam.

Outside, the neighborhood is rife with all manner of vice. Intoxicated men and women occasionally stagger into one of the many liquor stores. Across Market Street, a pornography store called Sin City exhorts passers-by to "See the Beauty, Touch the Magic."

Yet a dedicated group of women who support the change at Darussalam navigate their way to the mosque each Friday.

These women say they hated the wall. With it, they had trouble hearing the sermon and often fell out of sync with the prayer movements. Distracted, some say they gave up praying and instead just gossiped or drank tea.

Proponents of barriers in mosques tend to argue that the Prophet Muhammad's wives, who inhabited a series of rooms attached to the main mosque at Medina, spoke to the faithful from behind a tentlike curtain. They also say a distinct space for women assures they will not have to jostle with men.

Muslim rituals are guided by the Koran and the Hadith, tomes that detail Islam as it was practiced in the prophet's time. Advocates and some religious scholars say the books support the women. Muhammad emphasized that the rules for his wives were distinct from those for other women, they note, and he never resorted to a barrier, despite similar debate in the seventh century.

Some early adherents of Islam showed up late for prayers so they could stay in the back and ogle the women's behinds, even penning bawdy odes to the sight, said Dr. Abou El Fadl, the U.C.L.A. scholar, so Mohamed recommended that all men pray at the front of their mosques. None of Islam's three holiest mosques — Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and those in Mecca and Medina — originally had barriers between the sexes.

"Men try to justify it now by creating arguments that are ludicrous, like saying that men back then were more moral," said Mrs. Nawaz, the filmmaker, a 38-year-old mother of four. "This is completely bogus. The men were exactly the same back then when it came to being distracted. The prophet didn't deal with it by separation, he dealt with it by education."

    As Barrier Comes Down, a Muslim Split Remains, NYT, 25.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/us/25muslim.html

Stay Tuned, as 2 Churches Struggle With Gay Clergy

June 24, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

The only certain result of the Episcopal and Presbyterian church conventions that ended this week is that the participants will return to fight another day — and at future church conventions — over homosexuality.

For the Episcopal Church U.S.A. and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), as with other mainline Protestant churches, the summertime convention season has become a painful ritual. In each church, the conservatives and the liberals are bound together like brawling conjoined twins.

The liberals dominate the power centers of the denominations — the national offices and the legislative arms. The conservatives have threatened to walk away, but most have not because they say the church is rightfully, theologically, theirs.

"It's all very well to threaten divorce, but it's another thing to go to the divorce court," said David C. Steinmetz, a professor of the history of Christianity at Duke Divinity School who has spent the last few years on schism watch.

Members of both churches had looked to this year's conventions to clarify their positions on ordaining gay clergy members and blessing same-sex couples.

But instead, each convention produced the kind of parliamentary doublespeak that some Episcopalians call "Anglican fudge," a concoction often used to smooth over differences at meetings of the global Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is the American branch.

The Presbyterians, on the sixth day of their eight-day General Assembly in Birmingham, Ala., approved the proposal of a bipartisan "Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church," which had spent five years trying to devise a compromise that would keep the church from splitting. The vote was 57 percent to 43 percent.

The proposal gives congregations and regional districts known as presbyteries the leeway to ordain gay clergy members and elders, despite church standards banning the ordination of gay leaders, which the delegates voted to reconfirm at the convention.

Liberals who favor a "live and let live" solution were relieved. But the ball is now in the conservatives' court, and in the post-convention wrap-up, conservative leaders said in interviews that they were not in unity.

Some said they knew of individuals who would surely leave the Presbyterian Church and of churches that intended to "separate themselves" from the denomination, at least temporarily.

But the leaders of most conservative caucuses in the church are encouraging their members to stay and fight, and to challenge the first ordinations of gay clergy members in ecclesiastical courts. A victory or two would give them the precedent they need to undermine this "compromise," they said.

The Rev. Michael R. Walker, executive director of Presbyterians for Renewal, a large conservative group, said: "It's going to increase confusion and rancor in the church, and it's certainly going to result in a quagmire within church courts. So, far from promoting peace, unity and purity, it actually promotes unrest and disunity and impurity."

He said the compromise solution, in which each church or presbytery could make up its own mind, was not acceptable to many conservatives because they felt "guilty by association" with a church that had "compromised biblical standards" on sexuality and morality.

Terry Schlossberg, executive director of the Presbyterian Coalition, another conservative group, said: "We're tired. We don't want to keep fighting the same battles over again, but there are battles to fight that we could prevail in. We are going back to work. We will recommit ourselves to seeing this rescinded at the next General Assembly."

Stay tuned in 2008.

The Episcopalians went into their convention under pressure from conservatives in the United States, and in Africa, Asia and elsewhere, to express regret for consenting to the ordination of a gay bishop — V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire — at their convention three years ago.

The demands were in the Windsor Report, a document commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury in an effort to referee the ruckus that erupted after Bishop Robinson's consecration. The report asked the Episcopal Church to place a moratorium on the election of gay bishops, and to stop blessing same-sex couples.

The decision came down to the last day of the church's convention in Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday. The House of Deputies, made up of priests and lay people, was apparently in no mood to comply with the report's demands.

Then, at the urging of the church's newly elected presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, the House of Deputies passed a statement saying the church should "exercise restraint" in electing bishops "whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion."

Some advocates of gay inclusion were disappointed, but some of their liberal allies said it would buy the Episcopal Church time to remain in the Anglican Communion and persuade the bishops of other nations to accept the American position.

"I don't see it as a setback," said Bishop J. Jon Bruno of Los Angeles, a liberal. "I see it as a detour in the path to full inclusion of gay and lesbian people."

Bishop Bruno said he had been assured by the Archbishop of York, who was at the Columbus meeting, that the American statement would be sufficient to prevent the Americans from being excluded from the next major meeting of Anglican bishops, the Lambeth Conference in 2008.

The conservatives, however, insisted that the Americans' mea culpa was insufficient.

"If the communion puts its stock in this promise, it's going to be terribly deceived," said Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, moderator of the Anglican Communion Network, a conservative group that has formed an alliance with conservative Anglicans in the developing world.

Bishop Duncan suggested in an interview that he had received assurances that the Anglican Communion would soon reprimand the Episcopal Church for disregarding orthodoxy.

"That's the stuff of reformations," he said. "And no reformation goes quickly."

    Stay Tuned, as 2 Churches Struggle With Gay Clergy, NYT, 24.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/24/us/24church.html

Presbyterians Revise Israel Investing Policy

June 22, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted yesterday to back off from a decision it made two years ago to pursue divestment from companies that profit from Israel's involvement in the Palestinian territories.

The resolution, passed overwhelmingly at the church's general assembly in Birmingham, Ala., responded to outcries by some church members and Jews who accused the church of insensitivity to Israel. The resolution apologized for "the pain that this has caused" among "many members of the Jewish community and within our Presbyterian communion."

Church leaders said it still permitted divestment as a "last resort," but emphasized positive, not punitive, steps the church can take to support Middle East peace efforts.

The church also sought to reassure Palestinians by including in the resolution a call for an end to Israel's involvement in Gaza and the West Bank, along with criticism of the Israeli security wall where it encroaches on Palestinian territory and "fails to follow the legally recognized borders of Israel" before the 1967 war.

"The resolution makes clear that we're not targeting Israel, we're not abandoning our commitment to peacemaking, we're not abandoning the Palestinian Christians," said Jay Rock, coordinator for interfaith relations.

The Presbyterian Church never reached the point of divesting from companies that it said provided military equipment or technology for Israel to use in the territories. Church officials had begun to press four corporations — Caterpillar, ITT, Motorola and United Technologies. Divesting would have required a vote by the entire general assembly, which meets every two years.

Yesterday, the church's Peacemaking and International Issues Committee drafted the resolution after nearly 12 hours of testimony from church members and three invited guests, an American Jew, an American Muslim and a Palestinian Christian.

After a brief debate, the general assembly adopted the resolution, 483 to 28. The compromise mollified some Jewish leaders, who sent several representatives to lobby delegates.

"The divestment policy was a one-sided policy that focused only on the bad acts of Israel," said Mark J. Pelavin, director of the Commission on Interreligious Affairs of Reform Judaism, a Jewish leader who spoke to the panel. "One of the criticisms last time was they didn't hear American Jewish voices at all. To their credit, they reached out this time."

The national director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Salam al-Marayati, invited to represent a Muslim viewpoint, said he was disappointed at the retreat from divestment, because it was a nonviolent strategy to put pressure on Israel.

But Mr. Marayati said of the Presbyterians, "There's still a commitment to opposing the occupation, and I think that's the most important thing."

Mr. Pelavin and Mr. Marayati said they were pleased over the support for a "politically viable and secure Palestinian state alongside an equally viable and secure Israeli state, both of which have a right to exist."

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), with 2.3 million members, has close ties to Palestinian Christians and has long used divestment to communicate foreign policy positions.

The divestment vote in 2004 hurt relationships with many Jewish organizations that had long been allies on causes like civil liberties and the separation of church and state.

"Our relationships with our Jewish friends were severely strained," said James D. Berkley, director of Presbyterian Action, a conservative group affiliated with the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington. "We had congregations that had spent years making excellent relationships with local temples, and rabbis and pastors that were good friends. And suddenly, the rabbis were calling up and saying, 'What has the church done? I thought you were our friends.' "

The action on divestment prompted other Protestant churches to consider similar steps. The World Council of Churches urged its member churches last year to give serious consideration to divesting funds from Israel. The Church of England voted for divestment in February. But few others have followed suit.

Two years ago, divestment was a sleeper issue at the Presbyterian general assembly, passing without much controversy.

This time, opponents mounted a campaign. They put up a billboard on the highway from the airport to the convention center saying, "Divestment is not the way to peace."

They invited a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, R. James Woolsey, a Presbyterian layman, to speak, and he said the divestment policy put the church "clearly on the side of theocratic, totalitarian, anti-Semitic, genocidal beliefs."

Advocates of divestment, including some American Jews and Israelis, worked the conference hallways. Jewish Voice for Peace, a liberal group, set up a table at the conference center and showed a documentary on Israeli military resisters, said a member, Judith Kolokoff of Seattle.

In the end, many delegates who spoke during the final debate said they saw the resolution as fair and even-handed.

    Presbyterians Revise Israel Investing Policy, NYT, 22.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/us/22divest.html?hp&ex=1151035200&en=44de0b6d8dad6ccb&ei=5094&partner=homepage

US Presbyterian church opens door to gay clergy

Wed Jun 21, 2006 2:00 AM ET
Reuters
By Verna Gates

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama (Reuters) - The largest U.S. Presbyterian Church body approved a measure on Tuesday that would open the way for the ordination of gays and lesbians under certain circumstances.

The new policy was approved on a vote of 57-43 percent among 500 church representatives at the biennial meeting of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. It gives local church organizations more leeway in deciding if gays can be ordained as lay deacons and elders as well as clergy, provided they are faithful to the church's core values.

"It permits local governing bodies to examine candidates on a wider criterion than sexual orientation ... it allows these bodies to look at the whole person and not categorize them," said Jon Walton, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in New York's Greenwich Village and a member of the "Covenant Network of Presbyterians" which backed the change.

Kim Clayton Richter of the Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta, a member of the same group, said it's wrong to interpret the Bible literally on homosexuality.

"You cannot pick out two or three passages to prove your point. You have to look at the whole witness of Jesus Christ. We've changed our mentality on slavery and the role of women. We have to change with reality," Richter said.

But Donald Baird, a pastor from Sacramento, California, said the Bible is very specific about homosexuality, and he worried about Tuesday's vote undermining church unity.

"We used to act as one church," he said. "Now we'll have 11,000 churches ... chaos," he said.

The 2.5 million-member church is the largest body of that denomination in the United States. It's policy in the past has been against the ordination of anyone not living faithfully in a heterosexual marriage or a single chaste life.

    US Presbyterian church opens door to gay clergy, UT, 21.6.2006, http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-06-21T055939Z_01_N20195923_RTRUKOC_0_US-RELIGION-PRESBYTERIANS.xml

For an Episcopal Pioneer, the Challenge Is to Unite

June 21, 2006
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

COLUMBUS, Ohio, June 20 — As she talked about her past and her future, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori on Tuesday described a life filled with so many unusual steps — including learning to fly and entering the Episcopal priesthood at age 40 — that it seemed to suggest an almost congenital appetite for challenge.

She now faces one of her greatest challenges, one that she has called "a grand adventure."

Bishop Jefferts Schori's election on Sunday as the first woman to lead the Episcopal Church has cast her deep into the maelstrom that has engulfed the American arm of the 77-million-member Anglican communion.

"We need to send a message that we fully intend to be part of the communion," she said on her way to the daily Eucharist service. "All of this calls for us to grow and stretch. I think we're willing to stretch very far indeed."

An angry debate about the election of a gay bishop and the blessing of same-sex unions in the United States has frayed the church at home and threatened to fracture the Anglican communion, the world's third-largest church body. Lay and clergy representatives at the Episcopal Church's triennial general convention here are trying to hammer out a response that would satisfy the Archbishop of Canterbury and those Anglican primates abroad who are profoundly offended by the Episcopal Church's actions.

Bishop Jefferts Schori, the 52-year-old bishop of Nevada, will have to sell whatever decision her church makes to the rest of the global communion, a task that may be made more difficult by her sex. Most of the 37 other provinces of the communion do not ordain women, and the willingness of those primates to accept a woman, particularly one who has endorsed gay bishops and same-sex unions, will only become clear over time.

A tall, slender woman who speaks in a soft alto, Bishop Jefferts Schori was born March 26, 1954, in Pensacola, Fla., the oldest of four children. She grew up around Seattle and in New Jersey. But Bishop Jefferts Schori returned to the West Coast to attend college at Stanford University and then to pursue a master's and doctorate in oceanography at Oregon State University. Her master's work dealt with "things that live in mud," on the Oregon coast, she said.

Bishop Jefferts Schori's family seems to be defined by staggering competence.

Her father was an atomic physicist who became an astrophysicist and then went on to help invent a system to tag and code salmon. Her mother had a degree in comparative literature but later became a microbiologist. Her husband of 27 years, Richard M. Schori, is a retired theoretical mathematician. Her 24-year-old daughter, Katharine, is a pilot in the Air Force.

Bishop Jefferts Schori has been flying airplanes since college and took up rock climbing with her husband, a skilled mountaineer. She is fluent in Spanish.

Bishop Jefferts Schori's parents were Catholics who left the church when she was about 9 to join an Episcopal parish, she said.

"We went from a liturgy in Latin to one in English," she said, "from a large and anonymous church to a small and intimate one."

Her turn toward the ministry began more than 15 years ago, when her opportunities for work in oceanography were narrowing. At the same time, several people in her congregation told her she should become a minister. She said she studied and prayed with her pastor in Corvallis, Ore., and the answer became clearer over a period of years.

"My sense of call was like looking at a series of doors closing and others opening, not like there were words on fire on the wall," she said. "It was this dawning awareness that, 'Yes, it makes sense, that there is a coherence to the pieces I am experiencing.' "

Bishop Jefferts Schori was ordained in 1994. The church first ordained women in 1976.

When she walked down the hall toward the Eucharist, a woman in a wheelchair flashed her a smile and a pink button that read, "It's a girl!"

But to the Episcopal Church's critics, Bishop Jefferts Schori's election is another step in the wrong direction, given her liberal theology and her sex. Already, the diocese of Fort Worth, one of three that does not ordain women, has sent a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury asking to be placed under the oversight of a different primate. No decision on that is expected soon.

The archbishop himself sent rather wan greetings to Bishop Jefferts Schori, that in part cautioned that "her election will undoubtedly have an impact on the collegial life of the Anglican primates; and it also brings into focus some continuing issues in several of our ecumenical dialogues." That translates into concerns that other Anglican primates may not accept her, and the Vatican and Eastern Orthodox bishops might not, either.

If her fellow primates are not willing to sit at the table with her, Bishop Jefferts Schori said, she is willing to get up and follow them as they walk away.

"I think that building trust in other parts of the communion is crucial because there is anxiety about a woman in the boys club, as some have said, though I already know a number of the primates," she said. "There is anxiety about the place of the Episcopal Church in the communion. But we want to show that the main thing is that we aren't here to argue about matters of sexuality. We are here to build a holy community."

    For an Episcopal Pioneer, the Challenge Is to Unite, NYT, 21.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/21/us/21episcopal.html

In Wal-Mart's Home, Synagogue Signals Growth

June 20, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL BARBARO

BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Residents of Benton County, in the northwest corner of Arkansas, are proud citizens of the Bible Belt. At last count, they filled 39 Baptist, 27 United Methodist and 20 Assembly of God churches. For decades, a local hospital has begun meetings with a reading from the New Testament and the library has featured an elaborate Christmas display.

Then the Wal-Mart Jews arrived.

Recruited from around the country as workers for Wal-Mart or one of its suppliers, hundreds of which have opened offices near the retailer's headquarters here, a growing number of Jewish families have become increasingly vocal proponents of religious neutrality in the county. They have asked school principals to rename Christmas vacation as winter break (many have) and lobbied the mayor's office to put a menorah on the town square (it did).

Wal-Mart has transformed small towns across America, but perhaps its greatest impact has been on Bentonville, where the migration of executives from cities like New York, Boston and Atlanta has turned this sedate rural community into a teeming mini-metropolis populated by Hindus, Muslims and Jews.

It is the Jews of Benton County, however, who have asserted themselves most. Two years ago, they opened the county's first synagogue and, ever since, its roughly 100 members have become eager spokesmen and women for a religion that remains a mystery to most people here.

When the synagogue celebrated its first bar mitzvah, the boy's father — Scott Winchester, whose company sells propane tanks to Wal-Mart — invited two local radio D.J.'s, who broadcast the event across the county, even though, by their own admission, they had only a vague idea of what a bar mitzvah was.

"Jesus was Jewish," one D.J. noted in a dispatch from the reception at a local hotel. The other remarked, "I love Seinfeld."

Shortly after he moved to the area, Tom Douglass, a member of the synagogue who works in Wal-Mart's logistics department, made a presentation about Hanukkah to his son's kindergarten class. The lesson, complete with an explanation of how to play with a spinning dreidel and compete for chocolate coins, imported from New York, proved so popular that the school's librarian taped it for future classes.

Then there is Ron Haberman, a doctor and synagogue member, who has introduced Jewish cuisine to the county. His new restaurant, Eat This, next door to a new 140,000-square-foot glass-enclosed Baptist church, serves knishes, matzo ball soup and latkes. To guide the uninitiated, the menu explains that it is pronounced "LOT-kuz."

Not everyone is ordering the knishes, but Christians throughout Benton County are slowly learning the complexities of Jewish life. Gary Compton, the superintendent of schools in Bentonville and a member of a Methodist church in town, has learned not to schedule PTA meetings the night before Jewish holidays, which begin at sundown, and has encouraged the high school choir to incorporate Jewish songs into a largely Christian lineup.

"We need to get better at some things," he said. "You just don't go from being noninclusive to being inclusive overnight."

Surrounded by Christian neighbors, Bible study groups, 100-foot-tall crucifixes and free copies of the book "The Truth About Mary Magdalene" left in the seating area of the Bentonville IHOP, the Jews of Benton County say they have become more observant in — and protective of — their faith than ever before.

Marcy Winchester, the mother of the synagogue's first bar mitzvah, said, "You have to try harder to be Jewish down here."

Which may explain why what began as a dozen families, almost all of them tied to Wal-Mart and almost all of them sharing only a passing familiarity with one another, managed to create a free-standing synagogue in just under a year. Tired of being asked which church they attended, they decided to build the answer.

For several years, many of them had attended a small synagogue attached to the University of Arkansas about 30 miles south of Bentonville. But the drive was long and the university temple, a converted fraternity house, never felt like home.

So in 2004, the families — most of them like-minded transplants from big cities largely in their 30's — decided it was time to create a permanent Jewish community in Benton County. They bought a former Hispanic Assembly of God church a few blocks from the first five-and-dime store operated by Sam Walton, Wal-Mart's founder, and renamed it Congregation Etz Chaim, or Tree of Life.

A dozen families quickly turned into 20 families, then 40.

There were, for example, Betsy and Marc Rosen, who moved to Benton County from Chicago in 2000 after Mr. Rosen was offered a job in Wal-Mart's technology department. The family did not attend a synagogue in Chicago because, Mrs. Rosen said, "you didn't need a synagogue to have a Jewish identity." There were Jewish neighbors, Jewish friends, Jewish family.

But not in Bentonville, where her daughter brought home from day care a picture of Jesus to color in. Suddenly, a synagogue did not seem like a luxury anymore, but a necessity to preserve her family's Jewish heritage.

The Jewish community here is a demographic anomaly. For decades, the Jewish population has plunged in small Southern towns like Bentonville, as young Jews have been lured to big cities like Atlanta and Houston. The Jewish population in Arkansas was 1,700 in 2001, down from 6,500 in 1937, according to the most recent numbers available from the American Jewish Yearbook, forcing synagogues in towns like Blytheville and Helena to close their doors.

"Bentonville is the exception," said Stuart Rockoff, a historian at the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, a nonprofit group that supports synagogues like Etz Chaim.

But as Etz Chaim nears its second anniversary, Benton County's only synagogue — and by extension, its fledgling Jewish community — faces several unexpected challenges.

The members of the congregation come from observant religious families in Connecticut, reform synagogues in Kansas City, Mo., and everything in between. Though they agreed to share one roof, they are struggling to reconcile varied backgrounds and traditions, which has made for hours-long debates over, among other things, whether congregants can take photos inside the synagogue on the Sabbath. (The answer is yes, but only with the flash turned off.)

Then there is the pressure from the outside. Eager to gain a foothold in what they consider a fast-growing Jewish community, several major Jewish movements have begun wooing the synagogue. In the last year, representatives from the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements have all visited the temple.

After learning there was a sizable Jewish population in the area, a rabbi from the strictly observant Chabad-Lubavitch movement moved to town, creating a potential competitor to Etz Chaim. The rabbi has had some success offering residents prayer services in his home — which has its own Torah — and a hard-to-find amenity in these parts: a kosher meal.

Members of the synagogue's board said they were in no rush to pick a religious affiliation but conceded the decision was inevitable.

Turnover has also proved to be a problem. Wal-Mart's suppliers like Procter & Gamble and Walt Disney, which set up satellite offices to be closer to their largest retail client, replace their Wal-Mart teams every few years, so Etz Chaim has already lost some founding members.

David Hoodis, the synagogue's president and an executive in Wal-Mart's operations department, said he expected to lose two to three families a year, forcing the temple to recruit aggressively. Members of the congregation are encouraged to invite new Wal-Mart employees over for dinner on the Sabbath to talk to them about Etz Chaim. And, to build the congregation, the synagogue has created associate memberships, with lower dues, for businesspeople who make frequent overnight trips here to visit Wal-Mart.

"I still think we are fragile," Mr. Hoodis said.

But the synagogue's roots are deepening. It recently celebrated its first renewal-of-wedding-vows ceremony. It received a Torah from a temple seven hours away in El Dorado, Ark., that closed because of a dwindling congregation. And after relying on borrowed rabbis, it has hired one of its own, a member of a Conservative temple, who travels to Bentonville once a month from Tulsa, Okla., with his wife, a singer who serves as Etz Chaim's cantor.

With its purple carpet and orange pews, both vestiges of the Assembly of God church it once was, Etz Chaim is not the synagogue that all of its members envisioned growing old in. But in a short time it has become the center of the Jewish community here — and has begun to weave its way into this overwhelmingly Christian community.

This year a prominent local faith-based charity, consisting exclusively of churches, invited Etz Chaim to join. The charity promptly reworded it mission statement, replacing "churches" with "congregations."

    In Wal-Mart's Home, Synagogue Signals Growth, NYT, 20.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/business/20synagogue.html?hp&ex=1150862400&en=5b5644aaeeccee48&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Woman Is Named Episcopal Leader

June 19, 2006
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

COLUMBUS, Ohio, June 18 — The Episcopal Church elected Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of Nevada as its presiding bishop on Sunday, making her the first woman to lead a church in the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Many Episcopalians gathered here for the church's triennial general convention cheered the largely unexpected choice of Bishop Jefferts Schori, 52, the lone woman and one of the youngest of the seven candidates for the job. Her election was a milestone for the Episcopal Church, which began ordaining women only in 1976.

She takes on her new responsibilities at a particularly fraught moment in the history of the Episcopal Church, the American branch of the Anglican Communion, the world's third-largest church body, with 77 million members. She was elected to succeed Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold, who will retire in November when his nine-year term ends.

At the last general convention, in 2003, the church consented to the election of an openly gay man, the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, as bishop of New Hampshire. The decision deeply offended some Episcopalians in the United States and many Anglican primates abroad, who saw it as blatant disregard of Scripture.

Since then, some United States congregations have left the Episcopal Church, and primates overseas have threatened schism. Bishop Jefferts Schori supported Bishop Robinson's election in 2003, and the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada permits the blessing of same-sex unions. Moreover, that Bishop Jefferts Schori is a woman could further strain relations with three dioceses in the United States and many Anglican provinces that refuse to ordain women as priests and bishops, critics of the vote said Sunday.

But Bishop Jefferts Schori held out hope of mending any breaks that her election or previous positions on issues might cause.

"Alienation is often a function of not knowing another human being," she said at a news conference after her election. "I have good relations with almost all the other bishops, those who agree and those who don't agree with me. I will bend over backwards to build good relations with those who don't agree with me."

Bishop Jefferts Schori's election was a crowning moment in her meteoric rise in the Episcopal Church. She was ordained just 12 years ago, after leaving a career as an oceanographer.

"I'm thrilled," said the Rev. Susan Russell, the president of Integrity, an advocacy group for gay and lesbian Episcopalians. "I'm a cradle Episcopalian. I remember when there were no women priests. I remember when they said the church was going to split over the ordination of women. What we're giving as a Father's Day gift to the Anglican Communion is a woman primate, and that is wonderful."

But some at the general convention said Bishop Jefferts Schori's lack of experience as a church leader, especially of a large diocese, would be tested by the tensions in her denomination.

"Can she run a big ship of state?" asked the Rev. William L. Sachs, director of research at the Episcopal Church Foundation, the church's analysis arm. "She is certainly smart enough, and she gets it. But can she translate that into an actual program?"

Some critics were quick to focus on her sex, asserting that her election was an affront to others in the denomination who opposed the ordination of women. They described it as further evidence of the church's drift from the shared beliefs of the greater Anglican Communion.

"In many ways the election speaks for itself," Bishop Robert W. Duncan Jr. of Pittsburgh said in a statement. Bishop Duncan is the moderator of the Anglican Communion Network, a theologically conservative group of Episcopal dioceses. "For the Anglican Communion worldwide, this election reveals the continuing insensitivity and disregard of the Episcopal Church for the present dynamics of our global fellowship."

Bishop Jefferts Schori will be the 26th presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. As such, she will represent the church in meetings with other Anglican leaders from around the world and with leaders of other religious groups. But her powers are limited because of the Episcopal Church's tradition of autonomy for its dioceses, including the right to elect their own bishops.

That regard for autonomy has allowed three dioceses — those in Quincy, Ill.; Fort Worth; and San Joaquin, Calif. — to resist the ordination of women. In Quincy, at least, Bishop Jefferts Schori would not be welcome, said the Rev. H. W. Herrmann, rector of St. John's Episcopal Church there.

"Just like we can't use grape juice and saltines for Communion, because it isn't the right matter, we do not believe that the right matter is being offered here," Mr. Herrmann said in an interview on Sunday.

But no issue facing Bishop Jefferts Schori is likely to be as daunting as the fight over ordaining gay bishops.

In October 2004, a committee appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, issued a report to head off a possible schism over the sexuality debate. That document, the Windsor Report, recommended that the Episcopal Church apologize for the consecration of Bishop Robinson, stop blessing same-sex couples and place a moratorium on the election of gay bishops.

Bishop Jefferts Schori served on a commission that responded to the Windsor Report with recommendations that were less stringent. A committee at the general convention has been struggling to amend those recommendations, which have yet to come to a vote before the clergy and the lay deputies.

Bishop Jefferts Schori's role on the commission has only increased the suspicion of some critics. "Her gender has to be combined with her response to Windsor," said the Rev. Dr. Kendall Harmon, a critic of the church and theologian-in-residence at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Summerville, S.C. Speaking of other Anglican primates, he said, "Their anxiety will be focused less on her gender than her theology."

Beyond the fight over gay bishops, there is the question of how Bishop Jefferts Schori will be received by foreign church leaders and the heads of other religious groups. Church experts predicted that her election might further strain relations with the Vatican, which cooled to the church after the election of Bishop Robinson three years ago.

Her election may also increase pressure on the Church of England to break its deadlock over electing female bishops.

    Woman Is Named Episcopal Leader, NYT, 19.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/19/us/19bishop.html?hp&ex=1150776000&en=d0f2922746e9a4e1&ei=5094&partner=homepage

U.S. Muslim Clerics Seek a Modern Middle Ground

June 18, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Every seat in the auditorium at the University of Houston was taken, and the crowd was standing in the back and spilling out into the lobby, straining to hear. The two men onstage began to speak to the crowd in Arabic, with such flawless accents and rarefied Koranic grammar that some audience members gaped when they heard the Arabic equivalent of the king's English coming from the mouths of two Americans.

Sheik Hamza Yusuf, in a groomed goatee and sports jacket, looked more like a hip white college professor than a Middle Eastern sheik. Imam Zaid Shakir, a lanky African-American in a long brown tunic, looked as if he would fit in just fine on the streets of Damascus.

Both men are converts to Islam who spent years in the Middle East and North Africa being mentored by formidable Muslim scholars. They have since become leading intellectual lights for a new generation of American Muslims looking for homegrown leaders who can help them learn how to live their faith without succumbing to American materialism or Islamic extremism.

"This is the wealthiest Muslim community on earth," Mr. Shakir told the crowd, quickly adding that "the wealth here has been earned" — unlike, he said, in the oil-rich Middle East. As the audience laughed at Mr. Shakir's flattery, he chided them for buying Lexuses — with heated leather seats they would never need in Houston — and Jaguars, and made them laugh again by pronouncing it "Jaguoooaah," like a stuffy Anglophile.

And then he issued a challenge: "Where are the Muslim Doctors Without Borders? Spend six months here, six months in the Congo. Form it!"

Most American mosques import their clerics from overseas — some who preach extremism, some who cannot speak English, and most who cannot begin to speak to young American Muslims growing up on hip-hop and in mixed-sex chat rooms. Mr. Yusuf, 48, and Mr. Shakir, 50, are using their clout to create the first Islamic seminary in the United States, where they hope to train a new generation of imams and scholars who can reconcile Islam and American culture.

The seminary is still in its fledgling stages, but Mr. Yusuf and Mr. Shakir have gained a large following by being equally at home in Islamic tradition and modern American culture. Mr. Yusuf dazzles his audiences by weaving into one of his typical half-hour talks quotations from St. Augustine, Patton, Eric Erikson, Jung, Solzhenitsyn, Auden, Robert Bly, Gen. William C. Westmoreland and the Bible. He is the host of a TV reality show that is popular in the Middle East, in which he takes a vanload of Arabs on a road trip across the United States to visit people who might challenge Arab stereotypes about Americans, like the antiwar protesters demonstrating outside the Republican National Convention.

Mr. Shakir mixes passages from the Koran with a few lines of rap, and channels accents from ghetto to Valley Girl. Some of his students call him the next Malcolm X — out of his earshot, because he so often preaches the importance of humility.

Both men draw overflow crowds in theaters, mosques and university auditoriums that seat thousands. Their books and CD's are pored over by young Muslims in study groups. As scholars and proselytizers of the faith, they have a much higher profile than most imams, as Muslim clerics who are usually in charge of mosques are known. Their message is that both Islam and America have gone seriously astray, and that American Muslims have a responsibility to harness their growing numbers and economic power to help set them straight.

They say that Islam must be rescued from extremists who selectively cite Islamic scripture to justify terrorism. Though Mr. Yusuf and Mr. Shakir do not denounce particular scholars or schools of thought, their students say the two are challenging the influence of Islam's more reactionary sects, like Wahhabism and Salafism, which has been spread to American mosques and schools by clerics trained in Saudi Arabia. Where Wahhabism and Salafism are often intolerant of other religions — even of other streams within Islam — Mr. Yusuf and Mr. Shakir teach that Islam is open to a diversity of interpretations honed by centuries of scholars.

Mr. Yusuf told the audience in Houston to beware of "fanatics" who pluck Islamic scripture out of context and say, "We're going to tell you what God says on every single issue."

"That's not Islam," Mr. Yusuf said. "That's psychopathy."

He asked the audience to pray for the victims of kidnappers in Iraq, saying that kidnapping is just as bad as American bombings in which the military dismisses the civilians killed as "collateral damage."

"They're both sinister, as far as I'm concerned," he said. "One is efficient, the other is pathetic."

Both Mr. Shakir and Mr. Yusuf have a history of anti-American rhetoric, but with age, they have tempered their views. Mr. Shakir told the Houston audience that they are blessed to live in a country that is stable and safe, and in which they have thrived.

When it came time for questions, one young man stepped to the microphone and asked: "You said we have an obligation to humanity. Did you mean to Muslims, or to everyone?"

Mr. Shakir responded: "The obligation is to everyone. All of the people are the dependents of Allah."

When Mr. Shakir and Mr. Yusuf stepped off the stage, they were mobbed by a crowd that personified the breadth of their following. There were students in college sweatshirts, doctors and limousine drivers in suits. There were immigrants from Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and the grown children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the immigrant generation. There were plenty of African-Americans (as many as a third of American Muslims are black), and a sprinkling of white and Hispanic converts. There were women in all kinds of head scarves, and women without.

Mr. Yusuf and Mr. Shakir posed for pictures and signed their CD's, books and DVD's — the two men combined have more than 80 items on the market. A young couple thanked Mr. Yusuf for his CD set on Muslim marriage, saying it had saved theirs. A family from Indonesia asked him to interpret a dream. An older woman from Iraq begged him to contact Muslim scholars in her homeland and correct their misguided teaching.

After waiting for more than an hour to greet the scholars, Sohail Ansari, an information technology specialist originally from India, marveled, "I was born a Muslim, and these guys are so far ahead of us."

Encouraging Tolerance

Mr. Yusuf lives on a cul-de-sac in Danville, a Northern California suburb, in a house with a three-car garage. The living room is spread with Persian rugs; it is mostly bare of furniture. He held a dinner with guests in traditional Arab style — on the floor, while the smallest of his five sons curled up in the rugs and fell asleep. His wife, Liliana, tired from a day of home-schooling and driving the boys to karate lessons, passed around take-out curry. She converted to Islam after meeting Mr. Yusuf in college, to the chagrin of her Catholic Hispanic parents. The couple married outdoors, in a redwood grove.

Mr. Yusuf received the Arabic title of sheik from his teachers in Mauritania, in West Africa. There the honorific is usually given to old men with a deep knowledge of Islam who serve their communities as wise oracles, but Mr. Yusuf was only 28. His given name was Mark Hanson, and he was raised Greek Orthodox in a bohemian but affluent part of Marin County, just north of San Francisco.

He converted to Islam after a near-fatal car accident in high school sent him on an existential journey. He said that the simplicity of "no God but Allah" made far more sense to him than the Trinity, and he found the five daily prayers a constant call to awe about everything from the sun to his capillaries.

The American seminary was Mr. Yusuf's idea. His diagnosis of the problem with Islam today is that its followers lack "religious knowledge." Islam, like Judaism, is based in scripture and law that has been interpreted, reinterpreted and debated for centuries by scholars who inspired four schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Mr. Yusuf laments that many of the seminaries that once flourished in the Muslim world are now either gone or intellectually dead. Now, he said, the sharpest Muslim students go into technical fields like engineering, not religion.

He said he believed that if more Muslims were schooled in their faith's diverse intellectual streams and had a holistic understanding of their religion, they would not be so susceptible to the Osama bin Ladens who tell them that suicide bombers are martyrs.

"Where you don't have people who have strong intellectual capacity, you get demagoguery," he said.

Mr. Yusuf once was a source of the kind of zealous rhetoric he now denounces. He said in 1995 that Judaism was based on the belief that "God has this bias to this small little tribe in the middle of the desert," which makes it "a most racist religion." On Sept. 9, 2001, he said the United States "stands condemned" for invading Muslim lands.

He has since changed his tune — not for spin, he says, but on principle. "Our community has failed, and I include myself in that," he told an audience in a downtown theater in Elizabeth, N.J., this year. "When I started speaking in the early 90's, our discourse was not balanced.

"We were focused so often on what was negative about this country," he said. "We ended up alienating some people. I've said some things about other religions that I regret now. I think they were incorrect."

He added: "A tree grows. If you're staying the same, something is wrong. You're not alive."

An Enthusiastic Following

Mr. Yusuf named his school the Zaytuna Institute — Arabic for olive tree, and also the name of a renowned Islamic university in Tunisia. The site, adjacent to a busy boulevard in Hayward, Calif., is an unlikely oasis, the air scented by jasmine bushes and flowering vines.

Five times a day, starting around 5 a.m., a teacher or a student stands outside the prayer hall and warbles the call to prayer. In the mornings, few respond, but by evening, the hall is filled with the rustling of men and women dropping to their knees, divided by a wooden screen.

The prayer hall was once a church. There is also a yurt and a high backboard used as a target for archery, because the Prophet Muhammad recommended it as an athletic activity. (The backboard will soon come down to avoid alarming neighbors who might balk at seeing Muslims with bows and arrows).

On a sunny day, one student, Ousmane Bah, sat outside the yurt, washing the ink off a polished wooden slate on which he had written his lesson for the past week, which he had committed to memory. The lesson, written in Arabic poetry, was about what makes a fair trade. Near the yurt, BART trains sped by.

"The United States is the capital of modernity," Mr. Bah said, "and you have this very traditional Islam, which is 1,400 years old, being taught in this modern world."

Many American universities have Islamic studies departments, and a program at Hartford Seminary accredits Muslim chaplains. But there is no program in the United States like Zaytuna.

Hundreds of Muslims come to Zaytuna for evening and weekend classes on the Prophet Muhammad, the Koran and the Arabic language. The institute's full-time seminary program is in the pilot phase, with only six students. It is expected to double its enrollment next fall.

Besides Mr. Bah, there are two women — one a former software engineer, the other a former prenatal genetic counselor — and three men — a former jazz musician from Maryland, a motorcycle mechanic from Atlanta and a son of Bangladeshi immigrants in New York City who chose Zaytuna over the Ivy League.

"Sheik Hamza and Imam Zaid have grown up here after having studied abroad, and you can really connect with them," said the New Yorker, Ebadur Rahman, who is 19. "The scholars who come from abroad, they can't connect with the people. They're ignorant of life here."

Islamic studies experts say that what Mr. Yusuf and Mr. Shakir are teaching is traditional orthodox Islam, and that it is impossible to characterize their theology as either conservative or liberal. They encourage but do not require women in class to cover their heads. They have hired a female scholar, who teaches only women. Last year, Mr. Shakir published a rebuttal to a group of progressive American Muslims who argue that Islamic law allows women to lead men in prayer.

Mr. Yusuf says he has become too busy to teach regularly at his own school. He writes books, translates Arabic poetry, records CD's, tapes his television show. He meets with rabbis, ministers and the Dalai Lama, and travels annually to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Mr. Yusuf's fame grew after he was invited to the White House nine days after the Sept. 11 attacks, making him the only Muslim leader along with five other religious leaders who were called to meet with President Bush. He suggested that Mr. Bush change the name of the military's impending operation in Afghanistan, "Infinite Justice," because it would offend Muslims, who believe the only source of infinite justice is God. Mr. Bush responded by changing the operation's name to "Operation Enduring Freedom," and in the news media Mr. Yusuf gained a title other than sheik: "adviser to the president."

Mr. Yusuf, however, said that Mr. Bush since then "hasn't taken any of my advice."

Persuasion Over Violence

Three years ago, Mr. Yusuf invited Mr. Shakir to teach at Zaytuna as a scholar in residence. Mr. Shakir had recently returned from his second stint of studying Islam abroad — a total of seven years in Syria and Morocco.

One recent Sunday afternoon, Mr. Shakir had 50 students in his Zaytuna class on marriage and family. The women brought their babies and their knitting, and everyone munched on homemade cookies brought for a cookie-baking contest.

"It's going to be hard to beat this oatmeal raisin," Mr. Shakir said between swigs of organic milk.

The real topic at hand was whether polygamy, which is permitted in Islam, is appropriate in the modern context. Mr. Shakir mediated a heated debate between the men and women who sparred across the wooden divider that separated them.

One man said that having more than one wife was good because some women are so "career orientated" that "they don't want to be cleaning up all the time behind the man." At that, one woman shouted out, "Get a maid!" and everyone dissolved in laughter.

Mr. Shakir told the students that Islam allows polygamy because it was a "practical" and "compassionate" solution in some cases, as when women are widowed in war. But in the modern context, he said, "a lot of harm ensues."

Mr. Shakir said afterward that he still had trouble believing how a boy from the projects could have become an Islamic scholar with students who are willing to move across the country to study with him.

He and his wife, Saliha, became Muslims in the Air Force. He had joined the military as a teenager in the lull after Vietnam because his mother had died and he had no means. His name was Ricky Mitchell, and his mother had raised him and his siblings in housing projects in Georgia — where he remembers going to his grandparents' farm and picking cotton — and in New Britain, Conn.

A Goal for America

While leading a mosque in New Haven in 1992, Mr. Shakir wrote a pamphlet that cautioned Muslims not to be co-opted by American politics. He wrote, "Islam presents an absolutist political agenda, or one which doesn't lend itself to compromise, nor to coalition building."

While he did not denounce Muslims who take part in politics, he pointed out the effectiveness of "extrasystemic political action" — like the "armed struggle" that brought about the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan. A copy of the pamphlet was found in the apartment of a suspect in the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993. Mr. Shakir says he was questioned by the F.B.I., but had no link to the man, and that was the end of it.

While studying in Syria a few years later, he visited Hama, a city that had tried to revolt against the Syrian ruler, Hafez al-Assad. Mr. Shakir said he saw mass graves and bulldozed neighborhoods, and talked with widows of those killed. He gave up on the idea of armed struggle, he said, "just seeing the reality of where revolution can end."

Asked now about his past, he said, "To be perfectly honest, I don't regret anything I've done or said."

He added, "I had to go through that stage to become the person that I am, and I'm not willing to negate my past."

He said he still hoped that one day the United States would be a Muslim country ruled by Islamic law, "not by violent means, but by persuasion."

"Every Muslim who is honest would say, I would like to see America become a Muslim country," he said. "I think it would help people, and if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be a Muslim. Because Islam helped me as a person, and it's helped a lot of people in my community."

    U.S. Muslim Clerics Seek a Modern Middle Ground, NYT, 18.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/us/18imams.html?hp&ex=1150689600&en=0ea93e177a19a562&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Fall River Journal

Planning to Celebrate, City Turns to Mourning

June 17, 2006
The New York Times
By KATIE ZEZIMA

FALL RIVER, Mass., June 16 — Spring is the season of religious feasts in this largely Portuguese city, none more anticipated than the Feast of the Holy Spirit.

For generations, members of a local social club have marched through the streets in traditional embroidered skirts and tops to a celebration where everyone feasted on the soup of the Holy Spirit, made with potatoes, kale and meats.

This year, however, the celebration, set for Saturday, was canceled after four members of the club, the Our Lady of Light Society, were killed in a fire there Wednesday night during a prayer service. The fire started when flames from a candle ignited paper decorations. Ten members of the club and two firefighters were injured, officials said.

The fire has shaken this close community focused on family and faith.

"I think most people are still in shock," said Tina Revelo, 39, who owns Tina's Hair Salon on Pleasant Street, between the club and the Espirito Santo Church, where members worshiped. "I can't understand because it's been there for so long, and so many people with such faith have belonged their whole lives."

Ms. Revelo's mother worked in a textile mill with Emily Carvalho, 80, who died in the club's kitchen while preparing food for the celebration.

"She was tired, but excited to cook and get everything ready for the feast," Ms. Revelo said.

The Revelo and Carvalho families, like many others here, trace their roots to the island of São Miguel in the Azores, a Portuguese island chain about 1,000 miles west of Lisbon. Many came to work in this city's textile mills or fish for cod and scallops off the South Coast. More than half of the city's 91,000 residents are of Azorean heritage, and many signs are in both English and Portuguese.

"These people are the salt of the Earth, hard-working and proud of their culture and religion," said Mayor Ed Lambert. "It's a very tightly knit community."

That, many said, is making the deaths all the more painful.

"Everywhere you go, you find a relative," said Donald Raposa, whose mother, Isabella, 67, died in the fire, along with a 31-year-old woman and a fourth person officials have not identified. Mr. Raposa said his father escaped. Mrs. Raposa spent the day of the fire shopping for clothes for a trip back to São Miguel, her first in 20 years. The fire started at an altar containing a crown, the symbol of the Holy Ghost, which was surrounded by tall votive candles, paper flowers, lanterns and other decorations, fire officials and club members said. Members tried to put the fire out with a fire extinguisher and water, but the paper made the flames spread quickly. The 30 or so people present rushed out windows.

City officials had not inspected the building because records listed it as a residential structure that did not require inspection. On two building permit applications filed with the city, owners classified the building as a residential, three-family structure. The building, which also has two apartments, is owned by the Our Lady of Light Society. The head of the board could not be reached.

The city's building inspector, Joseph Bizko, said neither the application nor the ownership raised questions about the building's classification. The club did not have a liquor license, which would have automatically made it require inspection. The city is asking residents to report social clubs operating in residential neighborhoods, and the state fire marshal plans to work with local fire departments to ensure that clubs are up to code.

At a press conference on Thursday, the Bristol County district attorney, Paul Walsh, said his office was investigating whether the building's owners should be charged.

Residents are taking solace in the Catholic Church.

"It's a pious community, a faith-filled community, and that's what they were gathered for," said the Rev. James Ferry of Espirito Santo, where hundreds of people gathered Friday night for a Mass of remembrance and healing. "I really think it's going to take them a little time."

Frank P. Baptista, the host of a local Portuguese radio show, said residents called in for six hours Thursday to talk about the fire.

"They were relatives, friends, they all came from the same island," Mr. Baptista said. "There was that religious bond that was so tight. If any good comes from this, it is that people will be more careful."

Connie Costa, 59, a club member, said members were making food and helping families with arrangements. "I'm sad, but my faith in God is not shaken," she said. "We're people, and we make mistakes."

    Planning to Celebrate, City Turns to Mourning, NYT, 17.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/us/17fallriver.html

Episcopal church struggles with gay issues

Fri Jun 16, 2006 9:51 PM ET
Reuters
By Michael Conlon

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) - A key committee trying to craft the U.S. Episcopal Church's response to the anger and alienation caused by the consecration of an openly gay bishop wrestled with disagreements on Friday over how to apologize and what to promise for the future.

"I do not regret the decision we made," said committee co-chairman the Rev. Frank Wade, referring to the church's consecration three years ago of Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first bishop known to be in an openly gay relationship in more than 450 years of Anglican church history.

Another member of the panel said the group should state outright it "regrets the offenses caused" and offer an apology to the 77 million-member Anglican Communion, as the worldwide church is called, as well as promise not to consecrate more bishops who are "living in a same-sex union."

Robinson's elevation prompted some U.S. churches to affiliate themselves with a network of fast-growing Anglican churches in Africa, where homosexuality is largely taboo.

The special committee is meeting at the U.S. church's triennial convention. Its assignment is to come up with a resolution or a package of resolutions that the convention can vote on before adjourning next week.

The 2.3 million-member U.S. branch of the Anglican Communion is under pressure to respond to the Windsor Report, a paper issued at the behest of the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, which demanded the U.S. church apologize for the Robinson elevation, not do any more like it and make it plain that it is against the blessing of same-sex unions.

At the end of Friday's meeting, the committee decided to break into three smaller groups to consider the issues, and try to come up with agreed-upon language sometime on Saturday. The church leadership had hoped to have the gay-related issue disposed of before Sunday when the church elects a new presiding bishop, but it was not clear if that deadline could be met.

The panel is working with three principal resolutions crafted by a commission formed by the church leadership earlier this year. Some committee members were on that commission.

The resolutions include an admonishment that church congregations use "very considerable caution" in elevating gays to bishop; that clergy not authorize public blessings of same-sex unions until the broader church agrees on a policy; and that the entire convention reiterate a statement the Episcopal bishops made last year saying they regretted the pain the Robinson consecration caused.

"We definitely have to make a choice," said member Michael Howell, adding that if the panel did not put forth a statement that expressed regret many would find the response inadequate.

Wade, the retired rector of St. Alban's in Washington, said the committee needed to find a middle ground that reflected both the church's desire for autonomy yet recognized its interdependence with the broader Anglican community.

    Episcopal church struggles with gay issues, R, 16.6.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-06-17T015134Z_01_N16180294_RTRUKOC_0_US-RELIGION-EPISCOPALS.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L3-U.S.+NewsNews-3

A Changing Mass for U.S. Catholics

June 16, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and CINDY CHANG

Roman Catholic bishops in the United States voted yesterday to change the wording of many of the prayers and blessings that Catholics have recited at daily Mass for more than 35 years, yielding to Vatican pressure for an English translation that is closer to the original Latin.

The bishops, meeting in Los Angeles, voted 173 to 29 to accept many of the changes to the Mass, a pivotal point in a 10-year struggle that many English-speaking Catholics had dubbed "the liturgy wars."

But the bishops made substantial changes to the text that the Vatican wanted, and those changes could still be rejected by Vatican officials.

Some of the changes they did adopt are minor, but in other cases Catholics will have to learn longer and more awkward versions of familiar prayers. For example, instead of saying, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you," in the prayer before Communion, they will say, "Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof."

The reason for the change is a Vatican directive issued in 2001 under Pope John Paul II that demanded closer adherence to the Latin text. But some bishops in the English-speaking world were indignant at what they saw as a Vatican move to curtail the autonomy of each nation's bishops to translate liturgical texts according to local tastes and needs.

The new translation is likely to please those traditionalists who longed for an English version more faithful to the Latin in use before the Second Vatican Council in the 1960's. But it may upset Catholics who have committed the current prayer book to heart and to memory and who take comfort in its more conversational cadences.

"This translation will affect the worship life of every Catholic in the United States and beyond," said Bishop Donald W. Trautman of Erie, Pa., chairman of the bishops Committee on the Liturgy and a vocal critic of the Vatican's translation who insisted on amending it.

The translation must go to the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI for final approval. It could still take as much as two years until the new text is published and put into use in American churches, Bishop Trautman said in an interview.

Some Catholics welcomed the changes. Leon Suprenant, president of Catholics United for the Faith, a conservative group in Steubenville, Ohio, said, "When the Mass was first celebrated in English shortly after Vatican II, some of the translations took liberties with the original, and we lost some of the beauty and dignity of the original."

Mr. Suprenant said, "Certainly we're in favor of the new translation, which is a more faithful literal translation of the Latin, and we are a Latin rite church."

The bishops rejected about 60 of the changes proposed by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy, the panel of bishops from 11 English-speaking countries that prepared the translation. For instance, the committee wanted to change the phrase in the Nicene Creed "one in being with the Father" to "consubstantial with the Father."

But the bishops kept the current version, noting, " 'Consubstantial' is a theological expression requiring explanation for many."

The Rev. Lawrence J. Madden, director of the Georgetown Center for Liturgy in Washington, said: "In hewing to the Latin more closely, it's making some of the English awkward. It isn't the English we speak. It's becoming more sacred English, rather than vernacular English."

Father Madden said, "That's one of the reasons why a large number of the bishops up to this point have been opposed to the translation, because they're afraid this is going to distance the liturgy from the people."

Other changes were easier for the bishops to accept. The familiar exchange of greetings between the priest and congregation: "The Lord be with you/And also with you," will be replaced by "The Lord be with you/And with your spirit." This version is already used in Spanish-language Masses, and many others.

The changes apply only to the "Order of Mass," which includes the prayers and blessings recited at every service — not the scripture readings and prayers that are recited only during feast days and holidays.

American bishops went into the meeting in Los Angeles under pressure to put an end to the controversy. Bishops in Australia, Scotland, England and Wales had already voted to accept the Vatican-backed translation.

And just last month, Cardinal Francis Arinze, head of the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship, sent a letter to the president of the U.S. bishops' conference, Bishop William S. Skylstad of Spokane, Wash., saying the American church ultimately must accept the changes.

"It is not acceptable to maintain that people have become accustomed to a certain translation for the past 30 or 40 years, and therefore that it is pastorally advisable to make no changes," Cardinal Arinze wrote.

The Vatican directive in 2001, known in Latin as Liturgiam authenticam, was a turning point in the process. It said that in any translation, "great caution is to be taken to avoid a wording or style that the Catholic faithful would confuse with the manner of speech of non-Catholic ecclesial communities or other religions."

The burden of introducing the new translation to parishioners will fall on the priests, said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a former editor of the Jesuit magazine America, who has followed the debate.

"The priests are going to be the ones on the firing line who will have to explain this, and most of them don't see any advantage in this new translation," Father Reese said. "They're going to have to defend something they don't even like."

The Rev. Robert J. Silva, president of the National Federation of Priests Councils, said of the priests he represents: "We're not real anxious to have changes. There's real concern because a lot of us are saying, Is this really a theological and Biblical issue? Is it really to upgrade the language, or is this something that's a little more ideological?"

Father Silva said, "It's probably a little of both."

Laurie Goodstein reported from New York for this article, and Cindy Chang from Los Angeles.

    A Changing Mass for U.S. Catholics, NYT, 16.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/16/us/16mass.html?hp&ex=1150516800&en=6ba87367519399e2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

As old city churches close, fixtures and sacred artifacts disperse

Updated 6/11/2006 1:57 PM ET
USA Today

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — The altar was old. It was ornate. And it was on the gambling floor of the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas.

James Lang was startled when he saw it there. Lang, vicar of parishes for the Roman Catholic diocese in Syracuse, had a chat with the manager about desecration. The altar eventually was removed.

"They thought it looked cool," Lang remembers.

It also looked like part of a growing phenomenon: Religious artifacts are migrating as America's shifting population leaves empty churches across the Midwest and Northeast. This March, New York City's archdiocese recommended shutting 31 metro parishes, and Boston has closed almost 60 in three years.

So, chalices appear in antique shop windows. A confessional turns up in an Italian cafe. A stained-glass window of St. Patrick lands in a pub. And don't even start with eBay.

People who deal in such artifacts say interest in them is growing.

And while some are troubled by secular re-uses of religious items, they're encouraged about a different set of collectors: New churches in booming suburbs and in the South and West that are reaching for the relics of an older generation.

From 1952 to 2000, hundreds of thousands of Catholics left the inner cities, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. Philadelphia, for example, lost 198,000, but nearby Bucks County picked up 234,000. Detroit, Baltimore and Boston saw similar urban-suburban shifts.

Meanwhile, the South and West boomed. Los Angeles County added 3.4 million Catholics, and the counties that are home to Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Miami and San Antonio grew by more than 400,000 each.

In Lubbock, Texas, Holy Spirit parish is building a new church for a congregation that's grown from 30 families to about 700 in seven years. Its pastor, the Rev. Eugene Driscoll, grew up in Philadelphia, where his old parish closed in 2004. He asked the diocese if he could rescue some pieces of his past. Now, among other items, a statue of Our Lady of Fatima from his old school stands in his Texas prayer garden.

Every month, a downtown Philadelphia warehouse is unlocked to reveal about 2,000 items from closed area churches. Those in the religious community can browse tables of marble statues, altar pieces, candlesticks and tabernacles, or thumb through racks of vestments.

"We try to have it as tastefully arranged as possible," says Ed Rafferty, who handles the warehouse for the diocese. Private individuals are not allowed.

Some dioceses use dealers to help place objects in other religious locations. Some don't specify where items should go and let the dealers decide.

"We're an equal-opportunity seller," says Stuart Grannen, owner of the Chicago-based Architectural Artifacts, whose website boasts religious artifacts as its newest category. Recently listed were a carved oak bench from a Minneapolis church for $12,000 and a marble Ten Commandments from a Milwaukee synagogue for $3,800.

The website of Georgia-based King Richard's Religious Artifacts offers everything from antique crucifixes to gold-plated holy water sprinklers. Owner Rick Lair says he's worked with dozens of churches in upstate New York.

An altar from a downsizing Buffalo convent found its way to Our Lady of Hope, a church in northern Virginia that opened in January. Through architects and dealers, Rev. William Saunders decorated with items from churches as far away as San Francisco, including windows from a German-built church in Elmira, N.Y. His hand-carved marble altar came from the Philadelphia warehouse, for just $500.

"We were the first to do this in our diocese," Saunders says. "Now others are starting."

Interest in church items has even led to a new but unofficial order of priests devoted to preservation, the Society of St. John Cantius in Chicago.

"We're trying to bring back beautiful things," said the Rev. Jim Isaacson, noting that the order was formed after many items from closed area churches were simply discarded.

Some dioceses destroy items if another church won't take them so they don't fall into private hands.

"We don't want to find an altar railing in a bar," says Sister Regina Murphy, director of research and planning for the Buffalo diocese. "Or a confessional in a restaurant. People are kind of aghast at that. So we dismantle it completely."

The Rev. Pat Butler wishes there were a national clearinghouse for religious artifacts. The Albany-area priest worries about how much is being lost or desecrated.

He recalled once visiting a Missouri home furnished with an altar and church candlesticks bought at an auction. The owner explained how she'd also wanted a certain gold box for her jewelry.

"I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up," Butler says. He asked her to describe it. The box was a tabernacle, the enclosure for concecrated hosts, often kept at the center of the altar.

Though that troubled him, Butler encourages reuse by churches. He once received a windfall himself.

Some 150 years ago, Irish immigrants built Gothic-spired St. Joseph's Church in downtown Albany, but over time it declined and was was finally abandoned and sold for $1. Surrounded by rowhouses, it is now in the hands of the Historic Albany Foundation.

"It's like Pompeii. It's like life just stopped," says the foundation's executive director, Susan Holland, leading the way through the empty rooms where red vestments of altar boys still hang in a closet and a booklet of Christmas carols, published in 1960, gathers dust.

And yet, much has changed in the church. In worship space that seated 1,000-plus, pews have been ripped up and piled to the side. The walnut confessional was taken out with a chainsaw.

A few years ago, Butler — helping design his new church, Christ the King, in suburban Guilderland — expressed interest in St. Joseph's fixtures after learning that the diocese couldn't afford to remove them.

Now, some former parishioners of St. Joseph's who worship at Christ the King notice familiar details from the old downtown church, including marble statues, Gothic arched doors and a 1913 wooden pulpit.

"They're like our family pictures," Butler said. "When you move, you take the pictures off the wall and move to the next place."

An appraisal of the items Butler salvaged and worked into the design came to $900,000. And he got them all for free.

    As old city churches close, fixtures and sacred artifacts disperse, UT, 11.6.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-11-churchartifacts_x.htm

Amid Closings, Preparing to Bid a Chelsea Church Adieu

June 5, 2006
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS

Marie-Grace Alizata Traore had two wishes when she traded the volatility of the Ivory Coast for the prospect of a quiet life in Jersey City three years ago: a stable job and a Roman Catholic church where she could worship in French.

Finding work was fairly easy; Ms. Traore, 37, became a home health aide within a few months of leaving West Africa. But finding a church that offered Mass in her native tongue was not as simple.

A year went by before a co-worker told Ms. Traore about the Church of St. Vincent de Paul in Chelsea, which has been the religious center for French speakers in the New York area since 1857.

"I used to have to go to English Mass," Ms. Traore said yesterday, speaking in French, "but I couldn't understand what the priest was saying, so I just stopped going to church.

"But this place here," she continued, her arms outstretched, her palms facing the domed roof at St. Vincent de Paul's, "it's a lot more than just a church to me. This is my home in this country."

Though it is the only church in New York City that offers Mass in French (some churches that cater to Haitians mix Creole and French during religious services), St. Vincent de Paul's may be drawing its last breaths.

On March 28, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York announced plans to close 31 parishes in the metropolitan region — mostly in Manhattan and the Bronx — as well as to build several new church buildings north of New York City, where many Catholics have moved. St. Vincent de Paul is on the list of closings.

The Rev. Gerard E. Murray, the French-speaking pastor at St. Vincent de Paul's, said that Sunday's French Mass drew 200 people at best, most of them African immigrants. Only on rare occasions, like religious feasts or the monthly family Mass organized by the Lycée Français, a private school on the Upper East Side, is the church filled to capacity.

"It's sad to lose a parish," Father Murray said, "but the archdiocese has a shortage of priests and we have parishes that have been greatly reduced, so in that case, it makes sense to have fewer parishioners served by fewer parishes."

A final decision from the archdiocese is expected in the next few weeks. If St. Vincent de Paul closes, there will still be a French Mass in the city, Father Murray said, though he does not know where it would be held.

The Church of St. Vincent de Paul is an elegant Greek Revival building on West 23rd Street, in the heart of a thriving neighborhood. It is big enough to accommodate 400 people, on wooden pews that are surrounded by 10 stained-glass windows, each depicting a Biblical scene. A small chapel devoted to St. Thérèse sits to the left of the main entrance and honors the French soldiers who died in foreign wars past.

Construction of the church began in 1841 with funds gathered by the French community here and abroad. Now, the Sunday morning French service draws parishioners from 65 nations: from the Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Togo and dozens of other countries in Africa, to Belgium, Switzerland, Lebanon and France.

"There are many, many different countries that pray together each Sunday," said Isabelle Gibson, a catechism teacher at the Lycée Français. "We have a huge community to draw upon, and even though it's difficult to attract everybody, there's great potential and we were just beginning to tap it when we heard that our church might close."

Yesterday, the church was full during French Mass (it also holds one in English), as many people showed up to celebrate the feast of Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles. Then, on the sidewalk outside, dozens of parishioners gathered after the service to plead for the survival of their parish. The protest took on a celebratory air when a man began to bang on drums and a group of African women broke out in a cheerful hymn.

If the parish closes, the archdiocese plans to demolish the church and build a chapel in its place, inside a building that would rise on the church's lot, Father Murray said.

    Amid Closings, Preparing to Bid a Chelsea Church Adieu, NYT, 5.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/nyregion/05vincent.html

Muslim congressional aides taking stand

Posted 6/2/2006 10:59 PM ET
AP
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — At midday on Fridays, Muslims gather to pray in a basement room of the U.S. Capitol. Kneeling on sheets they've spread over the floor and facing east toward Mecca, they are members of the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association, about two dozen congressional aides who are part of a small but growing minority in America and in the halls of government.

At first just a prayer group, later a Muslim support group, the association is now looking outward to change what many see as woeful ignorance about Islam on Capitol Hill and beyond, said Jameel Aalim-Johnson, a black Muslim and chief of staff for Democratic Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York.

Some 100 non-Muslim congressional colleagues attended an association luncheon and the showing of part of a documentary on Islam in America. Visiting Imams from the Middle East recently met with association members.

The congressional chaplain's office consulted them about offering classes on Islam on Capitol Hill, said association member Nayyera Haq, daughter of Pakistani immigrants and spokeswoman for Rep. John Salazar, D-Colo.

"We're excited and hopeful," Haq said of the group's new mission. "It's nice to be Muslim and feel hopeful about the future."

That's not always easy to do.

Though there's no official count, the association says the number of congressional staffers who identify themselves as Muslim is little more than 20 out of some 10,000 employees at the Capitol complex.

There also is a smattering of Muslims at other Washington agencies, and some departments have consulted American Muslims for help with the counterterror war. Muslims have served as state legislators, but there is no member of Congress who identifies himself as a Muslim, said Corey Saylor, government affairs director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Understanding of Islam — and acceptance of American Muslims — has sometimes seemed as lacking among national leaders as it has elsewhere in the land.

One lawmaker suggested bombing Muslim holy sites. Another equated an Arab country with the devil. Others have been given to lumping Muslims and Arabs together as terrorists.

Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado suggested in a radio interview last summer that the U.S. "could take out" Islamic holy sites such as Mecca as retribution if there ever is a terrorist nuclear attack on America. He later said his comments were taken out of context, but refused to apologize.

And New Jersey Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg opposed the controversial deal that would have allowed Dubai Ports World to buy commercial port operations in several American cities. "Don't let them tell you that it's just a transfer of title," Lautenberg told a rally in his state. "We wouldn't transfer the title to the devil and we're not going to transfer it to Dubai."

At times like that, says Haq, "You wonder: What am I doing here, working for an institution that insists on viewing me as an outsider?"

In fact, getting Americans to think of Islam as a U.S. rather than foreign religion is a big part of the challenge, said John Voll, a Georgetown University professor of Islamic history and expert on Muslim-Christian relations.

The number of American Muslims is usually estimated at 6 million to 7 million, some 2% of the population.

It's believed roughly 40% are black, mostly descendants of slaves, and 60% immigrants and offspring from dozens of nations, said Voll.

Aalim-Johnson said the majority of the congressional group is Indo-Pakistani, with others whose backgrounds are Turkish, Iranian and African American.

"For a lot of Muslims who are first generation such as myself, when our parents immigrated here, they were working hard at trying to make a better life for their kids," not focused on politics, said Amina Masood, of Pakistani descent and legislative assistant to Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y.

"Now our generation is grown and realizing we are American ... part of this community and we need to be more active," she said. "I'm a staffer, but I'm also a Muslim and I care about Muslim issues ... things that affect us and that we have to take notice of and be a part of it."

Gaining political foothold "doesn't happen overnight," said Assad R. Akhter, legislative assistant to Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J.

In that, Muslims aren't so different from other groups "who suffered discrimination, isolation and difficulties moving into American politics," said Voll. "You have to be here and pay your dues."

Of a dozen congressional staff organizations, the Muslim group is the only one at the moment that centers on religion. But other religious groups use Capitol meeting space with sponsorship of a member of Congress.

    Muslim congressional aides taking stand, UT, 2.6.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-06-02-capitol-muslims_x.htm