History > 2007 > USA > Faith, sects (II)

Hillary Rodham Clinton

says she was raised "in a praying family."

Photograph: Charles Ommanney/Getty Images

Faith Intertwines With Political Life for Clinton

NYT        7.7.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/07/us/politics/07clinton.html

Presidential Candidates' Religions

July 30, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:30 a.m. ET
The New York Times

The Associated Press asked the 2008 presidential candidates what religion they practice, whether they are a member of a particular church, and how often they attend services.

Like the majority of Americans, all the candidates are Christians. Seven are Roman Catholic, four are Baptist, two are Methodist, one is Episcopalian, one is Presbyterian, one is Mormon, and one describes himself simply as Christian.

Their answers:

DEMOCRATS:

Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden: Roman Catholic New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton: Methodist

Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd: Catholic

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards: Methodist

Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich: Catholic

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama: Christian

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson: Catholic

REPUBLICANS:

Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback: Catholic

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani: Catholic

California Rep. Duncan Hunter: Baptist

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee: Southern Baptist

Arizona Sen. John McCain: Episcopalian

Texas Rep. Ron Paul: Baptist

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney: Mormon

Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo: Presbyterian

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson: Southern Baptist

Former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson: Catholic

    Presidential Candidates' Religions, NYT, 30.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Politics-Religion-Glance.html

Religion Looms Large Over 2008 Race

July 30, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:25 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- When George Romney ran for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, his Mormon heritage was mostly a footnote. It was scarcely mentioned in news accounts of the day. But for son Mitt Romney, the family religion presents a formidable political hurdle.

The younger Romney repeatedly is called on to defend his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its teachings, encountering skepticism particularly from Christian conservatives, a key component of the GOP base.

''I believe that there are some pundits out there that are hoping I'll distance myself from my church so that'll help me politically. And that's not going to happen,'' Romney asserts.

Religion has not played so prominent a role in a U.S. national election since 1960, when John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic to be elected president.

And it's not only Romney under scrutiny. All the Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls have been grilled on their religious beliefs. Most seem eager to talk publicly about their faith as they actively court religious voters.

Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton emphasizes her Methodist upbringing and says her faith helped her repair her marriage.

Chief rival Sen. Barack Obama frequently uses the language of religion and proclaims a ''personal relationship'' with Jesus Christ. The Illinois Democrat -- whose middle name is ''Hussein'' -- scoffs at suggestions of Muslim leanings because he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia. He is a member of the United Church of Christ.

In the most recent Democratic debate, a pastor in a YouTube video asked Democrat John Edwards to defend his use of religion to deny gay marriage. The former North Carolina senator -- a Methodist -- talked about his faith and his ''enormous conflict'' over the issue

Republican Sen. John McCain, an Episcopalian, says, ''I do believe that we are unique and that God loves us.'' Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, emphasizes his belief that ''God created the heavens and the earth. To me, it's pretty simple.''

Unlike the others, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a divorced Roman Catholic who favors abortion rights, sidesteps such questions, claiming one's relationship with God is a private matter. But he attended Catholic schools and at one point considered being a priest.

Clearly, the religious issue is the most problematic for Romney. Polls suggest he faces continued misgivings over his faith. An ABC News-Washington Post poll conducted July 18-21 showed that 32 percent of those who said they leaned Republican described themselves as ''uncomfortable'' with the idea of a Mormon president.

An earlier poll by the Pew Research Center said 30 percent of respondents said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate that was Mormon. The negative sentiment rose to 46 percent for Muslim candidates and to 63 percent for a candidate who ''doesn't believe in God.''

Pollster Andrew Kohut, Pew's director, said that between the late 1960s, when Romney's father ran, and now there has been ''one of the great transformations of our era. There is more mixing of religion and politics than there was then. As a consequence, people scrutinize Mormonism -- or any other religion -- more closely than back then.''

He cites the growing influence of the Christian right, the political activism of tele-evangelists and a trend that has seen a steady migration of Christian conservatives into the GOP fold, particularly in the South.

''When the South changed, it brought the evangelicals with it,'' Kohut said.

The links between religion and governance intensified with the presidency of George W. Bush, said Joan Konner, former dean of the Columbia Journalism School. ''He brought it up when he ran for office and he said his favorite philosopher, in answer to a question in a debate, was Jesus.

''And then he followed up on that by faith-based public funding and various other actions that started to erode what Americans took for granted as the separation between church and state,'' said Konner, who has studied the interaction between religion and politics and is the author of ''The Atheist's Bible.''

George W. Romney was a politically moderate former governor of Michigan and auto-industry executive when he sought the 1968 GOP presidential nomination. Scant mention was made of his Mormonism in news accounts at the time and it appeared to be a non-issue in the race.

Polls showed him as the front-runner until he stumbled by complaining to an interviewer that when he had visited Vietnam, he had been ''brainwashed'' by military briefers there into supporting the war. That remark generated enough controversy to cost him the nomination.

Some historians suggest more attention might have been paid to Romney's Mormonism if he hadn't torpedoed his own candidacy so early. And in those days, many Christian conservatives were southern Democrats and less interested in GOP primary contests.

Mitt Romney supporters point to Kennedy, who overcame questions about his religion to become the first Catholic elected president. He did that, in part, by speaking before Protestant clergymen in Houston in 1960 to dispel fears that, as a Catholic president, he would be subject to direction from the pope.

Can Romney neutralize the religion issue the same way Kennedy did -- by giving a major speech explaining the role his Mormon faith plays in his political life?

In an interview in Iowa with The Associated Press, Romney said he's considering dealing with the issue in a comprehensive manner, although ''it's probably too early for something like that.''

''At some point it's more likely than not, but we'll see how things develop,'' Romney said.

Kennedy had one advantage that Romney doesn't. When he ran, Catholics made up roughly 28 percent of the U.S. population. Although one of the fastest growing faiths in the world, Mormons represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population with 5.5 million members across the country.

''The differences between Kennedy and Romney are in the nose count,'' said political historian Stephen Hess. ''The religion issue may have hurt Kennedy, but it sure helped him at the same time'' as Catholics threw their support behind him.

''There is no way that capturing the Mormon vote is going to win Romney anything,'' Hess said.

    Religion Looms Large Over 2008 Race, NYT, 30.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Politics-and-Religion.html

Editorial

A Settlement in Los Angeles

July 17, 2007
The New York Times

In announcing a $660 million settlement for more than 500 victims of sexual abuse by clergy members, Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles tried to soothe the turbulent waters with conciliatory oil. “Once again, I apologize to anyone who has been offended, to anyone who has been abused,” he said.

It is up to the survivors to judge what those words are worth, but it helps to know the context in which they were spoken. They came just before the first trial would have started, at which Cardinal Mahony would have been required to testify. They followed four years of stonewalling and legalistic warfare by the archdiocese, the nation’s largest, that needlessly delayed this outcome and prolonged the suffering of hundreds of plaintiffs. And they came, of course, far too late for the children and adults whose innocence and trust were violated by priests.

Facing two avenues of public confession — apologizing before cameras or testifying about what he did or did not do about predatory priests — Cardinal Mahony took the gentler path. Facing the possibility of jury awards, and the exhumation and examination of evil acts, the archdiocese bought an expensive blanket of silence and financial closure.

The latest payment — millions of it from insurance companies, religious orders whose members were abusers and other sources — leaves the archdiocese free to move on, its leadership untouched and its parishes and schools unaffected. Adding in previous settlements, the archdiocese will end up giving more than three-quarters of $1 billion to the people on whom its priests preyed. The Catholic Church in the United States has paid more than $2 billion to survivors and their families — so far.

Those victims will never be made whole. The Los Angeles survivors will have about $1.3 million each, for treatment and therapy. They have the consolation of public vindication, the acknowledgment by the cardinal himself that a “terrible sin and crime” was inflicted upon them. And many have avoided reliving their anguish at trial.

But many also remain dissatisfied that the full truth about that sin, how it was abetted and tolerated by church leaders, may never be revealed. The settlement calls for the archdiocese to turn over internal files on abuse cases to a retired judge, who will decide whether and how to make them public. Plaintiffs’ lawyers say they expect still more struggling as the diocese fights to keep incriminating documents under wraps.

Three years after the Catholic bishops resolved in Dallas to set their house in order, the spirit of openness, humility and reconciliation from that historic meeting has failed to take root. Cardinal Mahony, like many of his counterparts, has avoided having to square his words with his deeds in open court. The money may bring some comfort to the church’s surviving victims, but their hunger for the full truth and accountability has yet to be satisfied.

    A Settlement in Los Angeles, NYT, 17.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/opinion/17tue1.html

LA Cardinal Apologizes to Abuse Victims

July 16, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:08 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- After a whirlwind weekend, the negotiations that produced a landmark $660 million settlement between the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles and more than 500 alleged victims of clergy abuse are moving from the cathedral to the courthouse.

Attorneys from both sides, as well as Cardinal Roger Mahony, are expected in court Monday to enter a formal settlement agreement with Judge Haley Fromholtz. The deal marks the end of more than five years of negotiations and is by far the largest payout by any diocese since the clergy abuse scandal emerged in Boston in 2002.

Mahony, leader of the nation's largest archdiocese, apologized Sunday to the hundreds of clergy sex abuse victims who will receive a share of the settlement.

''There really is no way to go back and give them that innocence that was taken from them. The one thing I wish I could give the victims ... I cannot,'' he said.

''Once again, I apologize to anyone who has been offended, who has been abused. It should not have happened and should not ever happen again.''

Mahony said he has met with dozens of victims of clergy abuse in the past 14 months and those meetings helped him understand the importance of a quick resolution to what he called a ''terrible sin and crime.''

The cardinal said the settlement will not have an impact on the archdiocese's core ministry, but said the church will have to sell buildings, use some of its invested funds, and borrow money. He said the archdiocese will not sell any parish properties or parish schools.

''We gather today because this long journey has now come to an end and a new chapter of that journey is beginning,'' Mahony told reporters.

The settlement also calls for the release of priests' confidential personnel files after review by a judge.

''I think for those of us who have been involved in this for more than five years, it's a huge relief,'' said Michael Hennigan, archdiocese attorney. ''But it's a disappointment, too, that we didn't get it done much earlier than this.''

Parishioners reacted with a mix of disappointment and relief.

Vivian Viscarra, 50, who attends Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels three times a month, said the victims deserve the payout even though it could hurt the church's ability to deliver important services. The amount would average a little more than $1.3 million per plaintiff, although individual payouts will vary according to the severity and duration of the abuse.

''I am disappointed,'' Viscarra said. ''And it's making me reevaluate my views of whether people in the ministry should be married. People do have needs.''

The deal settles all 508 cases that remained against the archdiocese, which also paid $60 million in December to settle 45 cases that weren't covered by sexual abuse insurance.

The archdiocese will pay $250 million, insurance carriers will pay a combined $227 million and several religious orders will chip in $60 million. The remaining $123 million will come from litigation with religious orders that chose not to participate in the deal, with the archdiocese guaranteeing resolution of those 80 to 100 cases within five years, Hennigan said. The archdiocese is released from liability in those claims, said Tod Tamberg, church spokesman.

Plaintiffs' attorneys can expect to receive up to 40 percent of the settlement money -- or $264 million -- for their work.

The settlements push the total amount paid out by the U.S. church since 1950 to more than $2 billion, with about a quarter of that coming from the Los Angeles archdiocese. A judge must sign off on the agreement.

Previously, the Los Angeles archdiocese, its insurers and various Roman Catholic orders had paid more than $114 million to settle 86 claims. Several religious orders in California have also reached multimillion-dollar settlements in recent months, including the Carmelites, the Franciscans and the Jesuits.

    LA Cardinal Apologizes to Abuse Victims, NYT, 16.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Church-Abuse.html

Deal Reported in Sexual Abuse Cases in Los Angeles

July 15, 2007
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Lawyers for more than 500 people who say they were abused by Roman Catholic clergy members said last night that they had settled their lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Los Angeles for $660 million.

If approved, it will be by far the largest payout made by any single diocese since the clergy sexual abuse scandals first became public in Boston in 2002. It will dwarf the $85 million paid for 552 claims by the Archdiocese of Boston.

The lawyers in the Los Angeles cases said the settlement would be announced today, a day before jury selection was set to begin in the first of the cases. Any agreement would require a judge’s approval.

Tod M. Tamberg, director of media relations for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said in an e-mail message that the only comment he could make was, “The archdiocese will be in court Monday at 9:30 a.m.”

A lawyer for the archdiocese did not return calls for comment.

Raymond P. Boucher, the lawyer who is representing 242 of the plaintiffs in the Los Angeles cases, confirmed in a telephone interview yesterday that a deal would be announced today for $660 million.

“Everything just fell into place,” Mr. Boucher said.

The settlement, which archdiocese officials have said would require the sale of church property, appeared to bring the drawn-out legal wrangling to a close.

“This will resolve all of the cases against the Archdiocese of Los Angeles,” said Katherine K. Freberg, an Irvine, Calif., lawyer who represents 109 plaintiffs. “It’s a global settlement.”

The Los Angeles cases have been particularly complex because they involve so many victims, multiple insurance companies, many Catholic religious orders whose own priests and brothers stand accused, and a prominent archbishop, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, who has cast himself as an ally of victims but has been accused by them of intransigence.

Many dioceses in California have been hit by large numbers of lawsuits because the state passed a law in 2002 that opened a one-year window for cases to be filed without regard to the statute of limitations.

Steven Sanchez, a 47-year old financial adviser who is one of the plaintiffs in the case set to begin on Monday, said he had been girding himself to testify about the abuse he suffered when he was 9 or 10 years old, and he said he wanted to see church officials called to account in a courtroom.

Asked before the settlement was disclosed what he would do with any money he might receive, Mr. Sanchez said simply, “Where can you take that check and cash it that will make you 10 years old again?”

Cardinal Mahony announced in May that, to raise money for a settlement, the archdiocese would sell its administrative building on Wilshire Boulevard and might sell about 50 other church properties that were not being used by parishes or schools.

Mr. Boucher’s co-counsel, Laurence E. Drivon, said, “The primary motivation for the archdiocese to settle is that it is substantially likely that if they don’t resolve these cases they’re going to get hit” for much more than the settlement amount.

The Associated Press was the first news organization to report on Saturday that the archdiocese had agreed to a settlement.

Cardinal Mahony had been expected to be called to testify in the case that was set to begin on Monday, involving what the archdiocese knew about two decades of alleged abuse by one priest — the Rev. Clinton Hagenbach, who died in 1987. Cardinal Mahony became archbishop of Los Angeles in 1985.

The trial scheduled for Monday is only one of more than a dozen that had been set to start between now and January.

A settlement would require the archdiocese to make public its confidential files that could shed light on which church officials knew of the abuse accusations, and when they knew, Mr. Boucher said. Many of the accused priests had multiple victims because they were moved by their superiors from one parish to another when accusations arose.

Mary Grant, 44, is an abuse victim whose case was settled by the Diocese of Orange, in California, and is a plaintiff in the Los Angeles cases. Ms. Grant is Western regional director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, and counsels other victims. Earlier yesterday, she said any settlement in Los Angeles would be “a bitter release.”

“We understand there are survivors who are desperately in need of medical care, therapy,” she said. “They may not be able to go through a trial. But on the other hand, there are many survivors really who’ve wanted their day in court.”

She added: “It’s been a long, hard five-year battle for survivors in Los Angeles. So I think that probably a sense of temporary relief that may come from it.”

The Los Angeles Archdiocese, its insurers and several Roman Catholic religious orders, including the Carmelites, the Franciscans and the Jesuits, have already paid a total of $114 million in several separate agreements, to settle 86 claims.

Lawsuits over sexual abuse have already cost the Roman Catholic church in the United States more than $1.5 billion. Each diocese must handle the costs on its own, with no assistance from the Vatican.

Settlements are far more common, and victims in California have consistently won some of the largest payouts. In California, the Diocese of Orange paid $100 million for 90 abuse claims in 2004 and the Diocese of Oakland paid $56 million to 56 people in 2005. The Diocese of Covington, in Kentucky, paid about $85 million to about 350 people.

Five dioceses have filed for bankruptcy protection: San Diego; Davenport, Iowa; Portland, Ore.; Spokane, Wash.; and Tucson.

David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said of the settlement: “They should feel incredibly proud, and Catholics should be very grateful to them. Without their courage, dozens of predators would still be unknown and maybe working in parishes today, and we would know absolutely nothing about who covered up these crimes.”

Mr. Clohessy said, however, “We don’t know as much as we would have if some of these cases had gone to trial.”

Michael Parrish contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

    Deal Reported in Sexual Abuse Cases in Los Angeles, NYT, 15.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/us/15abuse.html?hp

Religion News in Brief

July 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:13 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) -- The head of the Assemblies of God church will step down two years early, ending 14 years at the helm of one the nation's largest Pentecostal groups.

Thomas Trask, 71, plans to leave office in October.

In a statement Tuesday, Trask said he sought out ''the Lord as to his will'' and decided to step down as general superintendent. He would not comment further.

Trask is chairman of the World Assemblies of God Congress and is past president of the Pentecostal World Fellowship. He serves on the board of administration for the National Association of Evangelicals and the board of directors for the National Religious Broadcasters.

Trask, who spent five years as the Assemblies of God general treasurer, was part of a leadership team that has been in place since 1993. Charles Crabtree, who was elected that year as assistant general superintendent, plans to retire this year at the end of his term.

Despite the changes ahead, James K. Bridges, the current general treasurer, said, ''We don't feel we are in a leadership crisis.''

Nominations for a new leader will be made at the church's annual meeting Aug. 8-11 in Indianapolis. The top job will be filled by a member of the executive presbytery, comprised of 17 officers and representatives elected from the district ranks.

The 2.8 million-member church is based in Springfield.

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Christian frat sues University of Florida, claiming discrimination

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) -- A Christian fraternity sued the University of Florida on Tuesday, claiming the university is discriminating against them by refusing to recognize the fraternity as a registered student group.

University officials have told Beta Upsilon Chi that it can't be registered on campus because only men are allowed to join, which amounts to prohibited sex discrimination, according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Gainesville.

Beta Upsilon Chi is not allowed to join the off-campus Greek system of fraternities and sororities because the rules governing UF's Greek system bar religious discrimination, according to the lawsuit. The fraternity requires its members to be Christians.

Without official recognition, the fraternity is deprived of benefits including access to meeting space and the ability to advertise and recruit members on campus, the suit said.

UF spokesman Steve Orlando said the university does not comment on pending litigation.

The advocates who filed the lawsuit, the Christian Legal Society and the Alliance Defense Fund, had sued the University of Georgia in December because the school wouldn't recognize a chapter of the fraternity because of the religious discrimination issue. The suit was settled two days later when the university changed its policy and allowed the fraternity to register.

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Duke to spend $12 million to improve pastor health

DURHAM, N.C. (AP) -- The Duke Divinity School will use a $12 million grant to assess, track and improve the health of United Methodist pastors across North Carolina, the school said Tuesday.

The Clergy Health Initiative, using money from The Duke Endowment, will provide health counseling to about 1,600 United Methodist ministers for seven years.

''Through this effort, we are addressing both the health of ministers, as well as their congregations and communities, by sharing strategies for maintaining a healthy, balanced life,'' Duke University President Richard Brodhead said.

The initiative will recruit more than two dozen health coaches to help pastors improve their diet and exercise, and address smoking habits. The school said many pastors struggle with health problems, such as obesity and depression.

The school said it hopes the program will become a model for health initiatives across the country.

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http://www.divinity.duke.edu/

-------- Defunct meatpacking plant could gain new life as meat supplier to Muslims

TAMA, Iowa (AP) -- A closed meatpacking plant may soon be reopened as a supplier of meat to Muslim countries.

Investors from the Mideast nation Qatar are negotiating to buy the Iowa Quality Beef Supply Cooperative meatpacking plant in Tama, plant executives say.

The investors group wants the plant because it is already equipped to process cattle in a way that meets Muslim dietary requirements or halal.

Like Jews who keep kosher, devout Muslims cannot eat pork and can only eat meat killed in ritual slaughter. Foods processed with alcohol or with non-halal animal products such as lard can also be haram, or forbidden.

The U.S. exported nearly $80 million in beef to the Mideast in 2003, according to government statistics. Co-op members say there's strong demand for high quality beef in Islamic countries.

The co-op spent about $32 million to buy and remodel the plant and lease new equipment for working capital. The plant opened in July 2003 but closed a year later after a poor financial showing.

The group made an initial offer about two months ago and both sides have been exchanging counter offers, according to Keith DeHaan, chief executive of the cooperative.

''Hopefully we can call soon with a done deal,'' DeHaan said.

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Connecticut church plans services at comedy club

MANCHESTER, Conn. (AP) -- A comedy club is a place to find a few laughs ... and God?

So say the leaders of St. Paul's Collegiate Church, an independent congregation in Storrs. Starting in August, the church will hold Monday night services at The Hartford Funny Bone, a comedy club.

''Faith just got funnier'' reads a news release about the new service. A church leader is quoted as saying, ''We sense that a Monday night service in a comedy club at the mall might be just the thing for people who like Jesus but don't like the church.''

''A lot of times, churches are off the beaten path for people,'' said Ashley Capozzoli, director of membership and connections for the church. ''I think it's exciting for it to be in the midst of a really bustling area where people are going anyway.''

Ben Dubow, the church's lead pastor, said he was attracted to the comedy club's seating in a third-quarter round. The Storrs chapel also has seating in the round.

''We just feel like it really has the opportunity to build some sense of community, create a more informal feel for church, one that emphasizes dialogue and discussion in ways that are really positive,'' he said.

The church was created by a group of UConn alumni and former faculty in 2004. Dubow, a founding pastor, said the goal has been to reach people who felt disconnected from traditional churches. St. Paul's has a 40-person membership and averages about 150 people on a Sunday, he said. About 60 percent of the membership is younger than 30.

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Church groups start effort to fight table games in Kanawha County

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) -- Worshippers from across the spectrum of Christian belief are campaigning against casino-style gambling in a West Virginia county.

United Methodists, Southern Baptists and others gathered last Sunday under the auspices of the West Virginia Council of Churches to start a month of intense lobbying against the expansion of gambling at Tri-State Racetrack & Gaming in Nitro.

Yellow signs urging residents to vote against the measure on Aug. 11 are already common in Kanawha County, and are thick in Dunbar, where the signs are prominently displayed on the lawns of mainline Protestant churches and independent congregations alike.

Churches from a variety of Christian traditions have found common ground opposing proposed casino-style games like poker and blackjack to the Nitro racetrack. They warn about the dangers of addiction to gambling and the negative impacts it can have on individuals and families.

Advocates of table games -- including prominent politicians and the local Chamber of Commerce -- argue that the expansion will bring in tourists, new jobs and badly needed tax revenue.

    Religion News in Brief, NYT, 13.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Religion-Briefs.html

Faith Intertwines With Political Life for Clinton

July 7, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

WASHINGTON — Long before her beliefs would be tested in the most wrenching of ways as first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton taught an adult Sunday school class on the importance of forgiveness. It is a lesson, she says, that she has harked back to often.

“We all have things that oftentimes we’re upset about, or ashamed of, or feel guilty over, and so many people carry these enormous burdens around,” Mrs. Clinton said in a recent interview. “One of the great gifts of faith is to let it go.”

The themes of wrongs, forgiveness and reconciliation have played out repeatedly in Mrs. Clinton’s life, as she has endured the ordeal of her husband’s infidelity, engaged in countless political battles and shared a deep, mutual distrust with adversaries.

Her Methodist faith, Mrs. Clinton says, has guided her as she sought to repair her marriage, forgiven some critics who once vilified her and struggled in the bare-knuckles world of politics to fulfill the biblical commandment to love thy neighbor.

Mrs. Clinton, the New York senator who is seeking the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, has been alluding to her spiritual life with increasing regularity in recent years, language that has dovetailed with efforts by her party to reach out to churchgoers who have been voting overwhelmingly Republican.

Mrs. Clinton’s references to faith, though, have come under attack, both from conservatives who doubt her sincerity (one writer recently lumped her with the type of Christians who “believe in everything but God”) and liberals who object to any injection of religion into politics. And her motivations have been cast as political calculation by detractors, who suggest she is only trying to moderate her liberal image.

“Many people have developed opinions about her,” said John C. Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. “Senator Clinton has a long history of involvement in religious matters and appears to be a person of deep and sincere faith, but a lot of people don’t perceive her that way.”

Mrs. Clinton and others who have known her as a church youth-group member, a Sunday school teacher or a participant in weekly Senate prayer breakfasts say faith has helped define her, shaping everything from her commitment to public service to the most intimate of decisions.

“It has certainly been a huge part of who I am, and how I have seen the world and what I believe in, and what I have tried to do in my life,” Mrs. Clinton said in the half-hour interview devoted to her religious convictions, which her campaign granted only after months of requests.

Ever the good student, Mrs. Clinton can speak knowledgeably about St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley, the father of Methodism.

On the campaign trail or in other public appearances, she increasingly is speaking more personally about faith, sprinkling in references to inspiring biblical verses ( “faith without works is dead,” from James), Jesus’ injunction to care for the needy and even her daily prayer life, which she credits to being raised in a “praying family.”

In the interview and a subsequent telephone conversation, she described her spiritual habits — she carries a Bible on her campaign travels, reads commentaries on Scripture and on other people’s “faith journeys” and spoke of experiencing “the presence of the Holy Spirit on many occasions.”

And she talked of forgiveness. Mrs. Clinton volunteered that she was moved by apologies in recent years from David Kuo, a Republican speechwriter and evangelical Christian who later worked in the Bush administration, and Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, both of whom have confessed to harboring hateful thoughts of her. She spoke of her own shortcomings — “it’s a challenge every single day” — in leading a moral life and of turning to Christian writers for solace after her husband’s infidelity.

“It is both hard to forgive and ask for forgiveness,” she said. “There’s a reason it is talked about in the Bible. It is really hard. It is hard for people to let go of legitimate hurts and slights and disappointments.”

The intersection of faith and politics can be perilous for candidates. One of Mrs. Clinton’s chief rivals, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, talks often of embracing Christianity as an adult and the power of faith to transform lives. But Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential contender, has struggled to overcome concerns among many Americans about his Mormon faith.

Long portrayed by critics as out of touch with religious voters, Mrs. Clinton is clearly intent on trying win some of them over. Her campaign, for example, has brought in Burns Strider, an evangelical Christian who headed religious outreach for Democrats in the House.

Mr. Strider and other supporters point to what they say is Mrs. Clinton’s long record in bringing religious values to the public arena — her support for religion-based social programs, co-sponsorship of a law prohibiting religious discrimination and efforts on behalf of children, the poor and those needing health care. And while she supports abortion rights, she has made overtures to religious conservatives by expressing respect for opponents of abortion and calling for both sides to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

Mr. Green, the Pew fellow, said Mrs. Clinton’s increasing willingness to talk about faith could help attract Protestants and Roman Catholics in the political middle. But she is unlikely to make many inroads among religious conservatives, he said.

For example, after a forum last month for Democratic candidates that was organized by Sojourners, a liberal evangelical group, some conservative bloggers attacked Mrs. Clinton’s professions of faith as “a little too convenient,” “a little too timely” and “a little too scripted.”

Later, Andrew Ferguson, an editor at the conservative Weekly Standard, told an MSNBC interviewer that Democrats could win over only the religious voters who were “religious in the way that Hillary Clinton is religious, which is to say a very liberal Protestant sort of view, in which they believe in everything but God.”

Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, however, a Republican presidential candidate and former Baptist minister who knows Mrs. Clinton but holds very different political views from hers, said, “I think that she has genuine faith.”

“I go to a church that’s very expressive,” Mr. Huckabee added in an interview. “It doesn’t mean my faith is more genuine than someone” who has a very reflective tradition “and maybe who worships in a much more liturgical manner, in a quiet way.”

The liberal-leaning brand of Methodism that Mrs. Clinton is steeped in places a premium on social activism but tends to be reticent about discussing personal piety. “We were always taught, when you pray, you go into your closet,” said Ann Henry, a friend from Fayetteville, Ark., and a fellow Methodist.

Mrs. Clinton’s religious roots run deep. While her father, Hugh Rodham, was not a regular churchgoer, he descended from a long line of Methodists. Her mother, Dorothy, taught Sunday school at their Methodist church in Park Ridge, Ill. At age 11, Hillary Rodham read aloud an essay on “What Jesus Means to Me” for her confirmation.

In high school, she was influenced by the Rev. Donald Jones, a charismatic youth minister. He introduced his charges to the world beyond their suburban enclave, taking them to the South Side of Chicago to interact with black and Hispanic teenagers and baby-sit for migrant workers. On one memorable evening, he took them to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“I wouldn’t have focused so much on personal salvation,” Mr. Jones said recently about his message then. “I would have focused more on social responsibility.”

When she went away to Wellesley College, the Rev. H. Paul Santmire, then the college’s chaplain, got to know Mrs. Clinton as part of a group of religiously inclined students who discussed the social issues of the day. “This was sort of a ’60s movement type thing,” Mr. Santmire said.

The more devout students gravitated to the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, an evangelical group. But Mrs. Clinton’s network focused on social activism — and the teachings of the prophets, whose jeremiads against injustice are the favored text of today’s religious left.

Later, living in the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock, Ark., Mrs. Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, attended the First United Methodist Church, which generally leaned liberal, while Bill Clinton carried his Bible on Sundays to the more evangelical Immanuel Baptist Church.

Mrs. Clinton sometimes was a guest speaker at an adult Sunday school class, a class that some members complained normally resembled Rotary Club lectures because it often addressed nonreligious topics. But Mrs. Clinton took on more spiritual concerns.

“She said, ‘I don’t want to talk about public issues,’ ” recalled Nancy Wood, a longtime friend from the church. “ ‘I want to talk about our faith and how it plays out in the every day.’ ”

In a brief quiz about her theological views, Mrs. Clinton said she believed in the resurrection of Jesus, though she described herself as less sure of the doctrine that being a Christian is the only way to salvation. As for how literally to interpret the Bible, she takes a characteristically centrist view.

“The whole Bible gives you a glimpse of God and God’s desire for a personal relationship, but we can’t possibly understand every way God is communicating with us,” she said. “I’ve always felt that people who try to shoehorn in their cultural and social understandings of the time into the Bible might be actually missing the larger point.”

After the Clintons moved to Washington, they had a strained relationship with evangelical Christians from the start because of Mr. Clinton’s pledge to allow gay men and lesbians in the military, support for abortion rights and what critics perceived as Mrs. Clinton’s disdain for traditional family roles. Even so, a bipartisan women’s prayer group that included evangelicals quietly reached out to the new first lady. She met with them a few times during her White House years, and several members became close friends.

Shortly after her father’s death in 1993, Mrs. Clinton sought to meld her faith and political ideology into an overarching philosophy of public values. In delivering a passionate speech on health care, she said Americans suffered from a “sleeping sickness of the soul” and called for a “new politics of meaning.”

Liberal and conservative pundits alike jumped on what they called her religious moralisms wrapped in New Age language. But Melanne Verveer, her former chief of staff, said the speech was merely an extension of how Mrs. Clinton’s religious values infused her sense of public service.

“Her intent was to say what gives meaning to our lives and to take it one step farther into political life and what makes it matter,” Ms. Verveer said.

Friends and aides say they believe that Mrs. Clinton turned to her faith to get through the dark days after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. Mrs. Clinton writes in her memoir that she “spent a lot of time alone, praying and reading.”

The Rev. Gordon MacDonald, an evangelical pastor who advised Mr. Clinton, said the couple prayed together. “They would have times of prayer at breakfast,” Mr. MacDonald said. “Those were in the days everyone was waiting for her to walk out.”

Mrs. Clinton also met with the Rev. Billy Graham, according to Michael Duffy and Nancy Gibbs, editors at Time magazine and co-authors of a coming book, “The Preacher and the Presidents.” Mrs. Clinton told the authors that Mr. Graham helped her with “the issue of forgiveness.”

At the Sojourners forum, Mrs. Clinton spoke of that time. “I have been tested in ways that are both publicly known and those that are not so well known or not known at all,” she said. “I am very grateful that I had a grounding in faith that gave me the courage and the strength to do what I thought was right, regardless of what the world thought.”

When asked later whether her faith influenced her to stay in her marriage, Mrs. Clinton responded, “I think I’ve said all I’m going to say about that. Obviously my faith was crucial to the challenges I faced.”

She soon returned to the topic of forgiveness, however, saying she has thought a lot about it over the years. She recalled the Sunday school lesson she taught in Little Rock.

“The whole idea of the new covenant was really a new relationship with God, a sense that we could be forgiven, that we could seek both personally and through our relationships with others that gift of forgiveness,” she said. “It’s instrumental in life.”

    Faith Intertwines With Political Life for Clinton, NYT, 7.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/07/us/politics/07clinton.html?hp

Bloomberg: US's First Jewish President?

July 6, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:14 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Michael Bloomberg isn't known here as the Jewish mayor.

In fact, his religion is a non-issue in a city that had its first Jewish chief executive, Abe Beame, three decades ago. The New York Jewish community is so large and active that even non-Jewish mayors take counsel from rabbis. So when Bloomberg won the 2001 mayoral race, Jews saw no significant advantage in having one of their own in City Hall.

But if the billionaire businessman decides to run for the White House, his faith will become much more than an afterthought: He would be on a path toward being elected the first Jewish president of the United States.

''I think it's a great commentary on American political life when a person who happens to be Jewish is mentioned as a possible presidential candidate,'' said Rabbi Joseph Potasnik of the New York Board of Rabbis, who speaks regularly with Bloomberg and has hosted the mayor at a Passover seder and other events.

Bloomberg denies any plans to run, but recently switched from Republican to unaffiliated, clearing the way for a possible independent bid in a field where none of the announced candidates is Jewish.

Still, there is no evidence that Jews will support Bloomberg because of their shared faith.

American Jews vote overwhelmingly Democratic, with a small minority loyal to the Republican Party. Even when Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew and a Democrat at the time, became the first Jewish vice presidential nominee in 2000, there was little change in Jewish backing for the party. Between 1996 and 2000, the proportion of Jews that voted Democratic increased by only 1 percentage point to 79 percent, according to exit polls.

''People thought every Jew in America would run out and vote for Lieberman,'' said Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, interreligious affairs director for the American Jewish Committee, an advocacy group based in New York. ''But Jews are fairly sophisticated voters. They don't vote along the lines of, 'I'll vote for the Jew because I am one.' They tend to vote issues. They tend to vote politics.''

Bloomberg would also be competing against two other New Yorkers -- Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Each of those candidates has built strong ties to the Jewish community.

And in a campaign season when Democrats are speaking out as much as Republicans on the importance of faith, the mayor may be at a disadvantage.

Bloomberg, who declined to comment through his spokesman, has said he is not very religious. Other than mentioning that he plans to celebrate a few major Jewish holidays with his family, he almost never discusses his faith. He joined a prominent Upper East Side synagogue, Congregation Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue, which is part of the liberal Reform branch of Judaism, but only occasionally attends worship, Potasnik said.

''Don't pull out his attendance record'' the rabbi joked.

In a 2005 interview with The New York Times, Bloomberg made a rare comment on his religious views. ''I believe in Judaism, I was raised a Jew, I'm happy to be one -- or proud to be one,'' he said. Then he paused and added: ''I don't know if that's the right word. I don't know why you should be proud of something. It doesn't make you any better or worse. You are what you are.''

Bloomberg, 65, had a fairly typical religious upbringing for American Jews of his generation.

He was raised in a kosher home in Medford, Mass., just outside Boston, had a bar mitzvah, and, according to Potasnik, still remembers a few Yiddish words. Jewish leaders who speak with him regularly say they haven't heard him mention facing anti-Semitism as a child.

After the media mogul earned his fortune, he created an endowment for his hometown synagogue, which was renamed for his parents: Temple Shalom, the William and Charlotte Bloomberg Jewish Community Center of Medford. The congregation belongs to the Conservative movement, which emphasizes traditional observance while allowing some changes that adapt to modern times.

Bloomberg has given millions to Jewish causes in the United States and in Israel. He emphatically supports the Jewish state and has traveled there numerous times.

This past February, he dedicated a $6.5 million emergency rescue service facility in Jerusalem named for his father. On the same visit, he toured the southern Israeli town of Sderot, expressing solidarity with a small community that has been a frequent target of Palestinian rocket fire.

''I think there's a comfort level that he has with his identification as a member of the Jewish community,'' said Rabbi Michael S. Miller, chief executive of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. Every year since he was elected, Bloomberg has hosted a reception with kosher food at Gracie Mansion, the city's official mayoral residence, commemorating the council's Jewish Heritage New York project.

''He's an ardently strong supporter of Israel,'' Miller said.

However, neither of the mayor's two daughters celebrated a bat mitzvah, and Bloomberg, who is divorced, officiated at his daughter Emma's wedding, which was a civil ceremony.

''He's a fairly assimilated Jew,'' Greenebaum said. ''I don't think it will be a big thing.''

Associated Press Writer Sara Kugler contributed to this report.

    Bloomberg: US's First Jewish President?, NYT, 6.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bloomberg-Religion.html

Religion News in Brief

July 5, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:28 p.m. ET
The New York Times

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- A new reality of American Catholic life -- background checks on volunteers who work with children -- is generating criticism in the Diocese of Pittsburgh.

The diocese, which covers six counties in southwestern Pennsylvania, is following a national standard by running checks on its estimated 30,000 volunteers. Some volunteers, however, said they feel the step doesn't address the issue of sex abuse and invades the privacy of people who often have little contact with children and teenagers.

Dr. Mark Stehlik, a lector coordinator at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Pittsburgh, said two volunteers quit in protest over the screening process. Stehlik said he does not believe they were hiding anything.

''For a community, meaning the Catholic community, that has been built up on the backs of willing parish volunteers, there had better be a really good, verifiable return to justify putting anything onerous in the way of that volunteerism,'' Stehlik said. ''In my mind, that return is just not there. We are paying a huge price for a very small likelihood of something actually happening.''

In response to sex scandals involving priests, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops decided five years ago that each diocese must do criminal background checks on volunteers who come into regular contact with children.

Ron Ragan, director of the Office for the Protection of Children and Young People in the Pittsburgh Diocese, said he understands that some volunteers are offended but the checks are necessary to reduce the threat to children.

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http://www.diopitt.org/

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Third Anglican province will skip once-a-decade Lambeth meeting

NEW YORK (AP) -- Another group of Anglican leaders is planning to boycott the fellowship's once-a-decade assembly as divisions over the Bible and homosexuality threaten to split the world Anglican Communion.

The House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church of Rwanda said June 19 that its members won't attend the Lambeth Conference next year in England because some Rwandan bishops weren't invited.

A few Rwandan bishops oversee the Anglican Mission in America, a breakaway group of theologically conservative parishes that are not recognized by the Anglican Communion.

The communion's spiritual leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, has said that he did not invite bishops connected to the Rwanda-led mission or to other breakaway groups because he believed it would disrupt efforts at the conference to keep Anglicans together.

The world fellowship has been in an uproar since the liberal-leaning U.S. Episcopal Church, which is the Anglican body in the U.S., consecrated its first openly gay bishop, V. Gene. Robinson of New Hampshire.

Williams also did not invite Robinson to next year's gathering. The archbishop also did not invite Bishop Martyn Minns, a former U.S. Episcopal priest who is overseeing a group of breakaway conservative Episcopal parishes overseen by the Anglican Church of Nigeria.

Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola has said that not inviting Minns ''will be viewed as withholding invitation to the entire House of Bishops of the Church of Nigeria.''

On May 30, the head of the Anglican Church of Uganda, Archbishop Henry Orombi, said he will not attend the Lambeth gathering because Williams invited U.S. bishops who had participated in Robinson's consecration.

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http://www.anglicancommunion.org/

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Judge rules against evangelist in free speech lawsuit

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- A Pentecostal evangelist familiar to both college campuses and courtrooms has lost his initial bid to speak at Murray State University in western Kentucky.

James G. ''Brother Jim'' Gilles of Symsonia, Ky., sued the university in 2006, claiming that MSU deprived him of his rights to free speech and to exercise his religion by rejecting his requests to preach at the Curris Center, a campus spot frequented by students and visitors.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Russell, however, ruled that the school's campus speech policy, which requires speakers to obtain on-campus sponsors, is legal and not a burden on Gilles.

Gilles contends that he was not required to have a sponsor before 2004 and that MSU officials are arbitrarily enforcing the student handbook's solicitation policy.

Since 1981, the year Gilles says he found God while attending a Van Halen concert, the preacher has traveled across the nation to speak at dozens of universities and state capitals. He's fought speaking restrictions at other colleges, with some success.

The Alliance Defense Fund, a national legal organization founded in part by the Christian group Focus on the Family, represented Gilles in the lawsuit.

Gilles began speaking at Murray State in the 1980s and at various times has made disparaging remarks about students and professors, including referring to sorority members as prostitutes.

In October 2004, the university told Gilles he needed sponsorship from a university organization or department because his talks were considered solicitation.

Russell wrote that Murray State isn't required to treat open areas of its campus as a public forum. And because the school's policy requires everyone to get a sponsor, Gilles can't make the case that his rights were violated, Russell wrote.

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http://www.wku.edu/

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Judge: Christ justice icon will stay up in court lobby

SLIDELL, La. (AP) -- Unless a federal judge orders it down, an icon of Jesus holding biblical quotations about justice will stay up in the city court lobby, a local judge ruled.

The American Civil Liberties Union has threatened to take the court to court unless the icon and a plaque below it reading ''To Know Peace, Obey These Laws'' are removed.

''We respectfully disagree with the ACLU's opinion that this is a violation of the Constitution,'' City Court Judge Jim Lamz said. ''The only opinion that counts in this type of case is the opinion of the federal judge to whom this will go if the ACLU sues.''

ACLU representatives contend the icon violates the First Amendment prohibition against establishing a state religion.

Mayor Ben Morris said he was ready to fight. ''I fight daily with FEMA for the recovery of our city, and now we must fight with these tyrants, this American Taliban who seek to destroy our culture and our heritage,'' he said.

Lamz has said that a Russian priest translated the quotations as John 7:24 -- an injunction to judge rightly, and not by appearance -- and Matthew 7:2, which cautions that people will be judged as they judge others.

There is no legal precedent for whether such a display is unconstitutional, so it stays, Lamz said.

http://www.slidell.la.us/

http://www.aclu.org/

    Religion News in Brief, NYT, 5.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Religion-Briefs.html

Atheists Sue N.D. Over Youth Ranch

June 21, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:49 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) -- An atheist group says North Dakota officials are using public money to religiously indoctrinate young people at the Dakota Boys and Girls Ranch, according to a federal lawsuit.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation wants a judge to declare a violation of the constitutional separation of church and state, and order the government to stop sending children or money to the ranch.

The ranch has three residential facilities for troubled youth and also offers day-programs.

About $7 million in federal, state and county money has gone through the Human Services Department to foster care services at Dakota Boys and Girls Ranch in two years, but the money is not for religious programs, said Carol Olson, executive director of the state Human Services Department.

''The Dakota Boys and Girls Ranch receives private donations to support their spiritual life programs,'' Olson said.

The government money makes up about 70 percent of the organization's budget, said Gene Kaseman, president of the Dakota Boys and Girls Ranch Association.

The ranch is affiliated with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Its mission is to ''help at risk children and their families succeed in the name of Christ,'' according to its Web site.

''The Dakota Boys & Girls Ranch provides services to children in the context of an explicitly Christian community, including post-release mentoring services, which are publicly funded with taxpayer appropriations,'' the lawsuit says.

It would be difficult for the Boys and Girls Ranch to keep public and private money separate, said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Even if that is possible, she said, public money frees up more private money for religious purposes.

''The whole purpose of this ranch is to proselytize and indoctrinate,'' she said.

The suit filed Tuesday in federal court in Bismarck against Lisa Bjergaard, director of juvenile services for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and Daniel Richter, director of Ward County Social Services.

Bjergaard said no youth are placed in a facility ''without a good, thorough review that ensures that they're placed in compliance with state and federal law.''

    Atheists Sue N.D. Over Youth Ranch, NYT, 21.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Boys-Ranch-Lawsuit.html

Bush Meets Pope Benedict for the First Time

June 9, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:36 a.m. ET
The New York Times

ROME (AP) -- President Bush, in his first meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, defended his humanitarian record around the globe, telling the papal leader on Saturday about U.S. efforts to battle AIDS in Africa.

After posing for photos and sharing a few laughs, Benedict asked the president about his meetings with leaders of other industrialized nations in Germany -- the pontiff's homeland. Then, the topic changed to international aid.

''I've got a very strong AIDS initiative,'' Bush said, sitting with Benedict at a small desk in the pope's private library at the Vatican.

The president promised the pope that he'd work to get Congress to double the current U.S. commitment for combatting AIDS in Africa to $30 billion over the next five years.

The pope also asked the president about his meeting in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has expressed opposition to a U.S. missile shield in Europe.

''The dialogue with Putin was also good?'' the pope asked.

Bush, apparently eyeing photographers and reporters who were about to be escorted from the room, replied: ''Umm. I'll tell you in a minute.''

The pontiff gave the president a drawing of St. Peter's Basillica, an official Vatican medal and coins. ''It's beautiful, thank you,'' Bush said of the drawing. The president gave the pope a white walking sticking made by a former homeless man in Dallas, Texas. It was inscribed with the Ten Commandments.

Bush's activities in Rome were conducted under heavy security. Thousands of police deployed Saturday morning in downtown Rome to counter demonstrations by anti-globalization groups and far-left parties against Bush's meetings with the pope and Italian officials.

Dozens of trucks and buses surrounded the Colosseum, the downtown Piazza Venezia and other historic venues as scores of officers, some in anti-riot gear, poured from their vehicles. The main boulevard leading to St. Peter's Square and the Vatican was closed to traffic. Police and helicopters guarded the area.

Bush was greeted in the courtyard of the Vatican by members of the Swiss Guard, the elite papal security corps dressed in their distinctive orange, blue and red-stripped uniforms.

In a statement, the Vatican said Bush had ''warm'' talks with the pope and the Vatican's No. 2 official, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. They discussed international politics, particularly in the Middle East, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Lebanon, the ''worrisome situation in Iraq'' and the ''critical conditions in which the Christian communities (in Iraq) are found,'' the statement said.

The pontiff expressed his hope for a `'regional'' and `'negotiated'' solution of conflicts and crises that afflict the region, the Vatican said. Attention was also give to Africa, the humanitarian crisis in Darfur and Latin America.

They also discussed moral and religious questions relating to human rights and religious freedom, the defense and promotion of life, marriage and the family and sustainable development, the Vatican said.

Bush arrived in Rome Friday night, after a stop in the Czech Republic, three days at a summit of industrialized democracies on Germany's northern coast, and a quick, three-hour visit to Poland. The president stays in Rome Saturday night, too, before going on to Albania and Bulgaria.

While in Rome, he'll visit a lay Roman Catholic organization. The Sant'Egidio Community has a $25 million program to provide free antiretroviral drugs for HIV-positive people in 10 African countries, along with follow-up and home care.

Bush began his day with a short meeting with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano at Quirinale Palace, his official residence. Bush was greeted in a courtyard by an honor cordon of soldiers in navy uniforms, black boots and fur hats. They walked under a clock tower into the palace and ascended a marble staircase under a ceiling of frescoes.

White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino said the two talked about Afghanistan, Kosovo and Lebanon, but little about Iraq. Later, Bush was having longer talks and lunch with Premier Romano Prodi, also fresh from the G-8 meetings.

Perino said the Italian president told Bush that there had been speculation that U.S.-Italy relations would slide under Prodi. She said Bush told Napolitano: ''The opposite has proven true.''

Italian-U.S. relations are a bit strained.

Just hours before Bush's arrival Friday, the first trial involving the CIA's extraordinary rendition program opened in a Milan courtroom. Along with the 26 Americans on trial for the abduction of an Egyptian cleric, a U.S. soldier is on trial in Rome for the March 2005 slaying of an Italian spy in Baghdad. In both cases, the U.S. citizens are being tried in absentia.

Meanwhile, a report out Friday from European investigator Dick Marty accused Italy and Germany of obstructing his probe into alleged secret prisons run by CIA in Europe. Marty said they were located in Poland and Romania from 2003 to 2005 to interrogate suspected terrorists.

Italy also has withdrawn troops from Iraq and is reluctant to send additional soldiers to Afghanistan.

Washington is concerned that U.S. troops, along with those from Canada and Britain and elsewhere, are the only NATO countries sending forces to fight the Taliban in the most violent areas in the south. Other NATO-contributing countries, such as Germany, France and Italy, restrict the use of their forces to relatively peaceful areas of the north.

A series of small incidents involving the Italians and heavy fighting elsewhere in the country have heightened concerns in Italy over the mission and shaken Prodi's leadership.

Prodi ousted Silvio Berlusconi a year ago, replacing a like-minded conservative and staunch ally of Bush's with a center-left leader whose government has spared Washington no criticism.

Despite differences, Bush and Prodi have said they want good ties. Still, the U.S. leader is hedging his bets on Italian politics. He'll end his day with a private talk with his old friend Berlusconi.

Associated Press Writers Ariel David and Alessandra Rizzo in Rome contributed to this story.

    Bush Meets Pope Benedict for the First Time, NYT, 9.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Bush.html?hp

Evolution issue separates candidates

7.6.2007
USA Today
By Jill Lawrence

WASHINGTON — Evolution has roiled state and local school boards for years. Now it's entered presidential politics.
Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, have been explaining their positions ever since they and Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo first indicated in a May 3 debate that they do not believe in evolution.

Their religious views, they say, are compatible with science.

"I think science is marvelous and wonderful, and I enjoy the benefit of it every day," Huckabee told reporters Wednesday at a lunch. He said he embraces Scripture, but "to me, it's not a conflict with science."

People may say the story of creation is "preposterous," Huckabee said, but "if I believe anything about God, I believe that he's in the miracle business."

The three Republicans who reject evolution are long shots for the nomination and a minority of the 10-man GOP field. Still, Democratic strategist Mark Mellman, Kerry's 2004 pollster who is not affiliated with a current candidate, said they make their party look like "a front for the Flat Earth Society."

The image could cause serious damage with "swing voters who are culturally progressive," Mellman said — "not because evolution is their most important issue but because it says something significant about their cultural orientation. They aren't interested in rational scientific explanation and discourse."

Many Democrats, notably presidential nominee John Kerry in 2004, have accused President Bush of ignoring scientific consensus on global warming and constricting advances in stem-cell research by limiting federal funds.

Democrats already are pushing such themes. Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, is a broad attack on Bush administration policymaking and says a number of scientific issues have been treated "as primarily religious issues." New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, on the presidential campaign trail, often calls for a return to "evidence-based decision-making."

A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll suggests that a majority of voters agree at least in part with Huckabee, Brownback and Tancredo on evolution.

"Most of us don't think that we're just apes with trousers," said Gary Bauer, a Christian conservative who ran for president in 2000. He said Huckabee and Brownback have been "refreshing" on the subject. He also said that, while a president doesn't have direct influence on curriculum, the discussion is "an interesting marker on worldviews."

Lawrence Krauss, a scientist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said it is a warning flag. He said a president "who denies something at the basis of modern biology" would not be a credible leader on education or economic growth driven by biotechnology, would hobble scientific research and would lack international stature.

Huckabee argues that voters don't care about evolution — they ask about things like gas prices, health care, college tuition and Iraq.

Republican Don Racheter, a self-described fiscal and cultural conservative who heads a free-market think tank in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, said terrorism and taxes are top U.S. voter concerns. He said evolution isn't high on the social-issues list. "What trips people's triggers are people's positions on gay marriage and abortion," he said.

Racheter also said people have a right to their own view on how life began and how it should be taught, and said he's surprised Democrats don't agree: "They ought to be for choice in religion and choice in education as well as choice in reproductive rights."

    Evolution issue separates candidates, UT, 7.6.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2007-06-07-evolution_N.htm

Dedication Set for Billy Graham Library

May 31, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:27 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- Evangelist Billy Graham ended his crusades two years ago. But a new $27 million museum will carry on his work after the frail 88-year-old is gone.

On Thursday, former Presidents Carter, Clinton and George H.W. Bush were expected to be among 1,500 well-wishers at the private dedication of the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte.

The 40,000-square-foot complex, built near the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, traces the preacher's rise from farm boy to the most widely heard minister of all time. Over his long career he preached the Gospel in person to more than 210 million people.

''Even after my father is in heaven, whenever that day will be, it will be an opportunity to extend his ministry for several generations,'' said the Rev. Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's son and successor, who serves as chief executive of the evangelistic association.

Billy Graham suffers from fluid on the brain, prostate cancer and Parkinson's disease, and is largely confined to his home in Montreat. His wife Ruth, 86, has degenerative osteoarthritis of the back and neck and is bedridden at their home.

Franklin Graham said his father is strong enough to appear at the dedication, but ''he's preoccupied right now with my mother. She is very weak.''

''She's aware of what's happening. Her mind is sharp,'' Franklin Graham told The Associated Press. ''But we're just concerned that she won't be around with us much longer.''

Billy Graham, who has met every president since Harry S. Truman, initially opposed plans for the presidential-style library, his son said. But he agreed when Franklin Graham explained that it was not meant as a monument to him.

''We presented it to him that this is a ministry,'' Franklin Graham said. ''It's about the message you preached and what you dedicated your life to.''

The museum, which is set to open Tuesday, will be free to the public.

The dairy farm where Billy Graham grew up is just a few miles from the site of the library and the building design reflects his roots. The entrance looks like a barn and has a 40-foot glass cross for a front door. Hay bales and a 1936 farm truck decorate the lobby, along with an animatronic cow named Bessie that talks about Billy Graham as a young boy.

Critics dubbed the animal the ''Golden Calf,'' saying it wasn't appropriate for honoring the evangelist. But Franklin Graham said it was critical to include displays appealing to kids.

The exhibits highlight Billy Graham's close ties to U.S. presidents, his pioneering use of radio, TV and film for evangelism and his role as America's pastor -- comforting the nation during crises, most recently after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The evangelist's childhood home was also moved to the site and restored.

Billy Graham's children have been divided over where their parents should be buried -- at the library or at The Cove, a Bible training center near the Grahams' mountainside home at Montreat. Franklin Graham believes his parents have decided the location, but ''haven't made that public yet.''

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On the Net:

Billy Graham Evangelistic Association: http://www.billygraham.org

    Dedication Set for Billy Graham Library, NYT, 31.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Billy-Graham-Library.html

5pm

World's first creationist museum

opens in Kentucky

Tuesday May 29, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Fred Attewill and agencies

The world's first creationist museum, which tells visitors the Earth is only about 6,000 years old, has opened its doors in the American midwest.

The Creation Museum claims dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex lived alongside ancient civilisations but were strictly vegetarian before the Fall of Man and that the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood.

Some 4,000 people visited the Kentucky museum on its first day yesterday while demonstrators protested outside and a plane towing a banner reading "Thou shalt not lie" circled overhead.

Critics say the $27m (£14m) centre, whose motto is "Prepare to believe!", will be the first museum in the world whose exhibits are almost entirely fake.

It is seeking to convince visitors of the truth of its belief in the account of the world's creation in the book of Genesis through a mixture of animatronic models and tableaux.

Mark Looy, a co-founder of the privately funded centre, said: "The guests were very happy with the museum experience.

"Of course, we had some naysayers come through and engage us in conversation, and that's fine - we want them." Lawrence Krauss, an author and physicist at Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University, decided to view the museum first-hand.

"It's really impressive, and it really gives the impression that they're talking about science at some point," said Mr Krauss.

Awarding marks out of five, "I'd give it a four for technology, five for propaganda. As for content, I'd give it a negative five," he said.

The museum features hi-tech exhibits designed by former theme-park artist Patrick Marsh, including animatronic dinosaurs and a wooden ark at least two stories tall, plus a special effects theatre and planetarium.

Some exhibits show dinosaurs aboard Noah's ark and assert that all animals were vegetarians until Adam committed the first sin in the garden of Eden.

When Mr Marsh was asked to explain the existence of fossilised remains of man's ancestors, he replied: "There are no such things.

"Humans are basically as you see them today. Those skeletons they've found, what's the word? They could have been deformed, diseased or something.

"I've seen people like that running round the streets of New York."

Construction of the complex began with a prayer meeting for workers, all of whom signed a contract saying they agreed with creationism.

Ken Ham, the museum's Australian director, is equally defiant.

He revealed he had "skipped through" a copy of Richard Dawkins' latest book, but he said: "The thing is, Dawkins does not have infinite knowledge or understanding himself.

"He's got a position, too, it's just a different one from ours. The Bible makes sense and is overwhelmingly confirmed by observable science. It does not confirm the belief in evolution."

    World's first creationist museum opens in Kentucky, G, 29.5.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2090664,00.html

Churches apply graveyard tradition to ashes

27.5.2007
USA Today
By Chansin Bird
Religion News Service

Just outside Fredericksburg (Va.) United Methodist Church, an arc-shaped wall hugs the church's quiet meditation garden and outdoor fountain. A closer look at the wall reveals 360 niches and the names of deceased members of the congregation.

The columbarium, which holds urns containing ashes of the dead, was installed two years ago and is part of a growing trend of churches that are reverting back to the old church graveyard tradition in a modern way.

"Rather than buying plots in a cemetery in which they have no connection, to be buried at their church where they've worshipped and celebrated their life is meaningful to many people," said the church's senior pastor, Larry Lenow.

Part of the increase can be traced to the rising popularity of cremation. The use of cremation has risen to 30% from 20% since the mid-1990s, according to the Cremation Association of North America. The association projects that by 2025, the rate will be 50%.

The phenomenon of interring those ashes at churches is especially seen in mainline Protestant churches. Russell Vacanti, design director for Armento Liturgical Arts based in Buffalo, whose company completes about 11 columbarium jobs a month, said 85% of Armento's work is with the Episcopal Church, followed by Presbyterian, Methodist and Lutheran churches.

Lenow said in a world where people live in more than one city in their adult lives, it seems natural for people to turn back to their places of worship when thinking of a final resting place.

"It's almost like things come full circle," Lenow said. "We celebrate birth, life, death and life beyond death (in the church). I suspect you're going to find this as very much a growing trend in the decades ahead."

At Lenow's church, each niche can hold the urns of two individuals and sells for $2,000. They are only sold to members of the church or people connected to the church.

Other churches opt for indoor columbaria. National City Christian Church in Washington, D.C., built its 865-niche columbarium in 1986.

"People from all over the U.S. come to (live and work in) Washington," said Wes Strotman, facilities chairman of National City Christian Church Foundation. "It felt logical to have a central place for people to be taken to instead of a cemetery. It's one of these changing things. Fifty years ago, you wouldn't have heard of this kind of thing around here."

The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author of My Life With the Saints, said worship around the tombs of saints is an ancient tradition. Early Christians worshipped in the catacombs— secret underground burial caves — and some of the first churches were erected over the tombs of martyrs.

"The worship and the respect that takes place in columbaria and graves … reminds us that the people who went before us were real human beings," Martin said. "They weren't legends or mythical figures. This reminds us of our own call to holiness as embodied people."

The increase in demand for church columbaria has its roots in many factors.

Paul Eickhof, president of Minnesota-based Eickhof Columbaria Inc., said cremation is cheaper and requires less land. He said people today better understand their various burial options, including cremation.

His company has seen a 200% increase in church-sited columbaria installations in the past 10 years. The company's initial market in the late 1980s was cemeteries. Now they complete about three and a half church columbaria per month.

"In years past when someone passed away, there was only one place you went — the local undertaker," Eickhoff said. "There was only one place you were buried, and that was in the cemetery plot."

Those plots are not as obtainable as they once were. Metropolitan cemeteries are filling up, said Paul Pinigis, technical sales representative for Architarium, an Austin, Texas, company that has been building columbaria for more than 80 years.

Pinigis said most orders come from churches. The structures can be a form of church income by selling space in their columbaria.

"The columbaria systems today are superior to what was available 10 years ago," Pinigis said. "Because of that, the cost is more affordable for the churches, giving them a quality product."

Some churches find it simpler because they're dealing with urns instead of bodies and caskets. They don't have to hire anyone to dig holes with heavy equipment or deal with "all the difficult things that require cemetery overhead and equipment," Eickhoff said.

And it's easier for families to visit their loved ones.

"The folks that are inurned in the church congregation are part of a church family," Vacanti said. "Usually they're there once a week anyway. It's very convenient."

Strotman, the facilities chairman of the D.C. church, is around the columbarium daily.

"Me and my wife have ours picked out," he said. "The children may not like our idea of cremation 1,000%, but we made the decision."

    Churches apply graveyard tradition to ashes, UT, 27.5.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2007-05-27-columbaria_N.htm

Texas Town Worried by Polygamist

May 22, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:06 p.m. ET
The New York Times

LOCKNEY, Texas (AP) -- Samuel Fischer would appear to be just what's needed most in this withering Texas Panhandle town of about 2,000.

A successful cabinet maker with a thriving business in Utah, he hopes to move the operation here, bringing with it as many as 100 jobs and perhaps eventually an influx of residents.

Many here, however, say Fischer is no godsend, and the economic boost he could provide their community is not worth the cost.

Fischer is a polygamist, a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, a renegade offshoot of the Mormon Church. The sect's leader, Warren Jeffs, is awaiting trial on charges he arranged marriages between men and underage girls.

In Lockney, people like shopkeeper Ginger Mathis worry that Fischer, his two wives and their 24 children will soon be joined by thousands of other sect members now living Utah and Arizona. Fischer has closed on one house in Plainview and has contracts on three others there; he is also checking out property near Lockney.

''He wouldn't be looking at houses if he didn't have some others coming,'' Mathis said.

Others want to give Fischer the benefit of the doubt.

''I just feel like he's one of God's creatures and if he wants to come to town, that's his business,'' said Kay Martin, who owns an insurance agency in Lockney and is a member of the town's economic development board. ''It doesn't scare me or bother me.''

Ranching and farming are the mainstays in the Lockney area, about 75 miles from Amarillo. Farmers produce cotton, wheat, pumpkins and corn. The town's population has dropped by about 200 from the 2000 census because there is no other work for young people not interested in farming or ranching.

Fischer took his case for moving to Lockney to his future neighbors at a town meeting. He requested the meeting in a letter to the local paper after it published a column about him and his association with Jeffs.

About 100 people attended. When pressed, Fischer told them that Jeffs was his spiritual leader but that the FLDS doesn't have a stake in his business.

About 150 of Jeffs' followers are already in Texas, living outside the small town of Eldorado, about 230 miles from Lockney. Among the buildings erected by the sect is an 80-foot-tall, gleaming white temple.

Those who attended the meeting in Lockney say Fischer, 53, promised he would not build a compound. He also said he didn't know who would be living in the houses he will soon own.

Fischer declined to be interviewed by The Associated Press.

''We dealt with the people that have the need to know,'' he said. ''And that's all I'm worried and concerned about. Those are the people who we'll be living and working with. People in New York don't need to know.''

Jeffs' group -- based in the adjacent towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz. -- numbers about 10,000. It is cloaked in secrecy and widely known for marrying off teenage brides and banishing men and boys who disagree with Jeffs. The Mormon Church renounced polygamy in 1890 and has disavowed any connection to the sect.

Fischer's arrival has piqued interest in Lockney, where several residents said they were reading ''Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith,'' by Jon Krakauer, a 2003 nonfiction book about the polygamist sect.

In his letter to the newspaper, Fischer wrote that he wants residents to get to know him and to seek jobs at his cabinet factory. He said he settled on Lockey after getting stranded by an ice storm in January in Amarillo and seeing an economy that appeared on the ''upswing.''

Fisher said he is leaving Hildale because Utah authorities took control of the sect's scandal-plagued trust fund.

''There has been plenty of negative publicity regarding my beliefs which I would hope the honest in heart can see through,'' Fischer wrote. ''I feel that tolerance for others' way of thinking, that may differ from our own, is what constitutes a peaceful society.''

Some of those who attended the meeting said Fischer was not very forthcoming.

''He didn't tell us anything,'' Mathis said. ''He evaded some (questions) and even the ones he answered I didn't feel he was being truthful.''

Others said Fisher's cabinet-making business will infuse money into the area.

''I'm not very much bothered by this,'' said Mayor Roger Stapp. ''They have every right to be here if they're being good citizens and not breaking the law.''

    Texas Town Worried by Polygamist, NYT, 22.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Polygamist-Sect-Panhandle.html

Blue Light Aids Ill Mennonite Children

May 20, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:28 a.m. ET
The New York Times

EAST EARL, Pa. (AP) -- Across the moonless dark of Lancaster County, where horse-drawn buggies clatter along dusty country roads and many families shun electricity, a strange blue light cuts harshly through the night.

Over the cornfields it beckons, like some otherworldly force, beaming from the bedroom window of a 100-year-old Mennonite farmhouse.

Downstairs, flaxen-haired girls with braids read to younger children ... a mother in a traditional long print dress and white organdy cap rocks a slumbering child ... a father returning from the fields pulls up a chair to the coal-fired stove.

The scene is bathed in the glow of a single gas lamp.

Upstairs, a baby sleeps in another kind of light, in a very different world.

High-intensity blue electric rays burn down upon his crib, creating an iridescent haze that envelops the room. The lights are suspended from a heavy stainless steel canopy just inches above the child.

The baby wears only a diaper and has no blankets, just starched white sheets. Mirrors are built into one side of the crib. Fans hum loudly to keep him cool.

With his chubby cheeks and bleached blonde hair, 15-month old Bryan Martin looks like an angel in his luminous cocoon.

But Bryan is a very sick child.

The whites of his eyes are yellow and his skin is an unnatural gold.

The blue lights are saving his life.

------

In the lush, green pastures of Pennsylvania Dutch country, where life revolves around the one-room schoolhouse, the farm and the church, and locals speak a distinctive German dialect, the strange blue lights beam from a handful of homes.

To the Amish and Mennonites they mean one thing -- the presence of an extraordinarily rare disease that seems to cruelly target their communities, forcing afflicted children to spend 10 to 12 hours a day, undressed, under lights.

The children suffer from a genetic disorder that causes high levels of a toxin called bilirubin to build up in their bodies, resulting in severe jaundice that, if untreated, causes brain damage and death.

Bilirubin, a natural waste product from worn-out red blood cells, is normally broken down by an enzyme in the liver. If the enzyme is missing, bilirubin can be checked only by the wavelengths of blue lights. Levels must be monitored constantly. Even minor injuries or infections can cause them to rise dramatically.

The disease is Crigler-Najjar syndrome, named for two doctors who identified it 55 years ago. There are about 110 known cases of Crigler's worldwide, including about 35 in the U.S. About 20 are among the Amish and Mennonite in Pennsylvania.

There is no cure; Bryan's only hope for long-term survival is a liver transplant.

------

As a Mennonite, Katie Martin embraces the teaching of her church, that sick children are gifts from God, born to foster compassion and understanding.

But nothing prepared her for the news that her firstborn, Derick, had Crigler's. Several years earlier, a nephew had suffered brain damage and died of the disease at age 3.

''I thought it was a death sentence,'' she said.

In the past, it usually was. But in 1990 a new clinic had just opened in Strasburg specializing in children with rare diseases. There, the Martins met a doctor who had once studied with Dr. John Crigler, who first described the disease with Dr. Victor Najjar in 1952. The doctor told them about bilirubin levels and the dangers of kernicterus, the brain disorder that killed their nephew.

Bring the baby back for blood tests every month, the doctor told them.

And keep him under blue lights.

So the Martins -- who are unrelated to Bryan Martin -- took their yellow baby back to their 140-acre dairy farm in Mifflinberg and embarked on a life of testing, monitoring and lights.

Floyd, who also works as a welder, fashioned a stainless steel-framed canopy to hold the lights over his son's bed. He learned all he could about phototherapy, as the blue light treatment is called. As the boy grew, Martin made bigger, more sophisticated frames. When his next child, Amy, was born, he made another set of lights. When their three cousins across the hill were stricken, he made more.

Today, Floyd Martin's blue light beds, which cost about $1,000, are sought by Crigler families all over the world.

The Martins, old-order Mennonites, have electricity and a phone, but there is no computer, television or radio in their house. They travel by horse and buggy, except for emergencies when they hire a driver.

They had no moral qualms about using electric lights, as some more conservative families do.

But the disease forced other compromises, like accepting state insurance for their sick children, even though church rules forbid any form of government help. Generally, the church pays for all medical care.

''The hardest thing,'' says Katie Martin, a slender woman of 37 with a pale, thin face and dark brown eyes, ''was to hear them cry on cold winter nights and not just be able to wrap them in a blanket or curl up in our bed.''

She is standing in the brightly lit cow barn, overseeing the noontime milking of 65 Holsteins. Derick, now a strapping young man of 17, hauls long milking tubes along a motorized pulley. Amy, 15, attaches them to the cows.

The teenagers radiate sturdiness and health. Still, their mother eyes them nervously.

For years she has worried about bilirubin levels. She has cajoled her children back under the lights on the nights they crawled out, complaining about the heat. She has nursed them through gallbladder operations, and debilitating fatigue and other side-effects of Crigler's. She has made countless emergency visits to the clinic.

Now she has another worry: liver rejection. Both children have had transplants in the past three years and for Amy recovery was complicated. Ulcers. Lesions. Diabetes. High doses of steroids and anti-rejection therapy. Months of hospitalization. Martin estimates that Amy's total medical costs have amounted to over $1 million.

And yet, Martin knew her daughter had no choice. Bilirubin builds up dangerously in adolescence as skin gets more dense. And the psychological toll can be devastating.

For years, Martin received sad, lonely letters from a woman in England who survived Crigler's into early adulthood. In 2004, at the age of 30, she smashed her bed of lights. The disease killed her within a few weeks.

Martin tells this story to panicked parents who call from around the world when they have a yellow baby and they don't know where to turn.

She tells them exactly how to set the lights. She tells them what drugs to use and what to avoid. And she tells them about a special place and a doctor who is an expert on the disease.

''Go to Dr. Morton,'' she says. ''He can save your child.''

------

On a dewy spring morning in Strasburg, strains of Bach drift from a post-and-beam building on a hill overlooking an alfalfa field. Inside, rays of light wash down from rafters, silhouetting the doctor-musician as he cradles his cello.

For Holmes Morton, his daily dawn ''concert'' is a rare escape from the sadness of sick children and the desperation of parents who come to him for miracles.

There are no miracles, he tells them. For many rare diseases there are no cures.

To the families who travel from miles around, Morton's Clinic for Special Children is itself a miracle.

Here, on what was once an Amish farmer's field, in a building erected in traditional barn-raising fashion by 70 local men, some of the world's rarest diseases are identified. Children who would never have survived in the past are treated with special formulas and dietary regimens tailored solely to their needs. And because the local community helps pay for the nonprofit clinic through annual auctions, costs are far less than at a regular doctor's office.

Geneticists have long studied the Amish and Mennonites, descendants of Swiss and German Anabaptists who settled in Pennsylvania in the 1700s. Forbidden to marry outside their religion, the Plain People, as they are known, have a relatively high risk of being carriers of a rare disease.

But research generally takes place in university laboratories, far from actual patients and their illnesses.

At the Clinic for Special Children, laboratory director Erik Puffenberger studies a mass spectrometer and DNA sequencing machine in one room, while across the corridor an Amish family clusters around Morton to discuss their sick child. Heirloom quilts decorate the walls. A horse and buggy is tethered to a hitching post outside.

And new genes are being identified all the time.

''The real frontier of genetic medicine is in the everyday practice,'' Morton says, as he bounces over hilly back roads in his silver Jetta, waving at bearded farmers and straw-hatted boys.

With his thinning hair, walrus mustache, starched white shirt and bow-tie, Morton looks every inch the genial country doctor. But the 56-year-old, Harvard-trained pediatrician is far more. In 1989 he gave up a promising academic career to pursue his vision of the clinic, believing that the only way to understand rare diseases was to live in the communities where they occurred. Today, the clinic, which is run by Morton's wife Caroline, treats about 600 Amish and Mennonite children. Morton's work is recognized around the world.

''These children living with the sword of Damocles,'' Morton says. ''They need treatment, not just research.''

Morton is speaking not just of Crigler-Najjar syndrome, but of the many other rare disorders seen in the clinic. Maple syrup urine disease. Glutari aciduria. Pigeon breast disease. Pretzel syndrome.

Many of the disorders can be fatal -- or cruelly disfiguring -- if undetected. Like Crigler's, many are so unusual they are simply not recognized by general pediatricians.

The clinic now recommends all Amish and Mennonite newborns be routinely screened for more than 35 genetic diseases. In 2004 it discovered a gene implicated in some cases of sudden infant death syndrome. It has established links between rare metabolic disorders like glutari aciduria and diseases that are more common in the general population, like cerebral palsy.

''God sent Dr. Morton to us,'' says Norman Burkholder, after leaving his mules and plow one day to bring in his 9-year-old son. The child is dizzy and coughing and he complains, in Pennsylvania Dutch, that his stomach hurts.

Later the boy will be admitted to Lancaster General Hospital where he will spend days on a special formula prepared by Morton's clinic. The child has maple syrup urine disease, a rare enzyme deficiency that causes his urine and ear wax to smell like maple syrup. If he had not been properly diagnosed and the formula had not been available, he could have slipped into a coma and died.

Like Crigler-Najjar, there is no cure. The boy will eventually need a liver transplant.

------

John Crigler remembers being baffled by the jaundice disease he encountered among Amish newborns when he was a young pediatrician working with Najjar at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The babies all died.

''There wasn't any treatment, any hope, any cure,'' said Crigler, now 87. ''We were just spectators. There was nothing we could do.''

Patients began living longer in the 1970s when doctors realized that the wavelength and energy of blue light changes the nature of the bilirubin, allowing it to be excreted from the body.

There was even a brief time, in the late 1990s, when a cure seemed imminent. Experiments in rats suggested that chimeraplasty, a form of gene therapy, could also succeed in humans. The therapy is based on the use of a molecule called a chimeraplast, a synthetic blend of DNA and the related molecule RNA, that would enduce a patient's own cells to repair themselves.

At a conference of Crigler families in July 1999 Morton announced that the first human trials would begin on three of his patients in Lancaster General Hospital that fall.

''There was such excitement,'' recalls Katie Martin, who was pregnant with her third child at the time. ''We thought that soon we would get rid of the blue lights forever.''

Two months later an 18-year-old Arizonan named Jesse Gelsinger died during an unrelated gene-therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania. Funding for human trials dried up.

So did hope for Derick and Amy Martin.

Liver transplants are expensive and invasive and bring their own share of heartache and fear. Rejection can be especially hard for teenagers like Amy, craving normality after years under lights.

Amy has a smattering of freckles over pink cheeks and expressive eyes that light up when she boasts about her horse, Paintball, or the two bucks she shot when she went hunting with her Dad. She is proud of her transplant, despite her long recovery and all the anti-rejection medicine she must take.

She will even lift her long white dress to show off the scar that snakes down her chest and around her stomach.

Amy hated the lights, hated having to sleep without a blanket, hated the flies that crawled under the glass. Most of all she hated her eyes.

When she woke up after her transplant, she begged for a mirror.

Carefully, she scanned the whites for any trace of yellow.

''Wow,'' she thought. ''They're so blue.''

And then she thought, ''I'm not a Crigler's child anymore.''

Amy's uncle and aunt, John and Miriam Martin, have witnessed her trials even as they contemplate three transplants in their own family.

John is Katie Martin's brother; he has the same warm brown eyes and kind smile. His three eldest children have yellow eyes and honeyed skin.

Dawn, 12, is the eldest, a serious child with a mothering streak. Nine-year-old Eric is lanky and shy. Joyce, 8, is the mischievous one with the big imagination.

At their Mifflinburg farmhouse, Martin has built them a huge sunroom, all windows and light. He has fixed up one of Floyd Martin's inventions in the living room -- a 6-foot-high box of blue lights and mirrors with a door that the children climb into after school, their heads popping out of the top. They call it ''the shuttle'' He has taken them on vacation to Florida, to a family with a Crigler's child who let them borrow blue lights.

But the 33 year-old father cannot escape the agony of having cursed his children with his genes.

The new baby, Joel, doesn't have Crigler's. Nor does 20-month-old Johnny. When they were born, John says, it seemed like a miracle.

Now the family prays for another miracle -- a cure.

''Now I lay me down to sleep ... I pray the Lord my soul to keep ...''

Lying on their stomachs on their double bed, Dawn and Joyce chant their prayers in singsong unison. They are in their underwear, covered by a sheet. A heavy stainless steel canopy of lights hangs above them.

Their father kisses them goodnight in the dark. He cannot bear to turn on the blue lights or pull off their cover while they are still awake.

Later, he will creep back into their room and press a switch.

Outside, from far across the fields, a strange blue light will beckon in the dark.

    Blue Light Aids Ill Mennonite Children, NYT, 20.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Blue-Light-Kids.html

2 Raped by Minister Are Awarded $11.45 Million

May 19, 2007
The New York Times
By BRUCE LAMBERT

GARDEN CITY, N.Y., May 18 — In one of the largest judgments in a child sexual abuse suit against the Roman Catholic Church, a Long Island jury on Friday awarded a total of $11.45 million in damages to a young man and woman who were repeatedly raped by a youth minister as teenagers starting in the late 1990s.

The jury deliberated for seven days before finding that the Diocese of Rockville Centre, the sixth-largest in the United States; a church in East Meadow; and its pastor were negligent by hiring and retaining the man who abused the plaintiffs over a period of three years.

After the verdict, the woman tearfully embraced her mother, then held an impromptu news conference in a hallway at State Supreme Court in Nassau County. Saying that thousands of children have been victimized, she added, “I am their voice.”

The purpose of her suit was to “see the truth come out” and to “prevent the abuse of children everywhere,” she said. “Children cannot protect themselves from sexual predators.”

While awaiting his turn to speak, the other victim collapsed in the arms of a lawyer, and court aides had to revive him with oxygen.

“He was just overcome with emotion,” said one of his lawyers, Paul A. Mones.

Later, in a telephone interview, the young man said, “It was extremely difficult for me to relive the experience through the litigation process.” But he urged other victims to come forward because “these kids are going to need therapy and support — you have no idea.”

Both the woman, 23, and the man, 22, testified during the three-week trial that they suffered anxiety, depression, flashbacks, nightmares and difficulties in their careers and in social and romantic relationships as a result of being raped and sodomized by the youth minister, Matthew Maiello.

The jurors, four men and two women — most of them Catholics themselves — left the courthouse without comment.

A lawyer for the church defendants, Kevin McNiff of the firm Mulholland, Minion & Roe, said they were reviewing the verdict and their options.

A diocese spokesman, Sean Dolan, said it was “too early to say” if it would appeal.

“We humbly accept the decision of the jury,” Mr. Dolan added. “We need to try to understand better in terms of the actual dollar amount what that all means. We want to focus on the lessons we’ve learned over the last few years in creating the safest church environment we can. We’re really saddened by the terrible actions of Matthew Maiello, and I hope the award given by the jury helps the victims.”

The jury’s awards approached the $6 million given to each of two victims in a California case in 1998, according to Jeffrey Anderson, a lawyer who specializes in sexual abuse cases but was not involved in the Long Island case.

But the Long Island case was notable for more than the size of the judgments. Public attention in church cases has often focused on accused priests rather than on employees other than clergy members, like Mr. Maiello, now 33, who pleaded guilty in 2003 to raping and sodomizing four minors, including the two who sued. He served two years in prison and now lives in Connecticut.

This lawsuit was also the first abuse case against the Catholic Church in New York State — and one of the few in the nation — to go to a jury verdict. Most such suits against the church are dismissed, often because of the statute of limitations, or are quietly settled out of court.

“You very rarely get a chance to hear from the victims — how these guys operate, how the kids get trapped and how the parents get fooled — almost never,” said Mr. Mones, one of the lawyers. “And almost never do you get to hear a pedophile testify in detail; that’s very rare.” Mr. Maiello was subpoenaed to testify at the civil trial.

Convictions in most criminal cases on child sexual abuse, including Mr. Maiello’s, result from plea bargains.

The jury attributed 70 percent of the blame to Mr. Maiello, who did not contest the suit and has few assets.

But the jury also ruled that the church defendants — the Diocese of Rockville Centre; St. Raphael’s Roman Catholic Church in East Meadow; and its pastor, the Rev. Thomas Haggerty — acted “with reckless disregard for the safety of others in the negligent hiring and retention” of Mr. Maiello.

That finding of recklessness means that the church defendants are responsible to pay the full award if Mr. Maiello does not have the money for his share, said the victims’ lead lawyer, Michael G. Dowd.

The jury awarded $2.5 million to each victim for injuries and suffering to date, as well as $250,000 annually to the woman for the next 12 years, and $115,000 annually to the young man for the next 30 years. Her total would be $5.5 million, and his would be $5.95 million.

The diocese, comprising 1.4 million Catholics in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, is one of the nation’s largest and wealthiest. It was the target of a scathing Suffolk County grand jury report in 2003 that found years of sexual abuse complaints that were ignored and covered up.

Since then the diocese has imposed new safeguards, including background checks on employees and volunteers and preventive education for them and for church members.

The victims testified that Mr. Maiello pressured them into having sex with each other and him, plying them with marijuana and alcohol and videotaping them. The abuses started when, as 15-year-old virgins, they were summoned by him to his basement office. The abuse was repeated for years: in the school, rectory, convent and sanctuary, and later in homes, motels, a car, a truck and a boat, they said.

Mr. Maiello said that “God’s plan” brought them together, they said. He gave them prized roles in musical productions but also threatened harm through Mafia connections if they told their secrets, they said.

Other witnesses said that Father Haggerty hired Mr. Maiello even though he knew about Mr. Maiello’s “boundary” and “touching” issues and that Mr. Maiello’s supervisor at another church had said that he could not give a positive recommendation.

The witnesses also said Father Haggerty had ignored the advice of the parish business manager against the hiring and did not sufficiently heed complaints about Mr. Maiello’s conduct once he was hired.

The church’s lawyer, Brian R. Davey, argued that Mr. Maiello was totally at fault, church officials never knew about his crimes and they should not be blamed when the victims’ families saw nothing amiss.

    2 Raped by Minister Are Awarded $11.45 Million, NYT, 19.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/19/nyregion/19church.html

Religion News in Brief

May 17, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:12 p.m. ET
The New York Times

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Leaders for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Rev. Al Sharpton are planning an in-person meeting, a church spokesman said.

Sharpton asked for the meeting during a telephone apology he gave to two church elders after he said during a May 7 debate that Mormons don't believe in God.

''Mr. Sharpton and church leaders are looking at possible dates for a meeting, but nothing is imminent,'' church spokesman Scott Trotter said.

Sharpton spoke by phone with Russell M. Nelson and Henry B. Eyring, members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the second-tier of church leadership.

The minister and former Democratic presidential candidate's remarks were about Mitt Romney, a Mormon who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. Sharpton said that ''as for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyway, so don't worry about that, that's a temporary situation.''

Sharpton says the remark was distorted for political purposes and has apologized to ''regular Mormons'' for the slight.

Sharpton said he ''wasn't saying that Mormons didn't believe in God, I was saying that we weren't going to have to rely on atheists'' to defeat Romney.

Sharpton has not apologized to Romney, but called for a ''dialogue or reconciliation.''

A Romney spokesman has said nothing constructive would be accomplished by meeting with Sharpton. Romney has called Sharpton's remarks bigoted.

Sharpton has also raised questions about Romney's views on the way African-American Mormons were treated by their church before 1978, when only white men were allowed to hold certain religious offices.

-------- Presbyterian court says ban on gay clergy applies to gay candidates for ministry

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- The ban in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on ordaining gays who aren't celibate also extends to candidates for ministry, the denomination's high court said.

The Permanent Judicial Commission took up the issue in the case of a lesbian who was allowed to become a candidate for ministry in the Mission Presbytery in Texas even though she said she was in a same-sex relationship.

The moderator of the Texas governing body had said at the time that the requirement of chastity for unmarried clergy did not apply to those entering the candidacy process. The presbytery then voted to support the woman's candidacy -- moving her closer to ordination.

The following year, she withdrew her name from the roll of candidates. But the Judicial Commission said in a May 7 statement that it was still concerned that leaders of the Mission Presbytery had misread the denomination's governing Book of Order and therefore ''misled'' those who voted on the woman's candidacy.

Like many Protestant groups, the Presbyterian Church has been debating for years how it should interpret Scripture on gay relationships and other issues. Congregants who support full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the church have tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to challenge the ban.

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http://www.pcusa.org/

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Famed Harlem church in New York celebrates 200 years

NEW YORK (AP) -- When the Abyssinian Baptist Church was founded, Thomas Jefferson was president. Abraham Lincoln was not born yet. African-Americans were still enslaved, and would be for decades more.

A group of Ethiopian sea traders in lower Manhattan refused to participate in segregated church services and formed their own congregation, naming it for their homeland and taking many free blacks from other churches with them.

Two hundred years later, the church is going back to its roots.

Come September, the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III will lead a pilgrimage of about 200 church members and dignitaries on a pilgrimage to Ethiopia to mark the church's bicentennial.

The trip, he says, will highlight an observance that begins this month and ends in November 2008, the actual 200th anniversary of the church's origin.

''It was the first 'megachurch' of 2,000 members in the country,'' Butts said. ''We want to celebrate what that experience means, we want to talk about community development, spiritual renewal, and of course the history of Abyssinian Baptist as the primary and premier religious institution in Harlem.''

Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson visited the church, as did Jimmy Carter as a candidate. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. also made one appearance there in the late 1950s or early 1960s, Butts said. The Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, pastor at the time, ''was known then as 'Mr. Civil Rights,' but he acknowledged Dr. King,'' he said.

Today, the congregation is about 4,000, the largest black congregation in New York state.

-------- Embattled Jerusalem Patriarch says he is still supported by Jordan's King

ATHENS, Greece (AP) -- Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theofilos III of Jerusalem said Monday that he was counting on support from Jordan's King Abdullah II to help resolve a crisis over the handling of church property.

Jordan's Cabinet decided May 12 to ''withdraw its recognition'' of Theofilos ''for failing to fulfill the obligations he promised to the Jordanian government,'' saying he failed to act on a pledge to annul an unsanctioned church property sale to Israel.

The patriarch of Jerusalem requires recognition from Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority.

The Greek Orthodox Church abides by a 1958 Jordanian law banning the sale of any church property in Jerusalem, which Jordan ruled along with the West Bank until Israel seized the territories during the 1967 Middle East War.

Theofilos, enthroned in late 2005, replaced Patriarch Irineos I following claims he was involved in the unsanctioned sale of church property in Jerusalem to an Israeli company.

Irineos was demoted to the rank of monk after a rare meeting of world Orthodox leaders on the issue that year in Istanbul, Turkey.

In an interview with Greek private and state-run television channels, Theofilos said he had not been given enough time to resolve the property dispute.

''I have said repeatedly that the patriarchate must be regarded as a purely religious institution ... And I have said repeatedly that I am not a businessman,'' the Greek-born patriarch said. ''In Jordan, our relations with the king are excellent.''

Greece has expressed strong backing for Theofilos and described Jordan's decision as ''hasty.''

In Brussels, Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis met counterparts Abdul-Ilah al-Khatib of Jordan and Palestinian Ziad Abu Amr to discuss the issue, the Greek Foreign Ministry said.
 

-------- Malaysian leader says interfaith conference postponed, not canceled

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) -- Facing criticism from an opposition leader and a clergyman, Malaysia's prime minister insisted that a Muslim-Christian conference scheduled to be held in Malaysia in early May has been postponed, not canceled.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said he had asked for it to be delayed so he can attend. The Building Bridges seminar has been held annually for international Christian and Muslim scholars since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

''We will find another suitable date,'' Abdullah told the national news agency Bernama.

Malaysia is currently chair of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the world's largest Islamic grouping.

Opposition leader Lim Kit Siang had warned that canceling the conference would be a blow to the multiethnic country's reputation for religious tolerance.

The Rev. Hermen Shastri, general secretary of the Council of Churches of Malaysia, expressed dismay over the move and appealed to the government to review its decision.

Nearly 60 percent of Malaysia's 26 million people are Muslim, but there are large Buddhist, Christian and Hindu minorities whose right of worship is generally respected by the government.

However, interfaith relations have recently come under strain due to several religious disputes and an erosion of minority rights.

    Religion News in Brief, NYT, 17.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Religion-Briefs.html

Jerry Falwell, Moral Majority Founder, Dies at 73

May 16, 2007
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist preacher who founded the Moral Majority and brought the language and passions of religious conservatives into the hurly-burly of American politics, died yesterday in Lynchburg, Va. He was 73.

His death was announced by Liberty University, in Lynchburg, where Mr. Falwell, its founder, was chancellor. The university said the cause had not been determined, adding that he died in a hospital after being found unconscious yesterday morning in his university office.

Mr. Falwell went from a Baptist preacher in Lynchburg to a powerful force in electoral politics, at home in both the millennial world of fundamentalist Christianity and the earthly blood sport of the political arena. As much as anyone, he helped create the religious right as a political force, defined the issues that would energize it for decades and cemented its ties to the Republican Party.

He came to prominence first as a religious broadcaster through his “Old-Time Gospel Hour” and then, in 1979, as the leader of the Moral Majority, an organization whose very name drew a vivid line in the sand of American politics. After the organization disbanded a decade later, he remained a familiar and powerful figure, supporting Republicans like George W. Bush, mobilizing conservatives and finding his way into a thicket of controversies. And he built institutions and groomed leaders — including his two sons, who will succeed him in two important positions.

Mr. Falwell grew up in a household that he described as a battleground between the forces of God and the powers of Satan. In his public life he often had to walk a line between the certitudes of fundamentalist religion, in which the word of God was absolute and inviolate, and the ambiguities of mainstream politics, in which a message warmly received at his Thomas Road Baptist Church might not play as well on “NBC Nightly News.”

As a result, he was a lightning rod for controversy and caricature. After the Sept. 11 attacks, for example, he apologized for calling Muhammad a terrorist and for suggesting that the attacks had reflected God’s judgment on a nation spiritually weakened by the American Civil Liberties Union, providers of abortion and supporters of gay rights. He was ridiculed for an article in his National Liberty Journal suggesting that Tinky Winky, a character in the “Teletubbies” children’s show, could be a hidden homosexual signal because the character was purple, had a triangle on his head and carried a handbag.

Behind the controversies was a shrewd, savvy operator with an original vision for effecting political and moral change. He rallied religious conservatives to the political arena at a time when most fundamentalists and other conservative religious leaders were inclined to stay away. And he helped pulled off what had once seemed an impossible task: uniting religious conservatives from many faiths and doctrines by emphasizing what they had in common.

He had many failures as well as successes and always remained a divisive figure, demonized on the left in much the way Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, or Jane Fonda were on the right. Even so, political experts agree he was enormously influential.

“Behind the idea of the Moral Majority was this notion that there could be a coalition of these different religious groups that all agree on abortion and homosexuality and other issues even if they never agreed on how to read the Bible or the nature of God,” said John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron and an expert on religious conservatives.

“That was a real innovation,” Mr. Green continued, “And even if that’s an idea that did not completely originate with Falwell, it’s certainly an idea he developed and championed independently of others. It was a very important insight, and it’s had a huge influence on American politics.”

Seeds of Faith

Jerry Falwell was born Aug. 11, 1933, in Lynchburg. His ancestors there dated back to 1669, and his more immediate ones lived as if characters in the pageant of sin and redemption that formed his world view.

His paternal grandfather, Charles W. Falwell, embittered by the death of his wife and a favorite nephew, was a vocal and decisive atheist who refused to go to church and ridiculed those who did.

His father, Carey H. Falwell, was a flamboyant entrepreneur who opened his first grocery store when he was 22. He was soon operating 17 service stations, many with little restaurants and stores attached. He built oil storage tanks and owned an oil company and in 1927 began American Bus Lines, supplying old battery-operated movie projectors to show Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy movies to riders.

Later, he turned to bootlegging liquor, among other enterprises. His best-known business was the Merry Garden Dance Hall and Dining Room, high on a Virginia hilltop, which became the center of Virginia’s swing society. Carey Falwell, too, had no use for religion. He was left shaken forever by an episode in which he shot his brother to death. He became a heavy drinker and died of liver disease at the age of 55.

On the other hand, Mr. Falwell’s mother, the former Helen Beasley, was deeply religious. Every Sunday when he awoke, Mr. Falwell recalled, Charles Fuller’s “Old-Fashioned Revival Hour” was ringing out from the radio.

“It was my mother who planted the seeds of faith in me from the moment I was born,” Mr. Falwell said in his autobiography, “Strength for the Journey.”

What he saw in his own family, he said, was the battle between God and the Enemy, the malignant force just as real and just as determined to produce evil as God is to create good. It was the Enemy who destroyed his father and grandfather, he said, and God whose grace ennobled his mother.

In his telling, Mr. Falwell chose God on Jan. 20, 1952, when he was 18. It was an experience, he said, not of blinding lights and heavenly voices. “God came quietly into Mom’s kitchen” and answered her prayers, he said.

He declared his acceptance of Christ that night at the Park Avenue Baptist Church in Lynchburg, on an evening in which he also first saw the woman who would become his wife, the church pianist, Macel Pate. The next day he bought a Bible, a Bible dictionary and James Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Two months later, he decided he wanted to become a minister and spread the word.

He transferred from Lynchburg College, where he had hoped to study mechanical engineering, to Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Mo. Returning home, he decided to start his own church, an experience that melded his mother’s faith with his father’s entrepreneurial instincts. He started the Thomas Road Baptist Church with $1,000 and an initial congregation of 35 adults and their families in an abandoned building that had housed the Donald Duck Bottling Company.

Mr. Falwell began building his church in 1956 much as he would build a political movement. Carrying a yellow legal pad and a Bible, he set out to visit 100 homes a day, knocking on doors to seek members. Soon after the church opened, he began a half-hour daily radio broadcast. Six months later, he broadcast his first televised version of the “Old-Time Gospel Hour.” He was struck by how effective the radio and television broadcasts were in drawing new members.

“Television made me a kind of instant celebrity,” he wrote. “People were fascinated that they could see and hear me preach that same night in person.” On the church’s first anniversary, in 1957, 864 people showed up to worship, and he felt he was on his way. The church grew. Anticipating the megachurches to come, it morphed into a social service dynamo, with a home for alcoholics, a burgeoning Christian Academy, summer camps and worldwide missions.

In 1971, Mr. Falwell established Liberty University, originally Liberty Baptist College, with the intent of making it a national university for fundamentalist Christians. The same year, when the “Old-Time Gospel Hour” began broadcasting nationally from his church’s sanctuary, he gained a national audience at a time when televised evangelism was exploding.

Political Action

There were reversals as well. A lawsuit in July 1973 by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission accused the church of “fraud and deceit” and “gross insolvency” in the selling of $6.6 million worth of bonds for church expansion and services. The charges were dropped a month later after a United States District Court found that there had been no intentional wrongdoing.

As the cultural passions and transformations of the 1960s and ‘70s swept the nation, Mr. Falwell, like many religious leaders, struggled with what role to play. He saw ministers joining the civil rights movement and was unimpressed.

“Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners,” he said in a sermon titled “Ministers and Marchers” in March 1964. “If as much effort could be put into winning people to Jesus across the land as is being exerted in the present civil rights movement, America would be turned upside down for God.”

His position reflected his opposition at the time to the civil rights movement and his loyalty to a long fundamentalist tradition in which the faithful believed their role was to cater to the soul, not to the transitory tides of politics.

But Mr. Falwell said the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade, produced an enormous change in him. Soon he began preaching against the ruling and calling for Christians to become involved in political action.

In 1977, he supported the singer Anita Bryant’s efforts to repeal an ordinance granting equal rights to gay men and lesbians in Dade County, Fla. The next year, he played a similar role in California. He urged churches to register voters and for religious conservatives to campaign for candidates who supported their positions. He organized “I Love America” rallies, blending patriotism and conservative values; students at Liberty University produced their own upbeat presentations around the country.

As he told it, at a meeting of conservatives in his office in 1979, Paul M. Weyrich, the commentator and activist, said to him: “Jerry, there is in America a moral majority that agrees about the basic issues. But they aren’t organized.”

To Mr. Falwell, that suggested a movement encompassing more than just evangelical or fundamentalist Christians. He envisioned one that would also include other Protestants, Catholics, Jews, even atheists, all with a similar agenda on abortion, gay rights, patriotism and moral values.

“I was convinced,” he wrote, “that there was a ‘moral majority’ out there among these more than 200 million Americans sufficient in number to turn back the flood tide of moral permissiveness, family breakdown and general capitulation to evil and to foreign policies such as Marxism-Leninism.”

The movement, he said, would be pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-moral and pro-American — precisely the kind of broad agenda that could unite conservatives of different faiths and backgrounds. His agenda also included fervent support for Israel, even if his relations with Jews were often rocky; in 1999, for example, he apologized for saying that the Antichrist was probably alive and if so would be in the form of a male Jew.

The Moral Majority, he said, had a basic goal in building its membership: “Get them saved, baptized and registered.” He held up a Bible at political rallies, telling followers: “If a man stands by this book, vote for him. If he doesn’t, don’t.” Within three years of the Moral Majority’s founding, he boasted of a $10 million budget, 100,000 trained clergymen and several million volunteers.

In 1980, the Moral Majority was credited with playing a role in the election of Ronald Reagan and in dozens of Congressional races. The election gave resounding evidence of the potential of religious conservatives in politics. They themselves were electrified by their influence, but many others were alarmed, fearing an intolerant movement of lockstep zealots voting en masse for the preachers’ designated candidates.

A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of Yale University in 1981, accused the Moral Majority and other conservative groups of a “radical assault” on the nation’s political values.

“A self-proclaimed Moral Majority and its satellite of client groups, cunning in the use of a native blend of old intimidation and new technology, threaten the values” of the nation, Mr. Giamatti told Yale’s entering freshman class of 1985. He called the organization “angry at change, rigid in the application of chauvinistic slogans, absolutistic in morality.”

But many of those who defend mixing religion and politics, not all of them conservatives, say it is a form of bigotry to seek to deny religious conservatives their voice in the political process.

Mr. Falwell disbanded the Moral Majority in 1989, saying “our mission is accomplished.” But he remained a lightning rod. While running for the Republican presidential nomination against George W. Bush in 2000, Senator John McCain of Arizona characterized Mr. Falwell and the evangelist Pat Robertson as “forces of evil” and called them “agents of intolerance.” He soon apologized, but the remarks, believed to have alienated the party’s base, were seen as enormously damaging to his candidacy. The two men later reconciled. Last year, Mr. McCain delivered the commencement address at Liberty University.

For all the controversy, Mr. Falwell was often an unconvincing villain. His manner was patient and affable. His sermons had little of the white-hot menace of those of his contemporaries like Jimmy Swaggart. He shared podiums with Senator Kennedy, appeared at hostile college campuses and in 1984 spent an evening before a crowd full of hecklers at Town Hall in New York, probably not changing many minds but nevertheless expressing good will. He seemed “about as menacing as the corner grocer,” the conservative writer Joseph Sobran wrote in National Review in 1980.

Many experts say his role as a direct participant in politics may have peaked with the Moral Majority. Others, like Ralph Reed and Karl Rove, were even more successful in taking Mr. Falwell’s ideas and translating them into lasting political power and influence. But he never left the public eye, whether trying to rescue the foundering PTL ministry in the late 1980s, seeing his libel suit against Larry Flynt go to the Supreme Court or describing President Bill Clinton as an “ungodly liar.”

Culture vs. Politics

It could be argued that he affected electoral politics more than mainstream culture. The Moral Majority, for instance, began a campaign to “clean up” television programs in the 1980s, but no one viewed the initiative as a great success. After President Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in his impeachment trial, Mr. Weyrich wrote his supporters to say that maybe there was not a “moral majority” after all.

For all Mr. Falwell’s influence on the world stage, home always remained Lynchburg and his church. Last year the church moved to grand and vast new quarters in Lynchburg, with a membership of about 22,000.

Besides his wife, Macel, whom he married in 1958, Mr. Falwell is survived by two sons, Jerry Jr., of Goode, Va., who will succeed his father as Liberty University’s chancellor, and the Rev. Jonathan Falwell, of Lynchburg, who will become senior pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church; a daughter, Jeannie Savas, a surgeon, of Richmond; a fraternal twin brother, Gene, of Rustburg, Va.; and eight grandchildren.

To the end of his life, Mr. Falwell remained active at Liberty University, expanding the campus by buying surrounding land and erecting buildings. And he continued to participate in the political discourse, meeting with prospective Republican candidates for president in the 2008 campaign and inviting them to speak at Liberty.

He preached every Sunday and remained openly political in his sermons, declaring, for example, that the election of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to the presidency would represent a grave threat to the country.

He surprised some critics, who felt his views on some social issues, like gay rights, had moderated over time.

But, at his core, he remained through his career what he was at the beginning: a preacher and moralist, a believer in the Bible’s literal truth, with convictions about religious and social issues rooted in his reading of Scripture.

So there was no distinction at all between his view of the political and the spiritual. “We are born into a war zone where the forces of God do battle with the forces of evil,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Sometimes we get trapped, pinned down in the crossfire. And in the heat of that noisy, distracting battle, two voices call out for us to follow. Satan wants to lead us into death. God wants to lead us into life eternal.”

Margalit Fox contributed reporting.

    Jerry Falwell, Moral Majority Founder, Dies at 73, NYT, 16.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/obituaries/16falwell.html

Falwell in 'Gravely Serious' Condition

May 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:08 p.m. ET
The New York Times

LYNCHBURG, Va. (AP) -- The Rev. Jerry Falwell was hospitalized in ''gravely serious'' condition after being found unconscious Tuesday in his office at Liberty University, a school executive said.

Ron Godwin, the university's executive vice president, said Falwell, 73, was found unresponsive around 10:45 a.m. and taken to Lynchburg General Hospital. Godwin said he was not sure what caused the collapse, but he said Falwell ''has a history of heart challenges.''

''I had breakfast with him, and he was fine at breakfast,'' Godwin said. ''He went to his office, I went to mine, and they found him unresponsive.''

Godwin said Falwell was receiving emergency care. A hospital spokeswoman said she had ''no information to release at this time.''

Falwell, a television evangelist who founded the Moral Majority, became the face of the religious right in the 1980s. He later founded the conservative Liberty University and serves as its president.

Falwell survived two serious health scares in early 2005. He was hospitalized for two weeks with what was described as a viral infection, then was hospitalized again a few weeks later after going into respiratory arrest. Later that year, doctors found a 70 percent blockage in an artery, which they opened with stents.

Liberty University's commencement is scheduled for Saturday, with former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich as the featured speaker.

    Falwell in 'Gravely Serious' Condition, NYT, 15.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Jerry-Falwell.html

 Religious Groups Reap Share of U.S. Aid for Pet Projects        NYT        13.5.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/business/13lobby.html

Religious Groups

Reap Share of U.S. Aid for Pet Projects

May 13, 2007
The New York Times
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES and ANDREW W. LEHREN

St. Vincent College, a small Benedictine college southeast of Pittsburgh, wanted to realign a two-lane state road serving the campus. But the state transportation department did not have the money.

So St. Vincent tried Washington instead. The college hired a professional lobbyist in 2004 and, later that year, two paragraphs were tucked into federal appropriation bills with the help of Representative John P. Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, awarding $4 million solely for that project. College officials said the work would improve the safety and appearance of the road into the campus, which President Bush visited two days ago to give the college’s commencement address.

Religious organizations have long competed for federal contracts to provide social services, and they have tried to influence Congress on matters of moral and social policy — indeed, most major denominations have a presence in Washington to monitor such legislation. But an analysis of federal records shows that some religious organizations are also hiring professional lobbyists to pursue the narrowly tailored individual appropriations known as earmarks.

A New York Times analysis shows that the number of earmarks for religious organizations, while small compared with the overall number, have increased sharply in recent years. From 1989 to January 2007, Congress approved almost 900 earmarks for religious groups, totaling more than $318 million, with more than half of them granted in the Congressional session that included the 2004 presidential election. By contrast, the same analysis showed fewer than 60 earmarks for faith-based groups in the Congressional session that covered 1997 and 1998.

Earmarks are individual federal grants that bypass the normal appropriations and competitive-bidding procedures. They have been blamed for feeding the budget deficit and have figured in several Capitol Hill bribery scandals, prompting recent calls for reform from White House and Congressional leaders.

They are distinct from the competitive, peer-reviewed grants that have traditionally been used by religious institutions and charities to obtain money for social services.

As the number of faith-based earmarks grew, the period from 1998 to 2005 saw a tripling in the number of religious organizations listed as clients of Washington lobbying firms and a doubling in the amount they paid for services, according to an analysis by The Times.

Sometimes the earmarks benefited programs aimed at helping others. There have been numerous earmarks totaling $5.4 million for World Vision, the global humanitarian ministry, to conduct job training, youth mentoring and gang prevention programs. Another earmark provided $150,000 to help St. Jerome’s Church in the Bronx build a community center, and Fuller Theological Seminary, a leading evangelical seminary in Pasadena, Calif., received $2 million to study gambling and juvenile violence.

But many of the earmarks address the prosaic institutional needs of some specific religious group, like the ones giving the Mormon Church control over two parcels of federal land of historic significance to the church, transferring 10 acres of federal forest land to a small church in Florida, allowing a historic church surrounded by a federal park in Ohio to use public land to expand its parking space, and handing several acres of government land over to a Catholic college in New Hampshire. (An interactive database of almost 900 faith-based earmarks can be found at nytimes.com.)

Earmarks have also helped finance new buildings on religious college campuses, including a fitness center at Malone College, a small evangelical Christian liberal arts college in Canton, Ohio.

The $1 million that helped build the center came from an earmark by Representative Ralph S. Regula, whose district includes the college, according to Suzanne Thomas, director of communications for the college. Another earmark helped pay for a new school of nursing, she said.

In seeking the earmarks, the college hired a Washington lobbyist “to help us with a ‘boots on the ground’ program of meeting with various Congressional and Senate leaders,” Ms. Thomas said, noting that many private colleges are enlisting similar lobbying help.

Several scholars who wrote books about religious advocacy work in Washington in the 1980s and early 1990s say the push for earmarks identified in The Times analysis represents a sharp departure from the lobbying strategies traditionally associated with religious groups. One of them, Allen D. Hertzke, a professor at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, said, “I never heard religious lobbyists talk about earmarks.” That view was echoed by Daniel J.<133>B. Hofrenning, a professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn.: “Getting heavily into the pork-barrel politics of earmarks — that is a distinctive change.”

It is a shift that some religious advocates find worrisome.

“Earmarks are bad public policy,” said Maureen Shea, director of the Episcopal Office of Government Relations in Washington. “If earmarks are not in the public interest, I would wonder why the faith community would be involved in them. It would hurt our credibility.”

James E. Winkler, who has represented the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society since 2000, says he fears that the pursuit of earmarks could muffle religion’s moral voice. “For example, we’ve opposed the war since day one,” he said. “But what if an earmark benefiting us — money for a Methodist seminary, perhaps — is attached to the supplemental appropriation for the war? You can see how very serious moral conflicts could arise.”

The Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals, said that while religious organizations should be able to compete for federal money, such groups “shouldn’t do that through earmarks.” He explained, “As good stewards of the public trust, we have to be transparent and above board — and earmarks are not transparent or above board.”

And, constitutional lawyers point out, because the First Amendment prohibits direct government financing of religious activities, earmarks that steer money to religious groups pose constitutional risks. Indeed, several faith-based earmarks were successfully challenged as unconstitutional long after Congress approved them.

Paul Marcone, a lobbyist and former Capitol Hill staff member who specializes in getting earmarks for nonprofit clients, disputes the notion that religious groups should not pursue them.

“Despite what the critics say, there is far more transparency in earmarks than in the discretionary grant process,” Mr. Marcone said. “It’s the difference between unelected bureaucrats using a peer-review process and an elected member of Congress.”

Applying for competitive government grants “is a very frustrating process,” Mr. Marcone added. “You might score very high and have an innovative program, and still not get funded.” By contrast, he said, all his nonprofit clients who sought earmarks received grants within two years of signing on with him.

The lobbying firm to which Malone College and dozens of other religious organizations have turned is Mr. Marcone’s former employer, the Russ Reid Company, based in Pasadena, Calif. Since 1964, Russ Reid has provided direct-mail and other fund-raising services to some of the nation’s largest charities, like World Vision and Habitat for Humanity.

But it also maintains a government relations office in Washington, directed by Mark D. McIntyre, a former Congressional press secretary and a vice presidential speechwriter in the Reagan administration. “If your focus is on how faith-based organizations are getting earmarks, I’m your guy,” Mr. McIntyre said in a brief telephone conversation last month. But the company subsequently canceled an interview with Mr. McIntyre and declined to comment further about his work.

Among the dozens of institutions for which Russ Reid has helped obtain earmarks are several faith-based rescue missions, including the Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries, the Light of Life Mission in Pittsburgh and the Gospel Rescue Ministries of Washington; a host of religious colleges and seminaries, including Fuller seminary and Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, Calif., which got a $750,000 earmark for its new science center; and various Catholic ministries, including the specialized children’s educational programs of the Holy Family Institute in Pittsburgh.

Russ Reid has also lobbied for earmarks for World Vision, the humanitarian service ministry. Seeking earmarks is a departure for World Vision. “On the international side, we do not do earmark advocacy,” said Joseph Mettimano, director of public policy and advocacy. Instead of competing for an earmarked slice of money, the charity joins with other aid organizations to lobby for a bigger pie of foreign aid, he explained, adding that similar solidarity on the domestic front could “absolutely” be beneficial.

World Vision is evaluating whether to continue to seek earmarks, according to Romanita Hairston, its vice president for domestic programs. A main concern is the cost-effectiveness of such financing, but the controversy over earmarking is also being weighed, she said.

Among the beneficiaries of Mr. Marcone’s lobbying was the Silver Ring Thing, a faith-based abstinence program for teenagers. The program’s earmarked grant was suspended after being challenged as unconstitutional in May 2005, but other earmarks have been granted to Silver Ring Thing programs in Pennsylvania, Alabama and South Carolina.

Federal law and regulations require that all faith-based recipients of earmarks use the money only for non-religious purposes. But a federal appeals court decision late last year has raised fresh constitutional questions about earmarks awarded specifically to religious rescue missions.

The ruling came in a pending case that involves a homeless shelter owned by the city of Boise, Idaho, but operated, under city contract, by the Boise Rescue Mission. In a preliminary ruling, a trial judge refused to ban voluntary worship services at the city-owned shelter.

In November, the Federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco reversed that decision, citing “serious questions” about whether the city’s support for the faith-based rescue mission has the unconstitutional effect of advancing religion.

Constitutional questions aside, the political controversy over earmarks has already begun to affect their availability for all petitioners, including faith-based groups. But some lobbyists are optimistic that earmarks for faith-based groups and other nonprofits will be spared.

Indeed, Mr. Marcone said that increasing the transparency of the earmark process could actually work to the advantage of faith-based groups and other deserving nonprofit groups. If members of Congress are required to put their names on their earmarks, he explained, “they are going to want to award money to programs that are going to make them look good, and those are going to be groups that are doing good work.”

But for those who believe religious organizations should not pursue private-purpose earmarks, that is not necessarily good news.

Clyde Wilcox, a Georgetown University professor who has written extensively on religion and politics, said religious groups would naturally justify earmarks. But their moral authority in Washington — “the extra prophetic power of the religious voice,” as he put it — largely arises from the fact that they are not seen as self-interested, he said. “The loss of that prophetic voice would be profound.”

Kenneth Wald, a professor at the University of Florida who also studies religion in the political arena, foresees a more pragmatic danger for religious organizations that lobby for earmarks. “If they start to act like any other special interest, they’ll start to be treated like any other special interest,” he said. “I think it’s nuts to take that risk.”

    Religious Groups Reap Share of U.S. Aid for Pet Projects, NYT, 13.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/business/13lobby.html?hp

In God, Distrust

May 13, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL KINSLEY

Observers of the Christopher Hitchens phenomenon have been expecting a book about religion from him around now. But this impressive and enjoyable attack on everything so many people hold dear is not the book we were expecting.

First in London 30 or more years ago, then in New York and for the last couple of decades in Washington, Hitchens has established himself as a character. This character draws on such familiar sources as the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene; the leftist politics of the 1960s (British variant); and — of course — the person of George Orwell. (Others might throw in the flower-clutching Bunthorne from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Patience,” but that is probably not an intentional influence.) Hitchens is the bohemian and the swell, the dashing foreign correspondent, the painstaking literary critic and the intellectual engagé. He charms Washington hostesses but will set off a stink bomb in the salon if the opportunity arises.

His conversation sparkles, not quite effortlessly, and if he is a bit too quick to resort to French in search of le mot juste, his jewels of erudition, though flashy, are real. Or at least they fool me. Hitchens was right to choose Washington over New York and London.

His enemies would like to believe he is a fraud. But he isn’t, as the very existence of his many enemies tends to prove. He is self-styled, to be sure, but no more so than many others in Washington — or even in New York or London — who are not nearly as good at it. He is a principled dissolute, with the courage of his dissolution: he enjoys smoking and drinking, and not just the reputation for smoking and drinking — although he enjoys that too. And through it all he is productive to an extent that seems like cheating: 23 books, pamphlets, collections and collaborations so far; a long and often heavily researched column every month in Vanity Fair; frequent fusillades in Slate and elsewhere; and speeches, debates and other public spectacles whenever offered.

The big strategic challenge for a career like this is to remain interesting, and the easiest tactic for doing that is surprise. If they expect you to say X, you say minus X.

Consistency is foolish, as the man said. (Didn’t he?) Under the unwritten and somewhat eccentric rules of American public discourse, a statement that contradicts everything you have ever said before is considered for that reason to be especially sincere, courageous and dependable. At The New Republic in the 1980s, when I was the editor, we used to joke about changing our name to “Even the Liberal New Republic,” because that was how we were referred to whenever we took a conservative position on something, which was often. Then came the day when we took a liberal position on something and we were referred to as “Even the Conservative New Republic.”

As this example illustrates, among writers about politics, the surprise technique usually means starting left and turning right. Trouble is, you do this once and what’s your next party trick?

Christopher Hitchens had seemed to be solving this problem by turning his conversion into an ideological “Dance of the Seven Veils.” Long ago he came out against abortion. Interesting! Then he discovered and made quite a kosher meal of the fact that his mother, deceased, was Jewish, which under Jewish law meant he himself was Jewish. Interesting!! (He was notorious at the time for his anti-Zionist sympathies.) In the 1990s, Hitchens was virulently, and somewhat inexplicably, hostile to President Bill Clinton. Interesting!!! You would have thought that Clinton’s decadence — the thing that bothered other liberals and leftists the most — would have positively appealed to Hitchens. Finally and recently, he became the most (possibly the only) intellectually serious non-neocon supporter of George W. Bush’s Iraq war. Interesting!!!!

Where was this train heading? Possibly toward an open conversion to mainline conservatism and quick descent into cliché and demagoguery (the path chosen by Paul Johnson, a somewhat similar British character of the previous generation). But surely there was time for a few more intellectual adventures before retiring to an office at the Hoover Institution or some other nursing home of the mind. One obvious possibility stood out: Hitchens, known to be a fervid atheist, would find God and take up religion. The only question was which flavor he would choose. Embrace Islam? Too cute. Complete the half-finished Jewish script? Become a Catholic, following the path well trodden by such British writers as Waugh and Greene? Or — most daring and original — would he embrace the old Church of England (Episcopalianism in America) and spend his declining years writing about the beauty of the hymns, the essential Britishness of village churchyards, the importance of protecting religion from the dangers of excessive faith, and so on?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, Hitchens is either playing the contrarian at a very high level or possibly he is even sincere. But just as he had us expecting minus X, he confounds us by reverting to X. He has written, with tremendous brio and great wit, but also with an underlying genuine anger, an all-out attack on all aspects of religion. Sometimes, instead of the word “religion,” he refers to it as “god-worship,” which, although virtually a tautology (isn’t “object of worship” almost a definition of a god?), makes the practice sound sinister and strange.

Hitchens is an old-fashioned village atheist, standing in the square trying to pick arguments with the good citizens on their way to church. The book is full of logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever. How could Christ have died for our sins, when supposedly he also did not die at all? Did the Jews not know that murder and adultery were wrong before they received the Ten Commandments, and if they did know, why was this such a wonderful gift? On a more somber note, how can the “argument from design” (that only some kind of “intelligence” could have designed anything as perfect as a human being) be reconciled with the religious practice of female genital mutilation, which posits that women, at least, as nature creates them, are not so perfect after all? Whether sallies like these give pause to the believer is a question I can’t answer.

And all the logical sallies don’t exactly add up to a sustained argument, because Hitchens thinks a sustained argument shouldn’t even be necessary and yet wouldn’t be sufficient. To him, it’s blindingly obvious: the great religions all began at a time when we knew a tiny fraction of what we know today about the origins of Earth and human life. It’s understandable that early humans would develop stories about gods or God to salve their ignorance. But people today have no such excuse. If they continue to believe in the unbelievable, or say they do, they are morons or lunatics or liars. “The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal,” he remarks, unsympathetically.

Although Hitchens’s title refers to God, his real energy is in the subtitle: “religion poisons everything.” Disproving the existence of God (at least to his own satisfaction and, frankly, to mine) is just the beginning for Hitchens. In fact, it sometimes seems as if existence is just one of the bones Hitchens wants to pick with God — and not even the most important. If God would just leave the world alone, Hitchens would be glad to let him exist, quietly, in retirement somewhere. Possibly the Hoover Institution.

Hitchens is attracted repeatedly to the principle of Occam’s razor: that simple explanations are more likely to be correct than complicated ones. (E.g., Earth makes a circle around the Sun; the Sun doesn’t do a complex roller coaster ride around Earth.) You might think that Occam’s razor would favor religion; the biblical creation story certainly seems simpler than evolution. But Hitchens argues effectively again and again that attaching the religious myth to what we know from science to be true adds nothing but needless complication.

For Hitchens, it’s personal. He is a great friend of Salman Rushdie, and he reminds us that it wasn’t just some crazed fringe Muslim who threatened Rushdie’s life, killed several others and made him a virtual prisoner for the crime of writing a novel. Religious leaders from all the major faiths, who disagree on some of the most fundamental questions, managed to put aside their differences to agree that Rushdie had it coming. (Elsewhere, Hitchens notes tartly that if any one of the major faiths is true, then the others must be false in important respects — an obvious point often forgotten in the warm haze of ecumenism.)

Hitchens’s erudition is on display — impressively so, and perhaps sometimes pretentiously so. In one paragraph, he brings in Stephen Jay Gould, chaos theory and Saul Bellow; pronounces the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” “engaging but abysmal” (a typical Hitchens aside: cleverly paradoxical? witlessly oxymoronic? take your pick) in the way it explains to a “middlebrow audience” Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle; and winds down through a discussion of the potential of stem cells. Nevertheless, and in spite of all temptations, he has written an entire book without a single reference to Sir Isaiah Berlin, the fox or the hedgehog.

But speaking of foxes, Hitchens has outfoxed the Hitchens watchers by writing a serious and deeply felt book, totally consistent with his beliefs of a lifetime. And God should be flattered: unlike most of those clamoring for his attention, Hitchens treats him like an adult.

Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time magazine.

    In God, Distrust, NYT, 13.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/review/Kinsley-t.html

Religion in the News

May 11, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:40 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WOODBRIDGE, N.J. (AP) -- Jim McGreevey has gone from altar boy to mayor to the nation's first openly gay governor.

From the moment he stood at a podium in 2004 and announced he was a ''gay American'' who was resigning because of an affair with a male staffer (who denies it), people wondered what McGreevey's Act Two would be.

Now we know: He is taking steps toward becoming an Episcopal priest.

Embroiled in a bitter divorce battle, McGreevey joined the Episcopal Church and entered a program for prospective clergy deciding whether the priesthood is their true calling.

Raised Roman Catholic, McGreevey was accepted into the Episcopal Church on April 29 at St. Bartholomew's Church in Manhattan. This fall, he will start studying at the Episcopal General Theological Seminary in New York.

Preparing for the priesthood usually takes at least three years, but can last much longer.

''Where Mr. McGreevey goes with this is up to him,'' school spokesman Bruce Parker said. ''We have a lot of people studying here who are not interested in ordination at all.''

The former governor has joined a denomination embroiled in its own controversy: The Episcopal Church caused an uproar in the global Anglican family in 2003 by consecrating the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

Anglican leaders have given the U.S. denomination until Sept. 30 to step back from its support of gays or risk losing its full membership in the 77 million-member Anglican Communion.

Within the 2.3 million-member U.S. denomination, theological conservatives are a minority. Many Episcopal parishes are welcoming of same-sex partners and gay clergy, and several bishops allow individual priests to conduct blessing ceremonies for same-gender couples.

Some see an inspiring tale of redemption in McGreevey's new vocation; others see him as something akin to a bad rash that won't go away.

''He needs a lobotomy, not a collar,'' said Tom Balasia, who was waiting for a haircut in the same barbershop that used to trim McGreevey's locks when he was mayor of Woodbridge. ''He's a liar who's hiding behind the cloth. He should be ashamed to show his face.''

But Steve Goldstein, head of Garden State Equality, the state's leading gay rights group, said reaction in the gay community has been overwhelmingly positive.

''If I were not a nice Jewish boy studying to be a rabbi, I would embrace Jim McGreevey as my pastor in a New Jersey minute,'' he said. ''I think it will take about one week for a congregation to fall in love with him.''

McGreevey declined to be interviewed by The Associated Press.

Word of McGreevey's plans came the same week as his estranged wife, Dina Matos McGreevey, hit the talk show circuit to promote her book, ''Silent Partner,'' about their life together and subsequent breakup. Their ongoing divorce has become so nasty that a judge scolded the two to use common sense and remember that their daughter, now 5, will someday read what they are saying about each other.

Dina Matos McGreevey did not respond to requests for comment left at her office and through her book publicist. But she issued a statement to WABC Channel 7, a sister company of her publisher, terming his seminary plans ''the most absurd thing I've ever heard.''

''He needs to be in the spotlight,'' she said. ''I am astounded by his arrogance.''

McGreevey stepped down in 2004, claiming he had an affair with Golan Cipel, whom he appointed as homeland security adviser, and that Cipel threatened to sue him. Cipel denies having an affair with McGreevey, claiming he was sexually harassed by the ex-governor.

Many in his former hometown see McGreevey as a cunning political operative, even now. They note he got married and had a child knowing he was gay, resigned before Cipel could accuse him of wrongdoing, wrote a tell-all book just as he and his wife were hashing out divorce terms, and joined a new religion and the seminary the week his wife's side of the story came out in her book.

''He was deceitful, he lied, and if he thinks he's redeeming himself now, I'm not so sure,'' said resident Ken Zelenakas. ''Please, get him out of the papers. There's more important things to write about than Jim McGreevey.''

A close friend of the former governor, state Sen. Raymond Lesniak, insists McGreevey had long been interested in becoming a priest or religious member.

''It's always been on his mind,'' said Lesniak, who attends prayer meetings with McGreevey. ''It's been a natural progression since he acknowledged who he truly is.''

Lesniak said that since being received into the Episcopal Church, ''he's very much at peace and yet at the same time disturbed by the fact that it came out at that time.''

''He would have preferred to have had this happen privately, but him being who he is, that's not possible,'' Lesniak said.

Louie Crew, a McGreevey friend from north Jersey who founded the group Integrity, an Episcopal ministry for gays, said the former governor could be an effective minister.

''A lot of energy comes when people go through life-changing experiences, especially identity crises,'' he said. ''Sometimes when you get knocked down, that's the time to start asking yourself the really important questions.''

The pulpit isn't the only wooden lectern in McGreevey's future; he also holds forth in the classroom.

McGreevey teaches at Kean University (named after the family of another famous New Jersey governor), earning $17,500 as ''executive in residence.''

He conducts guest lectures in the school's Executive Master's of Business Administration program. So far, he has taught a class on law and ethics, and another on management and leadership. The head of the state's Republican party likened McGreevey teaching an ethics class to ''Doctor Kevorkian teaching health maintenance.''

But Crew said McGreevey's talents from the political world, an asset in ministry, might not lead the former governor to the pulpit.

''He is obviously a very capable person in terms of moving with and juggling a lot of people,'' Crew said. ''Instead of some big, visible leadership role, that may translate into running one of the most efficient soup kitchens in the world, where no one knows who you are.''

Associated Press writers Jeffrey Gold and Janet Frankston Lorin in Newark contributed to this story.

    Religion in the News, NYT, 11.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Religion-in-the-News.html

Religion Guided 3 Held in Fort Dix Plot

May 10, 2007
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM and ANDREA ELLIOTT

PHILADELPHIA, May 9 — The three Duka brothers — Eljvir, Shain and Dritan — not only prayed here at the Al Aqsa Islamic Center, but also recently began repairing its roof.

The work came naturally to them, as members of a large family of ethnic Albanian immigrants who own more than a dozen roofing companies in New York and New Jersey. They fixed the roof free of charge, encouraged by their imam to do good deeds. One congregant said the men were storing up credit for “the afterlife.”

But the job remains half finished after the brothers and three other Muslim men were taken into custody this week, charged with plotting a terrorist attack against soldiers at the Fort Dix military reservation. Their arrests reverberated through the extended Duka dynasty, from southern New Jersey to the village of Debar, in Macedonia, the family’s ancestral home.

“It’s fine to be a religion man,” said Murat Duka, 55, a distant relative of the defendants who was the first of the Dukas — now numbering about 200 — to move to the Northeast and work as a roofer. “But if you get too much to the religion, you get out of your mind and you do stupid things.”

More than 4,600 miles away is Debar, a village near the Albanian border, where the influence of American émigrés is seen in restaurants named Manhattan, Dallas and Miami. In Debar, Elez Duka, a first cousin of the three suspects, expressed disbelief Wednesday that they could be involved in a scheme inspired by Islamic radicals.

“This has to be political propaganda,” said Mr. Duka, 29, who recently opened an Internet cafe there with money sent by his own brothers in America. “America has always helped us.”

One day after the men were arraigned in United States District Court in Camden, a portrait is emerging of the five who face charges of conspiring to kill American military personnel, which could send them to prison for life. Much less is known about the sixth, Agron Abdullahu, 24, who the authorities say was a sniper in Kosovo but who faces lesser charges, carrying up to 10 years.

Serdar Tatar, 23, a Turkish immigrant who lives in Philadelphia, had grown so religious over the last two years that his father, Muslim Tatar, said they had become estranged. Serdar’s Russian-born wife, who is pregnant with twins, said he was so busy working that he rarely went to the mosque, but sometimes read the Koran and helped her 11-year-old son with his homework.

Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, 22, a Palestinian born in Amman, Jordan, had for the last year kept up an exhausting routine of work, sleep and prayer, according to his mother. He drove a cab at night in Philadelphia, had recently dropped out of Camden County Community College to help the family pay two mortgages and attended services occasionally at the Al-Aqsa center.

And there were the Dukas, ages 23, 26 and 28, who came to this country illegally, more than a decade ago. The brothers, like many of their relatives and fellow ethnic Albanian immigrants in the area, have worked in roofing, coming to own two companies, in addition to a pizzeria. They are not from an Arabic-speaking nation — though one is married to a woman from Jordan — but they sometimes used Arabic names for their roofing businesses: Qadr, which in Arabic means destiny, and Inshala, an unusual spelling for a commonplace expression that means “if God wills it.”

It is not fully known how the Dukas met the other defendants, but their lives began to intersect as early as 1999, when Mr. Tatar, Mr. Shnewer and Eljvir Duka, known as Elvis, were all enrolled at Cherry Hill West High School.

One of Mr. Shnewer’s five sisters married Eljvir Duka and is now pregnant. On Wednesday, Lamese and Israa Shnewer, ages 12 and 14, stood in the threshold of their house in Cherry Hill, holding tabloid newspapers with their brother’s picture splashed across the front. Cars slowed down as they passed. People snapped pictures with their cellphones.

Israa pointed to a neighbor’s house and said, “They hated us to begin with.”

The criminal complaint filed against the suspects on Tuesday portrayed Mr. Shnewer as the leader of the group, speaking most frequently in taped conversations about tactics. But his mother, Faten Shnewer, said in an interview that the charges “made no sense.”

She said that televised images from the war in Iraq had angered him, and wondered whether, while he was watching the news, he had said something that was misinterpreted by the authorities. When the authorities searched the family’s home, they took a Koran, along with the mortgage bills and other household items, Mrs. Shnewer said.

“He’s a good boy,” she said as she stood in the doorway of a relative’s home. “I’m proud of who we are.”

Co-workers and relatives described him as shy with a sweet nature. “Mohamad was like a teddy bear,” said Jaime Antrim, the manager of a restaurant in Marlton, where Mr. Shnewer once worked. He showed his religious devotion in some ways — he would not eat pizza cut with a knife that had come into contact with pork — but also served alcohol and did not break for the daily Muslim prayers.

Muslim Tatar, who owns SuperMario’s Pizza near Fort Dix, from which the authorities say his son Serdar took a map of the base, said that the young man had gravitated to radical Islam in recent years, prompting a rift between them.

“I’m not a religious person,” Muslim Tatar said. “I don’t want my son to be a religious person, but he was a religious person.”

The family came to America from Turkey in 1992, settling in Cherry Hill. Muslim Tatar said that his son fell in with the wrong crowd when he met some of the other suspects in high school. On at least one occasion, Mr. Tatar said, his son brought one of them to his pizza parlor in Cookstown, N.J.

“I told him, ‘I don’t like this kid, I don’t want you together,’ ” Mr. Tatar recalled Wednesday.

Though the criminal complaint says that Serdar Tatar became familiar with Fort Dix from delivering pizzas on the base and procured the map last November, his wife said he had not worked at the restaurant in more than a year, and his father said SuperMario’s has been delivering to the base only for three months.

“Nobody take map,” the elder Mr. Tatar said.

After quitting SuperMario’s to gain some independence, Serdar Tatar went to work at 7-Eleven, and recently became manager of one of the chain’s stores near the Temple University campus in Philadelphia, said his wife of a year, Khalida Mirzhyeiva. He worked long shifts, she said, and rarely went to the mosque.

“He planned to have a child and a good family,” Ms. Mirzhyeiva, 29, said in a telephone interview, which was translated from her native Russian by a neighbor. “He did not plan to kill anybody.”

“He isn’t a terrorist,” she added. “He follows his religion, the Muslim religion, and he cannot kill.”

Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka were all born in Debar, Macedonia, like many of their relatives.

The extended family’s trek to America began with Murat Duka, who opened a roofing company in New York, in 1980, five years after he came to the United States. Starting in 1985, a stream of relatives began going to Brooklyn, where some learned the roofing trade from him, he said.

Today, 40 to 50 families related to the Dukas of Debar live in New York and New Jersey. Many of them settled on Staten Island, which is home to a thriving mosque for Albanians.

“Everybody’s shocked from this,” said Ferid Bedrolli, the imam of the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center on Staten Island, where the three Duka defendants and their father used to pray before moving to Cherry Hill from Brooklyn in the late 1990s. “They didn’t look like really they are bad people.”

Another imam at the mosque, Tahir Kukigi, described the father of the defendants as a “simple man” and said the family “never had any conflicts with anyone.”

At the mosque in Philadelphia, the imam, Mohammed Shehata, declined an interview but his mosque released a statement.

“We have constantly urged our community members to report, either to us or to law enforcement, any suspicious incidents,” it read. “Had we noticed anything about these individuals that would have aroused suspicions, I can assure you that it would have been reported.”

Experts on Albania and the Albanian-American community said they were surprised at the ethnicity of the suspects.

Fred Abrahams of Human Rights Watch said, “Albanians on the whole are so very over-the-top pro-American that this news came as a shock.”

The 1999 American-led bombing of Serbia resulted in de facto independence for Kosovo, a majority Albanian province in Serbia that had been the scene of brutal repression by the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. One of the main thoroughfares in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, was renamed “Bill Clinton Boulevard.”

In Macedonia, Argitim Fida, mayor of the Dukas’ home village, said that on Sept. 11, 2001, students had a candlelight vigil in the town’s main square. The town council in Debar, which has a population of about 15,000, set a special meeting for Thursday to discuss how to respond to the arrests.

“If Albanians are traditionally pro-American, we in Debar have to be more pro-American than anyone,” Mayor Fida said. “Almost every family here has relatives living in the United States.”

The Dukas are typical of those who have thrived from such ties: 28 of 37 local family members live in America now.

The suspects’ grandmother and matriarch of the family, Naze Duka, said she visited her sons and grandsons in New Jersey last October, and said she received $7,000 this month to put a deposit down on a new house.

“I have no idea where this came from,” Mrs. Duka, 89, said Wednesday. “I don’t know what could have happened. I just don’t know.”

Stacy Sullivan, the author of a book on Albanian-Americans, said that a handful of Islamic hardliners arrived in Kosovo after the American intervention and attempted to spread radical Islam. She said they found little, if any, interest and that Albanians derisively dubbed them the “pajama people,” a reference to their traditional clothes.

Two Albanian-born businessmen in New York with ties to the Duka family said that an uncle of the defendants became a radicalized Muslim in the early 1990s after serving a prison sentence in New York State.

The parents and uncle of the Duka defendants could not be reached for comment.

Murat Duka, who said he knows the three brothers’ father, Ferik, was stunned that any of the Dukas could be involved in such activity.

“From the town we come, we’re not a religious people,” he said.

Told that the three brothers had been repairing the roof of the Philadelphia mosque, Murat Duka said he had done the same at local mosques and churches, and had also donated money to synagogues. “You’ve got to donate because you don’t know next life which one is the true story,” he said. “So you’ve got to be balanced.”

Kareem Fahim reported from Philadelphia and Cherry Hill, N.J., and Andrea Elliott from New York. Reporting was contributed by Richard G. Jones in Cookstown, N.J.; Sewell Chan, David Rohde and Maureen Seaberg in New York; Nate Schweber in Philadelphia; Ethan Wilensky-Lanford in Cherry Hill; and Nicholas Wood in Macedonia.

    Religion Guided 3 Held in Fort Dix Plot, NYT, 10.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/nyregion/10plot.html?hp

New Coalition of Christians Seeks Changes at Borders

May 8, 2007
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

WASHINGTON, May 7 — A new coalition of more than 100 largely evangelical Christian leaders and organizations asked Congress on Monday to pass bills to strengthen border controls but also give illegal immigrants ways to gain legal residency.

The announcement spotlights evangelical leaders’ increasingly visible efforts to push for what they say is a more humane policy in keeping with biblical injunctions to show compassion for their neighbors, the weak and the alien.

The new group, Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, includes members like the Mennonite Church U.S.A. and the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, which represents Latino evangelicals.

It includes individuals like Dr. Joel C. Hunter, pastor of Northland, a megachurch in Longwood, Fla., and Sammy Mah, president of World Relief, an aid group affiliated with the National Association of Evangelicals.

The concerns of the coalition mirror those of many evangelical leaders who have often staked out conservative positions on other social issues or who have avoided politics entirely.

In late March, Dr. Richard Land, the conservative president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, stood with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, in supporting routes to legalization for illegal immigrants.

The Rev. Joel Osteen, whose television ministry reaches millions but who steers clear of politics, has also spoken out for compassionate changes.

Immigration “for us is a religious issue, a biblical issue,” said the Rev. Jim Wallis, president of a liberal evangelical group, Call to Renewal, and a member of the coalition. “We call it welcoming the stranger.”

Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform does not back particular measures, said Katie Barge, a spokeswoman for Faith in Public Life, the organizers of a news conference about the group.

Rather, the coalition calls for bills that would push for border enforcement while improving guest worker programs and offering chances for illegal immigrants to obtain legal status, an approach similar to bills that Congress is considering.

The group advertised in newspapers like Roll Call here on Monday and plans to expand to other papers and radio. It is also trying to present at least 200,000 letters to Congress and the White House on immigration, the first 50,000 of which arrived at the news conference.

The group plans to focus its initial efforts on the news media and church members in Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, because of the high visibility of the immigration debate in some of those states and the pivotal role some of their members of Congress have in the debate.

Evangelical leaders have a delicate balance to strike among their rank and file. A poll in March 2006 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that white evangelicals favored a more conservative policy toward immigrants than other Americans. That position is largely based on concerns that immigrants threaten the American way of life, rather than economic worries, the survey said.

Immigrants, many of them illegal, have flocked to evangelical congregations, and evangelical pastors understand that immigration changes increasingly affect their congregants directly.

The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution last year calling for improved border protection and financial and language tests for legalization along with ministry to immigrants, a position most heartily backed, Dr. Land said, by Hispanic Baptists.

John Green, senior fellow with the Pew Forum, said: “There are risks coming out with any positions for evangelical leaders. They risk taking a position that many in their pews don’t agree with.”

But given the great efforts that evangelicals have been making to reach out to Asians and Hispanic immigrants, Mr. Green added, “if they remain silent, there are great risks as well.”

    New Coalition of Christians Seeks Changes at Borders, NYT, 8.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/washington/08immigration.html

A Candidate, His Minister and the Search for Faith

April 30, 2007
The New York Times
By JODI KANTOR

CHICAGO — Members of Trinity United Church of Christ squeezed into a downtown hotel ballroom in early March to celebrate the long service of their pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. One congregant stood out amid the flowers and finery: Senator Barack Obama, there to honor the man who led him from skeptic to self-described Christian.

Twenty years ago at Trinity, Mr. Obama, then a community organizer in poor Chicago neighborhoods, found the African-American community he had sought all his life, along with professional credibility as a community organizer and an education in how to inspire followers. He had sampled various faiths but adopted none until he met Mr. Wright, a dynamic pastor who preached Afrocentric theology, dabbled in radical politics and delivered music-and-profanity-spiked sermons.

Few of those at Mr. Wright’s tribute in March knew of the pressures that Mr. Obama’s presidential run was placing on the relationship between the pastor and his star congregant. Mr. Wright’s assertions of widespread white racism and his scorching remarks about American government have drawn criticism, and prompted the senator to cancel his delivery of the invocation when he formally announced his candidacy in February.

Mr. Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate who says he was only shielding his pastor from the spotlight, said he respected Mr. Wright’s work for the poor and his fight against injustice. But “we don’t agree on everything,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ve never had a thorough conversation with him about all aspects of politics.”

It is hard to imagine, though, how Mr. Obama can truly distance himself from Mr. Wright. The Christianity that Mr. Obama adopted at Trinity has infused not only his life, but also his campaign. He began his presidential announcement with the phrase “Giving all praise and honor to God,” a salutation common in the black church. He titled his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” after one of Mr. Wright’s sermons, and often talks about biblical underdogs, the mutual interests of religious and secular America, and the centrality of faith in public life.

The day after the party for Mr. Wright, Mr. Obama stood in an A.M.E. church pulpit in Selma, Ala., and cast his candidacy in nothing short of biblical terms, implicitly comparing himself to Joshua, known for his relative inexperience, steadfast faith and completion of Moses’ mission of delivering his people to the Promised Land.

“Be strong and have courage, for I am with you wherever you go,” Mr. Obama said in paraphrasing God’s message to Joshua.

It is difficult to tell whether Mr. Obama’s religious and political beliefs are fused or simply run parallel. The junior senator from Illinois often talks of faith as a moral force essential for solving America’s vexing problems. Like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and John Edwards, his fellow Democratic candidates, he expresses both a political and a religious obligation to help the downtrodden. Like conservative Christians, he speaks of AIDS as a moral crisis. And like his pastor, Mr. Obama opposes the Iraq war.

His embrace of faith was a sharp change for a man whose family offered him something of a crash course in comparative religion but no belief to call his own. “He comes from a very secular, skeptical family,” said Jim Wallis, a Christian antipoverty activist and longtime friend of Mr. Obama. “His faith is really a personal and an adult choice. His is a conversion story.”

The grandparents who helped raise Mr. Obama were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists. His mother was an anthropologist who collected religious texts the way others picked up tribal masks, teaching her children the inspirational power of the common narratives and heroes.

His mother’s tutelage took place mostly in Indonesia, in the household of Mr. Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, a nominal Muslim who hung prayer beads over his bed but enjoyed bacon, which Islam forbids.

“My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s younger half sister. But Mr. Obama attended a Catholic school and then a Muslim public school where the religious education was cursory. When he was 10, he returned to his birthplace of Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attended a preparatory school with a Christian affiliation but little religious instruction.

Years later, Mr. Obama met his father’s family, a mix of Muslim and Christian Kenyans. Sarah Hussein Obama, who is his stepgrandmother but whom Mr. Obama calls his grandmother, still rises at 5 a.m. to pray before tending to her crops and the three orphans she has taken in.

“I am a strong believer of the Islamic faith,” Ms. Obama, 85, said in a recent interview in Kenya.

From Skepticism to Belief

This polyglot background made Mr. Obama tolerant of others’ faiths yet reluctant to join one, said Mr. Wright, the pastor. In an interview in March in his office, filled with mementos from his 35 years at Trinity, Mr. Wright recalled his first encounters with Mr. Obama in the late 1980s, when the future senator was organizing Chicago neighborhoods. Though minister after minister told Mr. Obama he would be more credible if he joined a church, he was not a believer.

“I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won,” he wrote in his first book, “Dreams From My Father.”

Still, Mr. Obama was entranced by Mr. Wright, whose sermons fused analysis of the Bible with outrage at what he saw as the racism of everything from daily life in Chicago to American foreign policy. Mr. Obama had never met a minister who made pilgrimages to Africa, welcomed women leaders and gay members and crooned Teddy Pendergrass rhythm and blues from the pulpit. Mr. Wright was making Trinity a social force, initiating day care, drug counseling, legal aid and tutoring. He was also interested in the world beyond his own; in 1984, he traveled to Cuba to teach Christians about the value of nonviolent protest and to Libya to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Wright said his visits implied no endorsement of their views.

Followers were also drawn simply by Mr. Wright’s appeal. Trinity has 8,500 members today, making it the largest American congregation in the United Church of Christ, a mostly white denomination known for the independence of its congregations and its willingness to experiment with traditional Protestant theology.

Mr. Wright preached black liberation theology, which interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, whom by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less. That message can sound different to white audiences, said Dwight Hopkins, a professor at University of Chicago Divinity School and a Trinity member. “Some white people hear it as racism in reverse,” Dr. Hopkins said, while blacks hear, “Yes, we are somebody, we’re also made in God’s image.”

Audacity and Hope

It was a 1988 sermon called “The Audacity to Hope” that turned Mr. Obama, in his late 20s, from spiritual outsider to enthusiastic churchgoer. Mr. Wright in the sermon jumped from 19th-century art to his own youthful brushes with crime and Islam to illustrate faith’s power to inspire underdogs. Mr. Obama was seeing the same thing in public housing projects where poor residents sustained themselves through sheer belief.

In “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama described his teary-eyed reaction to the minister’s words. “Inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones,” Mr. Obama wrote. “Those stories — of survival, and freedom, and hope — became our story, my story.”

Mr. Obama was baptized that year, and joining Trinity helped him “embrace the African-American community in a way that was whole and profound,” said Ms. Soetoro, his half sister.

It also helped give him spiritual bona fides and a new assurance. Services at Trinity were a weekly master class in how to move an audience. When Mr. Obama arrived at Harvard Law School later that year, where he fortified himself with recordings of Mr. Wright’s sermons, he was delivering stirring speeches as a student leader in the classic oratorical style of the black church.

But he developed a tone very different from his pastor’s. In contrast with Mr. Wright — the kind of speaker who could make a grocery list sound like a jeremiad — Mr. Obama speaks with cool intellect and on-the-one-hand reasoning. He tends to emphasize the reasonableness of all people; Mr. Wright rallies his parishioners against oppressors.

While Mr. Obama stated his opposition to the Iraq war in conventional terms, Mr. Wright issued a “War on Iraq I.Q. Test,” with questions like, “Which country do you think poses the greatest threat to global peace: Iraq or the U.S.?”

In the 16 years since Mr. Obama returned to Chicago from Harvard, Mr. Wright has presided over his wedding ceremony, baptized his two daughters and dedicated his house, while Mr. Obama has often spoken at Trinity’s panels and debates. Though the Obamas drop in on other congregations, they treat Trinity as their spiritual home, attending services frequently. The church’s Afrocentric focus makes Mr. Obama a figure of particular authenticity there, because he has the African connections so many members have searched for.

To the many members who, like the Obamas, are the first generation in their families to achieve financial success, the church warns against “middleclassness,” its term for selfish individualism, and urges them to channel their gains back into the community.

Mr. Obama has written that when he became a Christian, he “felt God’s spirit beckoning” and “submitted myself to His will and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.” While he has said he shares core Christian beliefs in God and in Jesus as his resurrected son, he sometimes mentions doubts. In his second book, he admitted uncertainty about the afterlife, and “what existed before the Big Bang.” Generally, Mr. Obama emphasizes the communal aspects of religion over the supernatural ones.

Bridging Religious Divides

He has said that he relies on Mr. Wright to ensure “that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible.” He tends to turn to his minister at moments of frustration, Mr. Wright said, such as when Mr. Obama felt a Congressional Black Caucus meeting was heavier on entertainment than substance.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama is reaching out to both liberal skeptics and committed Christians. In many speeches or discussions, he never mentions religion. When Mr. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, does speak of faith, he tends to add a footnote about keeping church and state separate.

But he also talks of building a consensus among secular liberal and conservative Christian voters. Mr. Wallis, the antipoverty advocate who calls himself a “progressive evangelical,” first met Mr. Obama 10 years ago when both participated in traveling seminars on American civic life. On bus rides, Mr. Wallis and Mr. Obama would huddle, away from company like George Stephanopoulos and Ralph Reed, to plot building a coalition of progressive and religious voters.

“The problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect 10 point plan,” Mr. Obama says in one of his standard campaign lines. “They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness — in the imperfections of man.”

He often makes reference to the civil rights movement, when liberals used Christian rhetoric to win change.

Mr. Obama reassures liberal audiences about the role of religion in public life, and he tells conservative Christians that he understands why abortion horrifies them and why they may prefer to curb H.I.V. through abstinence instead of condoms. AIDS has spread in part because “the relationship between men and women, between sexuality and spirituality, has broken down, and needs to be repaired,” he said to thunderous applause in December at the megachurch in California led by the Rev. Rick Warren, a best-selling author.

At the same time, Mr. Obama’s ties to Trinity have become more complicated than those simply of proud congregation and favorite son. Since Mr. Obama announced his candidacy, the church has received threatening phone calls. On blogs and cable news shows, conservative critics have called it separatist and antiwhite.

Congregants respond by saying critics are misreading the church’s tenets, that it is a warm and accepting community and is not hostile to whites. But Mr. Wright’s political statements may be more controversial than his theological ones. He has said that Zionism has an element of “white racism.” (For its part, the Anti-Defamation League says it has no evidence of any anti-Semitism by Mr. Wright.)

On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later he wrote that the attacks had proved that “people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West went on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.”

Provocative Assertions

Such statements involve “a certain deeply embedded anti-Americanism,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative group that studies religious issues and public policy. “A lot of people are going to say to Mr. Obama, are these your views?”

Mr. Obama says they are not.

“The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification,” he said in a recent interview. He was not at Trinity the day Mr. Wright delivered his remarks shortly after the attacks, Mr. Obama said, but “it sounds like he was trying to be provocative.”

“Reverend Wright is a child of the 60s, and he often expresses himself in that language of concern with institutional racism and the struggles the African-American community has gone through,” Mr. Obama said. “He analyzes public events in the context of race. I tend to look at them through the context of social justice and inequality.”

Despite the canceled invocation, Mr. Wright prayed with the Obama family just before his presidential announcement. Asked later about the incident, the Obama campaign said in a statement, “Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church.”

In March, Mr. Wright said in an interview that his family and some close associates were angry about the canceled address, for which they blamed Obama campaign advisers but that the situation was “not irreparable,” adding, “Several things need to happen to fix it.”

Asked if he and Mr. Wright had patched up their differences, Mr. Obama said: “Those are conversations between me and my pastor.”

Mr. Wright, who has long prided himself on criticizing the establishment, said he knew that he may not play well in Mr. Obama’s audition for the ultimate establishment job.

“If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me,” Mr. Wright said with a shrug. “I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen.”

Reuben Kyama contributed reporting from Nyangoma-Kogelo, Kenya.

    A Candidate, His Minister and the Search for Faith, NYT, 30.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/us/politics/30obama.html?hp

Turning to Churches or Scripture to Cope With Debt

April 29, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN LELAND

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Doug Sweeney, a police officer, watched his credit card balance grow to $13,000, thinking he would never be able to pay it off. Renée Santiago had $40,000 in student loans. Susan Hancock owed $14,000 in credit card debt and could not point to anything in her home to show for it.

“I saw it going up,” Ms. Hancock said, “but I was numb. I thought, that’s just the way of life.”

When the debt got to be too much for them, instead of going to family members or financial professionals for help, they did what many Americans are doing: they turned to their church.

“You need a little help with motivation,” said Mr. Sweeney, 47, who blamed years of impulsive spending for his debt. Recently, he joined two dozen others at Southeast Christian Church for Week 9 of a 13-week debt-reduction program called Financial Peace University. Since joining the group, he had disposed of his credit cards.

“A big part of it is that it has a faith component,” he said. “God wants you to be good stewards of your money. The money’s all his.”

As Americans have run up nonmortgage debt of more than $2.4 trillion, churches and Christian radio stations are supplementing their spiritual counseling with financial counseling, often using programs developed by other Christian organizations and marketed in church circles or over the Internet. They offer a mix of basic budget planning, household cost-cutting and debt management, bolstered by Scripture and with tithing as a goal.

“We want to be relevant and to scratch people where they itch,” said Dave Stone, the senior pastor at Southeast, a nondenominational church that draws 18,000 worshipers each weekend. “For a church not to provide some service for people who are suffocating from too much debt would be burying our head in the sand.” Economists have recognized that the behavior of consumers often ignores their rational best interests. People overestimate their ability to repay loans, or spend more using credit cards than they would with cash. Church-based debt programs provide rules to force changes in spending and saving, then use Scripture to motivate people.

More than 39,000 churches have used debt reduction programs created by Crown Financial Ministries, a group in Gainesville, Ga. About 3,000 churches have bought a $250 Good Sense program developed by Willow Creek Community Church in Barrington, Ill. Both are nonprofit organizations.

“Nothing in the Bible says you can’t borrow,” said Mike Graham, who provides free financial counseling at Southeast Christian Church, in a position he created 10 years ago after stepping down as the church’s financial manager. “What you’re not allowed to do is borrow and not pay it back.”

The programs resemble secular plans, with two exceptions, said Dave Briggs, director of the Good Sense Stewardship Ministry at Willow Creek. “A secular adviser might say, it’s O.K. to stiff your creditors through bankruptcy,” Mr. Briggs said. “Biblically, bankruptcy is only an option if you need time and space to pay back what you owe.”

“The other conflict is in the area of giving,” he said. “We get a sense of devotion to God by being generous. Secular advice says, don’t give until you can afford it.”

The Financial Peace program, a curriculum marketed for profit by a radio host, Dave Ramsey, has been used in more than 10,000 churches, as well as 1,000 corporations and 350 military units or chapels, according to Mr. Ramsey’s representative.

More than 350,000 families have completed the program, at a cost of $80 to $90 each for books, audio CDs and other material, the representative said. Mr. Ramsey declined to answer questions about how much money is taken in by the company.

Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America, who reviewed the Financial Peace materials for The New York Times, said the advice was “fundamentally sound,” especially for people with low or middle incomes.

“It’s better than you get from a lot of financial advisers, who make it complicated and possibly subject consumers to avoidable credit risks,” Mr. Brobeck said.

Even tithing might help some Christians feel “empowered to pay back their debt faster, though the secular perspective would be that those funds could be used directly to pay down debt,” he said.

At Southeast Christian Church, a video presentation featuring Mr. Ramsey was followed by an hour of discussion, mixing quotations from Proverbs with advice on buying used cars, time shares and generic drugs. The discussion was led by a retired police officer, Rusty Bittle, 43, who has no financial background but who paid $2,000 to take a 50-hour course to become a certified counselor for Mr. Ramsey’s program.

“If you really start listening to the Scriptures we read each class,” Mr. Bittle told the group, “you’ll see that this isn’t just a finance class, it’s about how to live your life. And if you read the Scriptures you’ll get a blessing out of it.”

Mr. Sweeney said the program’s use of Scripture helped with his overspending. “I realized that I blow a lot of money,” he said. “It takes discipline to manage it, and prayer helps you have discipline. If you think you need something, before you buy it, go home and pray about it.”

Mr. Ramsey said that although the program has a “biblical base,” it was not aimed specifically at Christians, and that his books and radio show were most popular with secular stores and stations.

“Even if you’re not some kind of sold-out believer, you can relate to Proverbs 22, Verse 7, that the borrower is a slave to the lender,” he said. “It’s like a Mark Twain saying.”

Southeast Christian Church uses both the Financial Peace and Crown Ministries courses, and works with a Christian organization called Family Credit Counseling Service in Illinois, as well as secular credit counseling.

Anna and Jon Broster turned to Mr. Graham for help after the interest rate on one of their credit cards rose to 33 percent. Mrs. Broster (pronounced like “Brewster”) paid off the balance of $900, but was left with $3,000 on her other cards.

“I wanted to focus on getting out of credit card debt,” she said. “We live week to week, with no budget.” The couple said they turned to Mr. Graham rather than a professional because they trusted the people at the church. “He’s not making money off us,” Mrs. Broster said. “And he’s a Christian.”

Mr. Broster, 27, earns $15 an hour in a manufacturing job and $140 every two weeks from a part-time job at a Walgreens. Mrs. Broster, 25, attends nursing school part time while raising their 4-year-old daughter.

Each month, when Mrs. Broster receives her credit card statements online, she checks her bank balance, sets aside some money for food and gas, and divides what is left among four or five cards. She tries to pay more than the minimum but finds it hard to get the balances down.

“My dad is more conservative about credit card usage than me,” she said. “If I see something I like, I can just swipe and have it.” She added, “If I had to hand over $70, I’d think twice about it.”

When she went to see Mr. Graham, she said, he prayed with her and said he would help her draw up a household budget, which she said she wanted to include tithes to the church. “We don’t give every week now, and I feel kind of guilty about it,” she said.

Mr. Graham said, “We believe there’s a mandate in Scripture that calls for people to give 10 percent to the church. Until they can get to a tithe, we encourage a sliding scale so they can get their blessing from God.”

In the Financial Peace classroom, Mr. Bittle was finishing the lesson. “Remember,” he told the group, “there’s only one way to attain financial peace, and that’s to walk with the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ.”

    Turning to Churches or Scripture to Cope With Debt, NYT, 29.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/us/29debt.html

Ill. Priest Pleads Guilty to Sex Abuse

April 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:51 a.m. ET
The New York Times

JOLIET, Ill. (AP) -- A Catholic priest previously convicted of child molestation has pleaded guilty to sexually abusing two teenage brothers in the 1990s.

Louis Rogge, 76, of Joliet pleaded guilty Thursday to two counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. Under a deal with prosecutors, he will likely serve 30 days in jail and four years of probation. He had faced a sentence of three to seven years in prison.

The Will County State's Attorney's office accused Rogge of abusing the first boy in 1996, when he was 15, and the second in 1999, when he also was 15.

Rogge was a longtime family friend and spiritual adviser for the boys, prosecutors said.

In 1974, Rogge pleaded guilty to charges of child molestation in Athens, Ga., and was sentenced to six years probation, officials said.

Rogge, a priest with the Carmelite Order, was removed from public ministry in 2002 when the church learned about his decades-old sexual molestation conviction, officials said.

A Will County judge accepted Rogge's guilty plea and ordered a sex-offender evaluation.

Prosecutors said Rogge has had a heart attack and requires ongoing care.

''It's an appropriate disposition in the case,'' said Charles Pelkie, spokesman for State's Atty. James Glasgow. ''He's in his 70s, and we consulted with the family members on this.''

Rogge's sentencing is set for July 26.

    Ill. Priest Pleads Guilty to Sex Abuse, NYT, 27.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Priest-Abuse.html

Religion in the News

April 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:12 a.m. ET
The New York Times

OZONA, Fla. (AP) -- The pastor wears a sleeveless black T-shirt, blue jeans and a backward baseball cap. The collection is taken in a motorcycle helmet. And the first thing you see as you walk in the door of this makeshift church isn't a cross or a stained-glass window, it's a bar.

Steve's Cape Cod, a seafood restaurant and bar known for all-you-can-eat snow crab on Monday and ladies-drink-free night on Wednesday, is reborn each Sunday morning as the Salvation Saloon. Worshippers who go by names like Curly Joe and Wild Bill file in by the dozen -- many holding plastic foam cups of coffee, some biting at doughnuts -- for a service they say is unlike any other.

''This is not your parents' church,'' Paul White, who created the service and serves as the pastor, tells those gathered. ''This is going to bless your socks off.''

White started Salvation Saloon three years ago in this Tampa Bay area town as an attempt to being a unique, low-key spiritual experience to others who shared his love for motorcycles. The occasional service has grown into a weekly gathering, the congregation has grown to roughly 100 each Sunday and attendees now represent more diverse demographics than bikers alone. Organizers have even taken their ministry on the road, offering a service in another Florida bar every couple months.

''I feel very drawn to this ministry,'' said Bill Spellman, a 61-year-old advertising salesman from Dunedin. ''It is so powerful to be able to come here and hear people talk about the miracles in their lives.''

Christians have long sought to bring their faith to places outside the traditional church, from the rapid growth of skateboarding ministries to smaller-scale outreach to circus and carnival workers. While particularly evident among evangelicals, such efforts are seen across Christianity. Roman Catholics, for instance, have organized spiritual discussions called ''Theology on Tap'' in bars across the country.

Salvation Saloon is non-denominational. Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Columbia University, said it is one of countless endeavors seeking to attract congregants who otherwise might not be reached.

''It strikes me as a fairly good illustration of the ability of evangelicals to speak the idiom of the culture no matter where they find themselves,'' he said. ''I see this kind of thing as the successor to the megachurch -- to try to be all things to all people.''

It is, admittedly, a motley bunch of black leather vests and Harley-Davidson T-shirts, of tattooed arms and patches that say ''In Memory of Jesus.''

Congregants' own personal experiences are a centerpiece of Salvation Saloon. The ministry's Web site acknowledges many attendees are former thieves, drug dealers and addicts and murderers -- ''a bunch of outcasts and misfits.''

The service includes, at its start, a performance by the ''Posse Band'' which gathers on a small stage with swordfish mounted on a paneled wall at the back. They sing ''Boulevard of Broken Dreams'' by Green Day as a projection screen features cartoon characters Ren and Stimpy with the message ''Welcome Saloonatics.''

White says they try to keep discussion of Bible stories or Jesus' works simple and relevant. There are no church songs; communion is served once a month.

There are, however, jokes (''This big gnarly biker walks into a shop ...''), trivia (''Name that Saloonatic,'' complete with a member's baby picture and the theme music from ''Jeopardy!'') and the reading of the ''Saloony Report'' (comical, fake classified advertisements).

''We don't have any spiritual superstars here,'' White says. ''We believe that serving God shouldn't be a spectator sport.''

Several people leave their seats among lines of tables to share their own spiritual stories -- of overcoming hatred for a former spouse, of overcoming a drug habit, of accepting Christ.

White takes the microphone at the end of the testimonies. ''You know where Jesus is?'' he asks. ''He's right here, baby.''

As the service closes, White hands out three shiny gold trophies with cross on top to the winners of the Salvation Saloon's bike show. Outside, motorcycles rev up, hugs are exchanged and burly men and women say things like ''stay blessed'' and ''love you, bro.''

One of the members, Mark Perryman, says he can't imagine spending his Sunday any other way.

''I can't think of a better way to worship the Lord,'' he said, ''than the way we get together.''

------

On the Net:

http://www.salvationsaloon.com

    Religion in the News, NYT, 27.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Religion-in-the-News.html

Ohio Judge Frees Man After Bible Quiz

April 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:15 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CINCINNATI (AP) -- A man arrested on Wednesday for allegedly trying to use a stolen credit card at a drugstore got a break from a judge after passing a sort of Bible quiz.

When Eric Hine appeared in court this morning, his attorney described him as a church-goer, hoping the judge would set a low bond.

Hamilton County Municipal Court Judge John Burlew was skeptical and asked Hine to recite the 23rd Psalm.

He did: all six verses. Some in the courtroom applauded.

Burlew was satisfied and released Hine on a $10,0000 appearance bond, meaning he'll have to pay that amount if he doesn't show up for his next court date.

    Ohio Judge Frees Man After Bible Quiz, NYT, 26.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Defendant-Bible-Passage.html

Hispanics Reshaping U.S. Catholic Church, Study Finds

April 25, 2007
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

The influx of Hispanic immigrants to the United States is transforming the Roman Catholic Church as well as the nation’s religious landscape, according to a major study of Hispanics and faith released today.

The study, conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, found that many Hispanics practice a “distinctive form” of charismatic Catholicism that includes speaking in tongues, miraculous healings and prophesying — practices more often associated with Pentecostalism. Among non-Hispanic Catholics, these traditions are practiced by some but are not so widespread.

The study also found that most Hispanics are clustering in “ethnic congregations” with Hispanic clergy, Spanish-language services and where the majority of congregants are Hispanic. These ethnic congregations are cropping up throughout the country — not just in neighborhoods with a concentration of Hispanics, but even in areas where Hispanics are sparse.

According to the survey, 68 percent of Hispanics are Roman Catholic, 15 percent are born-again or evangelical Protestants, 5 percent are mainline Protestants, 3 percent are identified as “other Christian,” and 8 percent are secular (1 percent refused to answer). This is a very different picture than that of non-Hispanic Americans, where the largest groupings are 20 percent Catholic, 35 percent evangelical and 24 percent mainline Protestant.

About one-third of Catholics in the United States are now Hispanic. Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, said: “There are several measures on which Hispanic Catholics look different than your basic white suburban Catholics, which has been the dominant form of American Catholicism for about a generation now.

“They are different in terms of beliefs, practices, language and culture, but they remain very Catholic,” Mr. Suro said. “The open question here is, does the institution adapt to them, or do they adapt to the institution?”

The study also found that conversion is a common experience for many Hispanics. Nearly one in five changed either from one religion to another, or to no religion at all. The conversions have resulted in an exodus from the Catholic church, and a boon for evangelical churches. Half of Hispanic evangelicals are converts, most of them former Catholics. The study finds a link between conversion and assimilation. Hispanics born in the United States are more likely to convert than are first-generation, foreign-born immigrants.

These changes could have political repercussions. The Hispanic electorate is largely Democratic (63 percent). But Hispanic evangelicals are twice as likely as Hispanic Catholics to be Republicans — a far greater gap than exists among whites.

The study, “Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion,” is based on several surveys — the main one conducted from Aug. 10 to Oct. 4, 2006 — that involved more than 4,600 adult Hispanics. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percent.

    Hispanics Reshaping U.S. Catholic Church, Study Finds, NYT, 25.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/us/25cnd-hispanic.html?hp

Judge: No Religion at Post Office

April 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:50 a.m. ET
The New York Times

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- Religion has no place in post offices run by churches and other private contractors, a federal judge has ruled, citing the constitutional separation of church and state.

U.S. District Judge Dominic J. Squatrito, in a case involving a church-run post office in Manchester, ordered the Postal Service to notify the nearly 5,200 facilities run by contractors that they cannot promote religion through pamphlets, displays or any other materials.

He also told the agency to monitor those offices, which are distinguishable from government-run facilities and employ workers who are not Postal Service employees, to make sure they comply with his ruling.

Postal officials said they could not immediately comment on the ruling, which is dated April 18.

''We're carefully reviewing the decision and considering our options, including an appeal,'' said Gerry McKiernan, a Postal Service spokesman at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Squatrito sided with Bertram Cooper, who in 2003 sued the Postal Service and the Full Gospel Interdenominational Church, which operates the Sincerely Yours Inc. post office on Main Street in downtown Manchester.

When he filed the lawsuit, Cooper, a Navy veteran of World War II and the Korean War, said he became upset when he went to Sincerely Yours.

''I'm walking into a place that's doing government business -- selling stamps, mailing parcels and so forth -- and they're doing this religious bit,'' Cooper, who is Jewish, said in 2003. His phone number is not listed, and he could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

The Manchester office has a label on an exterior wall with the Postal Service's eagle symbol indicating it is a contract postal unit, along with a Sincerely Yours sign over the threshold.

Inside, the facility has evangelical displays, including posters, advertisements and artwork. One of the displays is about Jesus Christ and invites customers to submit a request if they ''need a prayer in their lives.''

The office has prayer cards and an advertisement for a mission run by the Full Gospel Interdenominational Church that receives profits from the post office. There is a television monitor for church-related religious videos.

There is also a sign saying the Postal Service does not endorse the religious viewpoints expressed in the materials in the office.

A worker at the office referred questions to church officials, who did not return a message seeking comment Tuesday.

''There is nothing wrong, per se, with the church exhibiting religious displays,'' Squatrito wrote in his ruling. ''Here, however, the church is exhibiting such displays while it is performing its duties under a contract with the Postal Service., i.e. the U.S. Government.''

Squatrito said that the post office was a state ''actor'' under the First Amendment and that its religious displays violate the clause calling for the separation of church and state. But he said the contract itself does not violate the clause.

Manchester Postmaster Ronald Boyne, who also was a defendant, declined to comment.

The Postal Service had argued that signs make it clear that Sincerely Yours is not an ''official'' postal facility. It also said that it had no proprietary interest in the office, other than postal products and equipment, and that there was no evidence that the agency had a direct financial stake in the office's success.

The agency noted that no government employees work at Sincerely Yours, and insisted the facts demonstrate that the post office is a private entity.

The judge said the Postal Service relies on contractor-run offices to provide services to areas that the agency has determined to be unsuitable for official facilities. Contract offices are typically at colleges, grocery stores, pharmacies and some private residences.

    Judge: No Religion at Post Office, NYT, 25.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Postal-Church.html

Preacher Plans Branch Davidian Memorial

April 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:16 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WACO, Texas (AP) -- In the ashes of the Branch Davidian site where nearly 80 people died in a 1993 blaze after an armed standoff with federal agents, a new religious community is slowly taking shape.

Charles Pace, leader of The Branch, The Lord of Righteousness sect of the Branch Davidians, hopes to open a museum for tourists in addition to building a tabernacle and wellness center as part of his new church.

But the few remaining Branch Davidians who once lived at the compound oppose Pace and his plans, saying the museum won't be an accurate representation of the events of April 19, 1993, because he was not there and despised their leader David Koresh.

''He'll portray us as deceived and put us down and say David Koresh was the devil,'' said Clive Doyle, who survived the fire and lived at the site until leaving last year because of conflicts with Pace.

On Feb. 28, 1993, authorities tried to arrest Koresh for stockpiling guns and explosives. The ensuing shootout killed four U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents and six Davidians.

That began a 51-day standoff that ended with an inferno that survivors say was ignited by tear gas rounds fired into the buildings. The government claims the Davidians committed suicide by setting the fire and shooting themselves. A 10-month independent investigation concluded in 2000 that Koresh was solely to blame.

The raid, the siege and its fiery conclusion were seen by some as an unwarranted government intrusion into personal and religious freedoms. Exactly two years after the Texas tragedy, Timothy McVeigh detonated a bomb at the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people in an act intended to avenge the Davidians' deaths.

Pace, 57, returned in 1994 to the Waco-area property -- owned by the church, an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists.

''I just felt I needed to be here to represent the true church,'' he said.

Since then he and his family have lived on its 77 acres of sprawling pastures and ponds.

Pace believes Koresh misled his followers, but said they thought they were following God's will. Despite his differences with the sect, Pace blames the U.S. government for the Davidians' death.

Visitors still come to the site about 10 miles east of Waco. But there are no signs directing them there or markers commemorating its notorious place in history; only a few charred remnants of the compound remain, piled under some brush near a swimming pool. Near a small chapel built a few years later are plaques with names of the Davidians and ATF agents who died.

People sympathetic to the group planted a simple memorial of trees and placed under each one a granite stone inscribed with the names of the Branch Davidians who died in the 1993 standoff.

But Pace removed the stones, destroying Koresh's, and is contemplating tearing down the trees, saying they are an abomination, according to the Bible. Instead, he plans to build a wall from the stones, with a new stone bearing Koresh's real name, Vernon Howell.

In addition, Pace, foresees the establishment of ''a spiritual community'' on the property, with families living in separate houses or mobile homes, as opposed to the group living situation that existed under Koresh. They would attend church and seek treatment at a wellness center.

''I believe people are going to be coming here seeking truth, and they're going to find it and they're going to be healed, physically and spiritually,'' said Pace, a licensed massage therapist.

Ray Feight Sr., a contractor who lives at the site and attends its church, said the goal is to change the negative image.

''We want the David Koresh thing to be history; we want to go on,'' Feight said. ''It's daunting -- we don't have the finances or the means to do all this. It seems like when God calls people to do this, there's no way, but it's all about restoration and healing. The image of this scarred land needs to be healed.''

Pace estimates that the project will take years -- and several million dollars in donations -- to complete, partly because the property lacks running water and a septic system.

Waco has long tried to distance itself from the tragic events.

Jim Vaughan, director of the Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce, said raising millions to develop such a memorial is unlikely without ''a whole lot of meetings and input and conversations in the community.''

''You have to ask, `What is the story that the community would want to tell?''' he asked.

Doyle, whose 18-year-old daughter died in the blaze, leads weekly services at his apartment for the handful of Davidians who still follow Koresh's teachings. Doyle said he wishes the site could have a larger memorial telling the victims' story, but he refuses to participate in Pace's project or to give him the Davidians' mementos that Doyle displayed in his own museum there a few years ago.

Sheila Martin, who left the compound during the standoff with three of her children but lost her husband and four other children in the fire, said she also opposes Pace's plans. She said he was not trying to honor the victims but call attention to himself.

''I don't think it's anything that God is pleased with,'' Martin said.

    Preacher Plans Branch Davidian Memorial, NYT, 19.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Branch-Davidians.html

Lawsuit Goes to Trial Against the Long Island Diocese
Over Sexual Abuse of Teenagers

April 16, 2007
The New York Times
By BRUCE LAMBERT

GARDEN CITY, N.Y., April 15 — A rare civil trial involving sexual abuse and the Roman Catholic Church starts here on Monday, and jury selection last week gave a hint of what could come.

Some potential jurors said the case was too disturbing to hear. Others said they were too angry to serve impartially. One woman, Antoinette Valentino, said she was Catholic but was “enraged against the Catholic Church.” She was not chosen. Another woman said, “I’m Catholic and I’m not going against the diocese,” and also was excused.

And a few revealed that they or their relatives had been victims of sexual abuse, although they did not accuse the church.

The case before the jury in State Supreme Court in Nassau County is noteworthy not only for its potential for disturbing testimony, but also for the fact that it has gotten this far at all.

Despite thousands of complaints of sexual abuse of children involving the Catholic Church in the United States in recent years, few have resulted in court cases, and most of those never come to trial. A vast majority of the abuse lawsuits ended in settlements, with the victims and the accused spared the embarrassment of testifying.

In this case, a young man and a young woman plan to take the stand to say that Matthew Maiello, in the late 1990s when he was rock music Mass director and led the youth ministry in an East Meadow church, repeatedly had sex with them beginning when they were 15. Mr. Maiello, now 33, also directed them to have sex with each other and group sex with him, plying them with drugs and alcohol, they have said in court papers.

The abuse occurred many times over three years, the victims said in their lawsuit, in many places, including a church, a convent, a parochial school, a rectory, his home, a motel, a car and a boat. Mr. Maiello recorded more than an hour of the sexual activity on videotape, which will be submitted as evidence.

The trial will also hear surprise testimony. A witness who only recently came forward says that as a teenager she was abused by Mr. Maiello at another Long Island church a decade before he was arrested. She and her parents say that they warned church representatives about him, but that no action was taken.

In the lawsuit, the two plaintiffs are seeking $150 million from Mr. Maiello; St. Raphael’s Roman Catholic Church in East Meadow, where he worked; the pastor who hired him, the Rev. Thomas Haggerty; and the Diocese of Rockville Centre.

Mr. Maiello pleaded guilty in 2003 to rape and sodomy charges involving four minors, including the two plaintiffs. He served two years in prison and now lives in Connecticut. He is not contesting the lawsuit and is expected to testify. His lawyer, Lawrence V. Carra, described him as “remorseful.”

The lawsuit says the church, the supervising priest and the diocese ignored warnings that Mr. Maiello was an abuser. The victims’ lawyer, Michael G. Dowd of Manhattan, said that years ago, other parishioners had raised concerns about Mr. Maiello’s hiring and his conduct with youths, prompting several parents to demand a meeting with the parish priest.

Brian R. Davey, a lawyer for the parish, the diocese and Father Haggerty, said church officials had been unaware of any criminal behavior by Mr. Maiello until he was arrested. They had “only a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle” and should not be judged with “20/20 hindsight,” he said in court.

“It is Matthew Maiello who bears 100 percent of the responsibility,” Mr. Davey said during jury selection, pointing to the empty chair reserved for Mr. Maiello’s lawyer. “We are not responsible.”

But Mr. Dowd says his case received a jolt in December, when an unsolicited letter came through his fax machine.

The letter’s writer, who had learned about the lawsuit in a news report, claimed that she, too, had been abused by Mr. Maiello, in the early 1990s in another parish.

The woman and her family have given depositions and said in a joint interview that they were eager to testify. Their names and the names of the other victims are being withheld because of the nature of the case.

“I felt I had to do something,” the woman said in an interview. She said she was still incensed at how Mr. Maiello, who was 19, had “brainwashed” and threatened her into having sex at 16 and eventually having group sex and being videotaped. She was especially upset that he was able to repeat the pattern and abuse others, she said. Mr. Carra said that Mr. Maiello would not comment on the woman’s claims.

The woman’s mother, who had been active in church organizations, said she was particularly pained because she had urged her daughter to join the youth ministry’s band as a volunteer. Mr. Maiello was quite “charming” at first, the mother said.

Soon after he began having sex with the daughter and psychologically abusing her, her mother said, she confided in a school official and a church leader.

The daughter said she eventually complained to another church leader and told fellow volunteers. Her father said he pleaded with a priest to intervene but was brushed aside — a priest who was later accused of abusing another child.

“It was our involvement with the church that nearly tore our family apart,” the father said. At the worst point, the daughter secretly mutilated herself, cutting her arms and legs, she said.

Even after she broke from Mr. Maiello’s control and returned home, her father said, “She slept with a baseball bat under her bed, and I found she had taken a hammer and nails and nailed all the basement windows shut.”

When Mr. Maiello was arrested years later, the woman and her parents said, they spoke at length with investigators for the diocese. The family turned over copies of taped telephone calls and the daughter’s detailed calendars and her purple spiral-bound journal.

The diocese was urging people with complaints to come forward to aid in investigations, and Bishop William Murphy was offering “therapy and pastoral care” to victims. But the family said they never heard back from the diocese.

And though opponents in a lawsuit are supposed to disclose relevant material to each other, Mr. Dowd said the diocese never informed him that its investigators had learned about an earlier victim.

“The ball has been dropped so many times, for years,” the mother said. “If they had only listened to what we tried to do all along, these poor children would not have gone through what they did.”

The diocese declined to comment last week on the woman’s account, or the lawyer’s assertion that it withheld information from the plaintiffs.

Experts say that the Long Island case is unusual for several reasons, not the least of which is simply getting it to trial.

Across the nation, only a small fraction of complaints involving the Catholic Church have resulted in prosecutions or litigation. Among the main hurdles are secrecy, shame, lack of corroborating evidence, the statute of limitations and the credibility of emotionally troubled victims, said Laurence E. Drivon, a victims’ lawyer in Stockton, Calif. Of the legal cases filed, few are actually tried.

“This is a very important case,” said Jeffrey R. Anderson of St. Paul, Minn., a leading victims’ lawyer in church cases for 23 years. “Most cases are dismissed on the statute of limitations without getting to the merits,” he said. The rest are often settled, usually in secret agreements. Since 2002, only a dozen or so cases have gone to trial, he estimated. Videotaped and group sex are also “very unusual,” Mr. Anderson said. Generally “these are crimes of secrecy, rarely in the presence of witnesses,” he said.

The Diocese of Rockville Centre does not release statistics on abuse complaints, legal cases and payments. Across the country, the National Conference of Bishops says, the sex scandals have cost $1.5 billion so far, much of it for out-of-court payments.

Covering Long Island and its 1.4 million Roman Catholics, the diocese is one of the nation’s largest and wealthiest. But its attendance and donations slumped after a sweeping report by a Suffolk County grand jury in 2003 found a long history of sexual abuse, deception and cover-up by church authorities. The grand jury cited 23 cases over many years, mostly beyond the statute of limitations.

Aside from laying the responsibility for the abuse on Mr. Maiello, who has few assets, the church defendants — though they share legal representation — argued in court papers that the diocese is not responsible for the activities of the parish, which was described as “a completely separate legal entity.” That may be an attempt to insulate the diocese from a possible costly verdict. The church also argued in court papers that the victims were partly responsible, but Mr. Davey, who appeared stung when Mr. Dowd noted that to prospective jurors, announced that he would withdraw that argument.

The selection of six jurors and three alternates finished on Friday, after 91 other members of the jury pool were excused. Though the suit could be settled out of court, Mr. Davey told the prospective jurors that will not happen. “You will be rendering a verdict,” he said.

    Lawsuit Goes to Trial Against the Long Island Diocese Over Sexual Abuse of Teenagers, NYT, 16.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/16/nyregion/16church.html

Sex Offenders Test Churches’ Core Beliefs

April 10, 2007
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

CARLSBAD, Calif. — On a marquee outside and on a banner inside, Pilgrim United Church of Christ proclaims, “All are welcome.” Sustained by the belief that embracing all comers is a living example of Christ’s love, Pilgrim now faces a profound test of faith.

In late January, Mark Pliska, 53, told the congregation here that he had been in prison for molesting children but that he sought a place to worship and liked the atmosphere at Pilgrim.

Mr. Pliska’s request has plunged the close-knit congregation into a painful discussion about applying faith in a difficult real-world situation. Congregants now wonder, are all truly welcome? If they are, how do you ensure the safety of children and the healing of adult survivors of sexual abuse? Can an offender who accepts Christ truly change?

“I think what we have been through is a loss of innocence,” said the Rev. Madison Shockley, Pilgrim’s minister. “People think of church as an idyllic paradise, and I think that is a great part of that loss.”

Pilgrim’s struggle mirrors those of other congregations, of various faiths, across the country.

Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said that over the last five years pastors had called him to seek advice about how to deal with sex offenders who had returned from prison and wanted to return to church.

The Rev. Debra W. Haffner, director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing in Norwalk, Conn., said she received one or two calls a month from congregations facing a crisis similar to Pilgrim’s.

Having a policy to deal with sex offenders before a crisis occurs is the best way to avoid turmoil, Ms. Haffner said. But such a policy still may force a congregation to decide under what circumstances an offender can attend, a discussion that can shake many churches to their core.

“They are conflicting ministries,” the Rev. Patricia Tummino said about reaching out to sex offenders, to children and to adult survivors of abuse. Since the late 1990s, Ms. Tummino’s congregation, the First Unitarian Universalist Society in Middleboro, Mass., has dealt with two known sex offenders. “You can’t be all things to all people,” she said.

Congregations have always had sex offenders, largely unknown to others, Ms. Haffner said.

Parole officers have encouraged offenders who have been jailed to seek congregations as a source of community and support, Ms. Haffner said.

States have computerized registries of sex offenders that let anyone check on a new congregant. Local news media often report on a sex offender’s arrival from prison, making it hard for a parolee to remain anonymous.

After being released in mid-2006, Mr. Pliska ended up at First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, in Santa Cruz, Calif.

“My spiritual growth is very important to me,” Mr. Pliska said in an interview in Mr. Shockley’s office. “I went looking for an open and affirming church and attended a U.C.C. church and liked it.”

The United Church of Christ takes pride in its liberalism, and it has led other Protestant denominations in the ordination of women and on civil rights issues.

In Santa Cruz, Mr. Pliska agreed to avoid children and to always be escorted by another adult. The church has two services, which made it easier for those uncomfortable with him to still worship.

But business was slow and he lost his job as a mechanic, Mr. Pliska said, and in December, he moved to Carlsbad, an affluent seaside town 30 miles north of San Diego.

Mr. Shockley received an e-mail message from Santa Cruz about Mr. Pliska’s search for a new congregation. He said he thought that if Pilgrim established the same limits as Santa Cruz had, Mr. Pliska’s presence would be as uneventful.

Before introducing Mr. Pliska to the congregation, Mr. Shockley spoke to a few congregants who had been abused as children and to parents, and none objected to Mr. Pliska’s inclusion.

But Mr. Pliska’s introduction unlocked a flood of emotions among the 300 members.

“The scariest moment,” Mr. Shockley said, “was when I got the feeling in the congregation about whether Mark could attend or not, and we needed more time, yet people were saying ‘If he stays, I leave,’ or ‘If he leaves, I leave.’ ”

The church has pulled back from that edge, and most people seem to be listening respectfully to one another. A few families have stopped attending. Some new people have started to come, impressed by local news accounts of the congregation’s willingness to consider having Mr. Pliska.

Tristan Green attends with her three sons, and is torn about having Mr. Pliska in the congregation. She believes he should be welcome but she wonders how she might keep track of the boys during the social hour, whether they would enjoy the freedom to play, whether Mr. Pliska would get the church’s pictorial members’ directory.

“I’d feel uncomfortable,” said her oldest son, Sebastian, 9, “but we’re supposed to let everybody come.”

Samantha Peterson, 21, said she believed Mr. Pliska should attend. “I feel that those who are fearful have a very valid opinion, but we have a unique opportunity to be really tested and to make the right decision,” she said. “I don’t think this guy is a danger. He’s asking for help.”

Her mother, Missy Peterson, who also has a 10-year-old son, said she felt guilty about her wariness. But she could not ignore it.

“Why should I reserve judgment and not listen to the bells and whistles in my gut that say ‘No’?” Ms. Peterson asked.

Adult survivors of sexual abuse are also shaken by the possibility of worshipping with a sex offender.

“There are people who feel that if we don’t welcome Mark, we lose who we are,” said David Irvine, 48, who was sexually abused as a child. “But what do you say to one member who was abused for 10 years, several times a week? By welcoming one person, are we rescinding our welcome to some of the survivors among us, people in pain and healing, members of our family?”

An ad hoc committee at the church is trying to develop a “safe church” policy that would apply to sex offenders and would also create programs to prevent sexual abuse through education and screening of anyone working with children.

The policy is expected to be ready for discussion in early May, Mr. Shockley said. Mr. Pliska has been asked not to attend worship services for now, but he meets weekly with a small group from Pilgrim.

In the meantime, publicity over his arrival at Pilgrim led to Mr. Pliska’s eviction and the loss of his job. He is homeless and unemployed. Yet he said he does not regret being open with the church, after spending years hiding who he was.

“So far, there is no upside,” he said. “But there will be later on. God makes miracles in different ways.”

    Sex Offenders Test Churches’ Core Beliefs, NYT, 10.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/us/10pilgrim.html?hp

Op-Ed Contributor

The Presidency’s Mormon Moment

April 9, 2007
The New York Times
By KENNETH WOODWARD

IN May, Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and 2008 Republican presidential hopeful, will give the commencement address at Pat Robertson’s Regent University. What better opportunity for Mr. Romney to discuss the issue of his Mormon faith before an audience of evangelicals?

When John F. Kennedy spoke before Protestant clergymen in Houston in 1960, he sought to dispel the fear that as a Catholic president, he would be subject to direction from the pope. As a Mormon, Mr. Romney faces ignorance as well as fear of his church and its political influence. More Americans, polls show, are willing to accept a woman or an African-American as president than a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

It isn’t just evangelical Christians in the Republican base who find Mr. Romney’s religion a stumbling block. Among those who identify themselves as liberal, almost half say they would not support a Mormon for president. Although with 5.6 million adherents Mormonism is the nation’s fourth-largest denomination, 57 percent of respondents to a recent CBS poll said they know little or nothing about Mormon beliefs and practices. Mr. Romney needs to be their teacher, whether he likes that role or not.

Among the reasons Americans distrust the Mormon church is Mormon clannishness. Because every worthy Mormon male is expected to be a lay priest in voluntary service to the church, the demands on his time often leave little opportunity to cultivate close friendships with non-Mormon neighbors. A good Mormon is a busy Mormon. Those — like Mr. Romney — who serve as bishops (pastors of congregations) often find it difficult to schedule evenings at home with their own families.

To many Americans, Mormonism is a church with the soul of a corporation. Successful Mormon males can expect to be called, at some time in their lives, to assume full-time duties in the church’s missions, in its vast administrative offices in Salt Lake City or in one of many church-owned businesses. Mormons like to hire other Mormons, and those who lose their jobs can count on the church networks to find them openings elsewhere. Mr. Romney put those same networks to effective use in raising part of his $23 million in campaign contributions.

Moreover, Mormons are perceived to be unusually secretive. Temple ceremonies — even weddings — are closed to non-Mormons, and church members are told not to disclose what goes on inside them. This attitude has fed anti-Mormon charges of secret and unholy rites. Already in his campaign, Mr. Romney has had to defend his church against beliefs and practices it abandoned a century ago. That some voters still confuse the Latter-day Saints with fundamentalist Mormon sects that continue to practice polygamy and child marriage is another reason the candidate should take the time to set the record straight.

But Mr. Romney must be sure to express himself in a way that will be properly understood. Any journalist who has covered the church knows that Mormons speak one way among themselves, another among outsiders. This is not duplicity but a consequence of the very different meanings Mormon doctrine attaches to words it shares with historic Christianity.

For example, Mormons speak of God, but they refer to a being who was once a man of “flesh and bone,” like us. They speak of salvation, but to them that means admittance to a “celestial kingdom” where a worthy couple can eventually become “gods” themselves. The Heavenly Father of whom they speak is married to a Heavenly Mother. And when they emphasize the importance of the family, they may be referring to their belief that marriage in a Mormon temple binds families together for all eternity.

Thus, when Mr. Romney told South Carolina Republicans a few months ago that Jesus was his “personal savior,” he used Southern Baptist language to affirm a relationship to Christ that is quite different in Mormon belief. (For Southern Baptists, “personal savior” implies a specific born-again experience that is not required or expected of Mormons.) This is not a winning strategy for Mr. Romney, whose handlers should be aware that Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals know Mormon doctrine better than most other Americans do — if only because they study Mormonism in order to rebut its claims.

Especially at Regent University, Mr. Romney should avoid using language that blurs fundamental differences among religious traditions. Rather, he should acknowledge those differences and insist that no candidate for public office should have to apologize for his or her religious faith.

Finally, there is the question of authority in the Church of Latter-day Saints, and of what obligations an office holder like Mr. Romney must discharge. Like the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church has a hierarchical structure in which ultimate authority is vested in one man. But unlike the pope, the church’s president is also regarded as God’s own “prophet” and “revelator.” Every sitting prophet is free to proclaim new revelations as God sees fit to send them — a form of divine direction that Mormon missionaries play as a trump card against competing faiths.

At Regent University, Mr. Romney will address an audience of conservative Christians who regard the Bible alone as the ultimate authority on faith and morals. Some, like Mr. Robertson, will also be Pentecostals who claim to receive private revelations themselves from time to time. But these revelations are strictly personal, the fruit of a wildly unpredictable Holy Spirit, and their recipients have no power to demand acceptance, much less obedience, from others.

How, then, might Mr. Romney defend himself against the charge that, as president, he would be vulnerable to direction from the prophet of his church?

He should invite critics to review the church’s record. The former Massachusetts governor is neither the first nor even the most prominent Mormon office holder. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah come immediately to mind — not to mention Mr. Romney’s father, George, a moderate governor of Michigan who ran for the Republican nomination for president in 1968.

There is no evidence that church authorities have tried to influence any of these public servants. On the contrary, the church leadership is undoubtedly astute enough to realize — as Catholic bishops did with President Kennedy — that any pressure on a Romney White House would only harm the church itself. “My church doesn’t dictate to me or anyone what political policies we should pursue,” Mr. Romney declared in New Hampshire in February. Voters should accept that declaration unless there is evidence to prove otherwise.

The issues above are real to many people, and Mr. Romney should take the opportunity to address them at Regent University. But none of these popular reservations about the Mormon Church are reasons to vote for or against Mitt Romney. History was bound to have its Mormon moment in presidential politics, just as it had its Catholic moment when Kennedy ran. Now that the moment has arrived, much depends on Mr. Romney.

Kenneth Woodward, a contributing editor at Newsweek, is writing a book about American religion since 1950.

    The Presidency’s Mormon Moment, NYT, 9.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/opinion/09woodward.html

U.S. Churches Go ‘Green’ for Palm Sunday

April 1, 2007
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

SIERRA MORENA, Mexico, March 29 — Clutching a tiny knife in his big calloused hands, Laizon Corzo wound his way through the thick foliage in one of southern Mexico’s forested areas in search of living treasures.

When he found them — big, leafy palm fronds — he did not cut right away. Instead, he inspected the leaves, back and front, for stains and other imperfections. “This one, no,” he said, pushing aside one and grabbing another. “This one — see how perfect it is?”

Mr. Corzo is one of the indigenous farmers who puts palms in the hands of North American churchgoers on Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter. He is also on the cutting edge of a new movement to harvest what are being called “eco-palms.”

Slightly more expensive than the average palm, eco-palms are the rage in churches across the United States because of the social and environmental benefits they represent. They are collected in a way that helps preserve the forest, and more of the sale price ends up in the pockets of the people who cut them.

“We want to be a green congregation,” said the Rev. David C. Parsons, pastor of St. John-St. Matthew-Emanuel Lutheran Church in Brooklyn, which purchased eco-palms for the second straight year. “We are conscious of our footprint on the earth. There is a biblical mandate to do that.”

Now operating in a handful of palm-producing areas in southern Mexico and northern Guatemala, the eco-palm project is similar to programs for certified coffee, chocolate or diamonds. But the consumers in this case are churches, and many say that the religious significance of the plant compels them to buy the most wholesome palm possible.

“Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem was accented by the jubilant waving of palm branches,” Lutheran World Relief, one of the groups endorsing the project, says on its Web site. “Unfortunately, for the communities where these palms are harvested, palm fronds do not always represent the same jubilation they do for us.”

Mr. Corzo, 37, a father of three who has been harvesting palm leaves since he was 5 or 6, used to be paid by how many he delivered, no matter the quality. He would hack away at any old palm and allow the middle man to worry about quality.

No more. Under the eco-palm program, Mr. Corzo is paid only for the quality fronds that he delivers — but at a much higher return, so his trifling pay has nearly doubled. The palms are now bundled in his village by women who had no jobs before.

The percentage of palms that must be discarded has plummeted from roughly half to a tenth. And the forest that Mr. Corzo uses to make a living is slowly becoming greener, environmentalists say.

The program began in 2005 with 20 American churches that bought about 5,000 palms. It grew last year, with 281 congregations placing orders for 80,000 palms. On this Palm Sunday, 1,436 churches will distribute 364,000 eco-palm stems.

That still represents just about 1 percent of the palms that are purchased for Palm Sunday, the day when the most palms are used; American churches use 25 million to 35 million palms, say officials involved in the project.

Lutheran churches are the biggest buyers, followed by Presbyterians. Smaller numbers of Roman Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist, Church of Christ and Mennonite congregations also ordered eco-palms this year.

The palms harvested in southern Mexico have shorter leaves than the ones many churches have used, resulting in some consternation in the pews. “Parishioners can’t fold these leaves into crosses, and that’s been a tradition,” Pastor Parsons said. “It’s something parents have passed on to their children, and it’s an adjustment to have these new palms.”

The project grew out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has come under far more criticism than praise for its effect on the environment. One of the pact’s side agreements set up the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation to promote environmentally friendly trade policies. As it sifted through the products that are sent from Mexico to the north, the commission discovered palms.

Dean A. Current, a professor of natural resources management at the University of Minnesota, was called in to study the economics of the palm industry. He discovered that about 10 percent of the palms sent to the United States were bought by churches. The rest go to florists, who often use them in arrangements for weddings and funerals.

In surveying churches, Mr. Current found that most were willing to pay up to double the going price to be sure their palms were responsibly harvested. A big church might spend as much as $1,500 on palms for Palm Sunday.

Sometimes, they are burned for the next year’s Ash Wednesday, although that practice is being cast aside by some congregations because of concerns that it pollutes the air.

“Churches want to help,” Mr. Current said. “Before this, they really didn’t know where their palms came from.”

Now many of them do. Mr. Current has brought small groups of church leaders here to Sierra Morena, a village of about 50 families in the southern highlands of Chiapas State, to see for themselves.

Environmental groups in Mexico and Guatemala have trained palm cutters to cut good fronds while allowing the palm plants to survive. That keeps the income flowing and maintains the habitats of birds and other species.

Those who harvest the palms are also coffee and corn farmers. Palms help make ends meet.

But exactly what they are used for up north is not always clear.

“I know it’s used for decoration,” said Moses Macal Maroukin, 69, a veteran palm chopper, who seemed somewhat mystified. He said he had no palm fronds in his home.

But then he revealed what the people here had long believed to be the real use of the exported palms. The juices in the stems and leaves are extracted, he explained in a conspiratorial whisper, and then turned into a special mixture that is used to stain greenbacks green.

“This is how you color your dollars,” he said, waving a palm.

U.S. Churches Go ‘Green’ for Palm Sunday, NYT, 1.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/world/americas/01palm.html