History > 2008 > USA > Faith (I)

Illustration: Harry Campbell

Why Radical Islam Just Won’t Die

NYT

23.3.2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/opinion/23berman.html

Pieces of History for New Churches

March 28, 2008
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS

LaGRANGEVILLE, N.Y. — The Roman Catholic churches stand 66 miles apart, one in the center of Harlem, the other on 82 acres between a farm and a hunting club in this rural hamlet in Dutchess County.

The Harlem church, St. Thomas the Apostle, is an exquisite piece of neo-Gothic architecture, its spiky terra-cotta crown resembling a wedding cake. Finished in 1907, the church first served Irish parishioners and then a black congregation that waned and withered, its Sunday Mass sparsely attended, its building in dire need of repairs, until closing in 2003. Now it faces demolition.

The church here, Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, is still under construction, modest in appearance yet impressive in size. It will have a steel frame, a bluish stone facade and seats for 1,200 people — four times the number that can fit in the church it will replace, which in recent years has rapidly run out of space for its growing flock of New York City transplants.

The two churches are connected by 12 stained-glass windows from Germany depicting New Testament scenes, which have graced St. Thomas for a century and will soon surround the altar at Blessed Kateri. The church is named after a 17th-century Mohawk who converted to Catholicism against her tribe’s wishes.

“We’re building a very large church,” Msgr. Desmond O’Connor, pastor at Blessed Kateri, said in an interview. “And we thought it could sustain windows as big and imposing as the ones down in Harlem.”

The transfer of the windows was arranged through a new program in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York through which priests can select sacred objects — crucifixes, chalices and pulpits, for example — from shuttered churches and give them new homes. The archdiocese began these artifact adoptions last year when it closed 21 parishes, most of them in Manhattan, the Bronx and in old industrial suburbs amid the shrinking of the Catholic populations there.

Church law prohibits the sale of such religious items and calls for their disposal only if they are damaged beyond repair, so the recent wave of closings presented a problem: What to do with all the stuff — some of it beautiful, much of it quite worn — behind the churches’ padlocked doors.

There are similar programs in other parts of the country, most with elaborate safeguards, including password-protected Web sites open only to priests, and storage areas equipped with surveillance cameras and alarms.

“The last thing you want is to find one of those pieces in some antique shop or on eBay,” said Msgr. Louis A. D’Addezio of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, whose artifact-swap program was set up in 1991, one of the first in the nation.

Often, the items move from a shuttered church to an active one without much notice or protest. But there are times when those transfers end up entangled in legal disputes, as was the case with the windows from St. Thomas.

In 2004, former St. Thomas parishioners sued the Archdiocese of New York to keep it from razing their church, arguing that they should have a say on what happens to the property. Politicians asked preservation officials to grant the church landmark status, and a descendant of the German windows’ maker wrote a letter to the archdiocese, calling the proposed demolition of St. Thomas a “barbaric act.”

“We were trying to prevent what’s been a house of worship and architectural icon for more than a century from being picked apart and destroyed,” said Eric V. Tait Jr., 68, a former altar boy at St. Thomas who has helped lead the fight to save the church, which is on West 118th Street near St. Nicholas Avenue. The church is still standing, but its future is doubtful.

In most cases, once church officials decide to close a parish, workers visit the building to catalog what is inside, photographing the objects, noting their origin and artistic or religious significance. Priests are allowed to give small items to other priests, preferably from neighboring parishes; whatever is not distributed is wrapped and stored in empty convents, schoolhouses or warehouses.

The Philadelphia Archdiocese, which has closed 22 churches since 1992, opens its storage vault once a month for two hours, and priests from all over have come by to look at the offerings. “We’ve placed items in Florida, Delaware, Nebraska and in New Mexico,” Monsignor D’Addezio said.

Two years ago, the Archdiocese of Newark hired an architectural historian, Troy Simmons, to manage its property. The job includes retrieving the artwork and sacred items that had been left inside closed churches there, some of which had been locked for decades.

“We found these beautiful oil paintings gathering dust under the stairs at St. John’s Church in Newark, probably since the church’s renovation in the 1960s,” Mr. Simmons said as he stood in a second-floor room at a former convent in East Orange, N.J., where the paintings are stored behind locked doors.

“There are treasures like this hidden all around,” he said.

The paintings, century-old portraits of female saints, share the space with statues, vestments, brass tabernacles and carved wooden crucifixes, which lie side by side on a pine floor. Visits to the storage space must be arranged in advance. Some of the items, like the paintings (prices upon request) and a reed organ ($300), can be viewed on the archdiocese’s Web site, though they are for sale only to parishes and religious institutions, Mr. Simmons said.

The Archdiocese of Boston introduced a program to relocate religious objects in 2004, ahead of a vast reorganization that led to the closing of 44 churches. At one point, there were hundreds of objects: pews, statues, Stations of the Cross and altars, stored in an empty church equipped with a climate-control system and a burglar alarm, said Kathleen Heck, who is in charge of the program.

“We try to be very good custodians,” Ms. Heck said.

Little by little, she said, the items have found new homes.

St. Patrick’s Church in Stoneham, Mass., a Boston suburb, concluded a $6.7 million expansion project in 2005. Its new building has several items from shuttered churches, including an altar from Nuestra Señora del Carmen in Lowell, 21 miles away, and a lectern from St. Joseph’s parish in the Hyde Park section of Boston, about nine miles south.

In Weymouth, Mass., another Boston suburb, Sacred Heart Church, which was destroyed by fire in 2005, reopened last December with stained-glass windows and Stations of the Cross — the sequence of scenes portraying Jesus’s journey to his crucifixion — culled from six closed churches.

“We had all these people call us and visit us to tell us how great they felt that the religious objects they had in their churches are now in our church and not relegated to storage,” said Sacred Heart’s pastor, the Rev. Daniel J. Riley.

Here, at the new Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, space for the stained-glass windows from St. Thomas the Apostle has already been carved into the walls, but for now, the voids remain filled by clear glass.

In August 2005, a judge dismissed the lawsuit filed by the parishioners at St. Thomas on grounds that interfering in the internal operations of the Catholic Church would violate the separation of church and state. The parishioners have not appealed the ruling, said Mr. Tait, the former altar boy who is one of the founders of the Harlem Preservation Foundation, partly because they do not have money for a lawyer.

The efforts to turn the church into a historic landmark have also stalled. Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, a preservationist group, said that the city has so far declined to entertain the request, though last year it designated two other Harlem Catholic churches as landmarks: All Saints, on East 129th Street, and St. Aloysius, on West 132nd Street.

The New York Archdiocese, for its part, has suspended its plans to build apartments for senior citizens at the St. Thomas site and has not yet applied for a full demolition permit. A spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, said in an interview that demolition remains “at least the most plausible and likely ultimate disposition” for the church and that the windows are still expected to be moved from there to here, even if he does not know when.

The cost to build the new church here and refurbish the old one right next to it amounts to $12 million; $8 million of it borrowed from the archdiocese, the rest a gift from the archdiocese. The work includes converting the 350-seat nave in the old Blessed Kateri into meeting rooms.

Dedicated in 1999, the old church is now too small for the 1,600 families who are members of the parish and the 770 children enrolled in its religious education program.

If all goes as planned, Monsignor O’Connor, the pastor at Blessed Kateri, said that he would celebrate the first Mass at the new church in September.

“We might not have the windows in place by then,” he added. “But we’ll have them at some point. They’ll look beautiful.”

Pieces of History for New Churches, NYT, 28.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/nyregion/28church.html

Many Muslims

Turn to Home Schooling

March 26, 2008
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

LODI, Calif. — Like dozens of other Pakistani-American girls here, Hajra Bibi stopped attending the local public school when she reached puberty, and began studying at home.

Her family wanted her to clean and cook for her male relatives, and had also worried that other American children would mock both her Muslim religion and her traditional clothes.

“Some men don’t like it when you wear American clothes — they don’t think it is a good thing for girls,” said Miss Bibi, 17, now studying at the 12th-grade level in this agricultural center some 70 miles east of San Francisco. “You have to be respectable.”

Across the United States, Muslims who find that a public school education clashes with their religious or cultural traditions have turned to home schooling. That choice is intended partly as a way to build a solid Muslim identity away from the prejudices that their children, boys and girls alike, can face in schoolyards. But in some cases, as in Ms. Bibi’s, the intent is also to isolate their adolescent and teenage daughters from the corrupting influences that they see in much of American life.

About 40 percent of the Pakistani and other Southeast Asian girls of high school age who are enrolled in the district here are home-schooled, though broader statistics on the number of Muslim children being home-schooled, and how well they do academically, are elusive. Even estimates on the number of all American children being taught at home swing broadly, from one million to two million.

No matter what the faith, parents who make the choice are often inspired by a belief that public schools are havens for social ills like drugs and that they can do better with their children at home.

“I don’t want the behavior,” said Aya Ismael, a Muslim mother home-schooling four children near San Jose. “Little girls are walking around dressing like hoochies, cursing and swearing and showing disrespect toward their elders. In Islam we believe in respect and dignity and honor.”

Still, the subject of home schooling is a contentious one in various Muslim communities, with opponents arguing that Muslim children are better off staying in the system and, if need be, fighting for their rights.

Robina Asghar, a Muslim who does social work in Stockton, Calif., says the fact that her son was repeatedly branded a “terrorist” in school hallways sharpened his interest in civil rights and inspired a dream to become a lawyer. He now attends a Catholic high school.

“My son had a hard time in school, but every time something happened it was a learning moment for him,” Mrs. Asghar said. “He learned how to cope. A lot of people were discriminated against in this country, but the only thing that brings change is education.”

Many parents, however, would rather their children learn in a less difficult environment, and opt to keep them home.

Hina Khan-Mukhtar decided to tutor her three sons at home and to send them to a small Muslim school cooperative established by some 15 Bay Area families for subjects like Arabic, science and carpentry. She made up her mind after visiting her oldest son’s prospective public school kindergarten, where each pupil had assembled a scrapbook titled “Why I Like Pigs.” Mrs. Khan-Mukhtar read with dismay what the children had written about the delicious taste of pork, barred by Islam. “I remembered at that age how important it was to fit in,” she said.

Many Muslim parents contacted for this article were reluctant to talk, saying Muslim home-schoolers were often portrayed as religious extremists. That view is partly fueled by the fact that Adam Gadahn, an American-born spokesman for Al Qaeda, was home-schooled in rural California.

“There is a tendency to make home-schoolers look like antisocial fanatics who don’t want their kids in the system,” said Nabila Hanson, who argues that most home-schoolers, like herself, make an extra effort to find their children opportunities for sports, music or field trips with other people.

Lodi’s Muslims also attracted unwanted national attention when one local man, Hamid Hayat, was sentenced last year to 24 years in prison on a terrorism conviction that his relatives say was largely due to a fabricated confession. (Had he been more Americanized, they say, he would have known to ask for a lawyer as soon as the F.B.I. appeared.)

Parents who home-school tend to be converts, Mrs. Khan-Mukhtar said. Immigrant parents she has encountered generally oppose the idea, seeing educational opportunities in America as a main reason for coming.

If so, then Fawzia Mai Tung is an exception, a Chinese Muslim immigrant who home-schools three daughters in Phoenix. She spent many sleepless nights worried that her children would not excel on standardized tests, until she discovered how low the scores at the local schools were. Her oldest son, also home-schooled, is now applying to medical school.

In some cases, home-schooling is used primarily as a way to isolate girls like Miss Bibi, the Pakistani-American here in Lodi.

Some 80 percent of the city’s 2,500 Muslims are Pakistani, and many are interrelated villagers who try to recreate the conservative social atmosphere back home. A decade ago many girls were simply shipped back to their villages once they reached adolescence.

“Their families want them to retain their culture and not become Americanized,” said Roberta Wall, the principal of the district-run Independent School, which supervises home schooling in Lodi and where home-schooled students attend weekly hourlong tutorials.

Of more than 90 Pakistani or other Southeast Asian girls of high school age who are enrolled in the Lodi district, 38 are being home-schooled. By contrast, just 7 of the 107 boys are being home-schooled, and usually the reason is that they were falling behind academically.

As soon as they finish their schooling, the girls are married off, often to cousins brought in from their families’ old villages.

The parents “want their girls safe at home and away from evil things like boys, drinking and drugs,” said Kristine Leach, a veteran teacher with the Independent School.

The girls follow the regular high school curriculum, squeezing in study time among housework, cooking, praying and reading the Koran. The teachers at the weekly tutorials occasionally crack jokes of the “what, are your brothers’ arms broken?” variety, but in general they tread lightly, sensing that their students obey family and tradition because they have no alternative.

“I do miss my friends,” Miss Bibi said of fellow students with whom she once attended public school. “We would hang out and do fun things, help each other with our homework.”

But being schooled apart does have its benefit, she added. “We don’t want anyone to point a finger at us,” she said, “to say that we are bad.”

Mrs. Asghar, the Stockton woman who argues against home schooling, takes exception to the idea of removing girls from school to preserve family honor, calling it a barrier to assimilation.

“People who think like this are stuck in a time capsule,” she said. “When kids know more than their parents, the parents lose control. I think that is a fear in all of us.”

Aishah Bashir, now an 18-year-old Independent School student, was sent back to Pakistan when she was 12 and stayed till she was 16. She had no education there.

Asked about home schooling, she said it was the best choice. But she admitted that the choice was not hers and, asked if she would home-school her own daughter, stared mutely at the floor. Finally she said quietly: “When I have a daughter, I want her to learn more than me. I want her to be more educated.”

Many Muslims Turn to Home Schooling, NYT, 26.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/us/26muslim.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Why Radical Islam Just Won’t Die

March 23, 2008
The New York Times
By PAUL BERMAN

THE big surprise, viewed from my own narrow perspective five years later, has taken place in the mysterious zones of extremist ideology. In the months and weeks before the invasion of Iraq, I wrote quite a lot about ideology in the Middle East, and especially about the revolutionary political doctrine known as radical Islamism.

I tried to show that radical Islamism is a modern philosophy, not just a heap of medieval prejudices. In its sundry versions, it draws on local and religious roots, just as it claims to do. But it also draws on totalitarian inspirations from 20th-century Europe. I wanted my readers to understand that with its double roots, religious and modern, perversely intertwined, radical Islamism wields a lot more power, intellectually speaking, than naïve observers might suppose.

I declared myself happy in principle with the notion of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, just as I was happy to see the Taliban chased from power. But I wanted everyone to understand that military action, by itself, could never defeat an ideology like radical Islamism — could never contribute more than 10 percent (I invented this statistic, as an illustrative figure) to a larger solution. I hammered away on that point in the days before the war. And today I have to acknowledge that, for all my hammering, radical Islamism, in several of its resilient branches, the ultra-radical and the beyond-ultra-radical, has proved to be stronger even than I suggested.

A lot of people right now make the common-sense supposition that if extremist ideologies have lately entered a sort of grisly golden age, the Bush administration’s all-too-predictable blundering in Iraq must bear the blame. Yes, certainly; but that can’t be the only explanation.

Extremist movements have been growing bigger and wilder for more than three decades now, during that period, America has tried pretty much everything from a policy point of view. Our presidents have been satanic (Richard Nixon), angelic (Jimmy Carter), a sleepy idiot savant (Ronald Reagan), a cagey realist (George H. W. Bush), wonderfully charming (Bill Clinton) and famously otherwise (George W. Bush). And each president’s Middle Eastern policy has conformed to his character.

In regard to Saddam Hussein alone, our government has lent him support (Mr. Reagan), conducted a limited war against him (the first President Bush), inflicted sanctions and bombings (Mr. Clinton, in other than his charming mode), and crudely overthrown him. Every one of those policies has left the Iraqi people worse off than before, even if nowadays, from beneath the rubble, the devastated survivors can at least ruminate about a better future — though I doubt that many of them are in any mood to do so.

And each new calamity for Iraq has, like manure, lent new fertility to the various extremist organizations. The entire sequence of events may suggest that America is uniquely destined to do the wrong thing. All too likely! But it may also suggest that America is not the fulcrum of the universe, and extremist ideologies have prospered because of their own ability to adapt and survive — their strength, in a word.

I notice a little gloomily that I may have underestimated the extremist ideologies in still another respect. Five years ago, anyone who took an interest in Middle Eastern affairs would easily have recalled that, over the course of a century, the intellectuals of the region have gone through any number of phases — liberal, Marxist, secularist, pious, traditionalist, nationalist, anti-imperialist and so forth, just like intellectuals everywhere else in the world.

Western intellectuals without any sort of Middle Eastern background would naturally have manifested an ardent solidarity with their Middle Eastern and Muslim counterparts who stand in the liberal vein — the Muslim free spirits of our own time, who argue in favor of human rights, rational thought (as opposed to dogma), tolerance and an open society.

But that was then. In today’s Middle East, the various radical Islamists, basking in their success, paint their liberal rivals and opponents as traitors to Muslim civilization, stooges of crusader or Zionist aggression. And, weirdly enough, all too many intellectuals in the Western countries have lately assented to those preposterous accusations, in a sanitized version suitable for Western consumption.

Even in the Western countries, quite a few Muslim liberals, the outspoken ones, live today under a threat of assassination, not to mention a reality of character assassination. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch legislator and writer, is merely an exceptionally valiant example. But instead of enjoying the unstinting support of their non-Muslim colleagues, the Muslim liberals find themselves routinely berated in the highbrow magazines and the universities as deracinated nonentities, alienated from the Muslim world. Or they find themselves pilloried as stooges of the neoconservative conspiracy — quite as if any writer from a Muslim background who fails to adhere to at least a few anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist tenets of the Islamist doctrine must be incapable of thinking his or her own thoughts.

A dismaying development. One more sign of the power of the extremist ideologies — one more surprising turn of events, on top of all the other dreadful and gut-wrenching surprises.
 

Paul Berman, the author of “Power and the Idealists,” is a writer in residence at New York University.

Why Radical Islam Just Won’t Die, NYT, 23.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/opinion/23berman.html

Obama Talk Fuels Easter Sermons

March 23, 2008
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
and NEELA BANERJEE

This Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the Christian calendar, many pastors will start their sermons about the Resurrection of Jesus and weave in a pointed message about racism and bigotry, and the need to rise above them.

Some pastors began to rethink their sermons on Tuesday, when Senator Barack Obama gave a speech about race, seeking to calm a furor that had erupted over explosive excerpts of sermons by his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

The controversy drove the nation to the unpatrolled intersection of race and religion, and as many pastors prepared for their Easter message they said they felt compelled to talk about it. Their congregants were writing and e-mailing them: some wanted to share their emotional reactions to Mr. Obama’s speech; others asked how Mr. Wright, the minister, could utter such inflammatory things from the pulpit.

Some ministers interviewed over the last several days said they would wait until after Easter to preach on it all, because Easter and headlines do not mix. But others said there was no better moment than Easter, when sanctuaries swelled with their biggest crowds of the year, and redemption was the dominant theme.

At Mount Ararat Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, the Rev. William H. Curtis said: “At the end of the day, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ makes it possible for even an African-American and a female to articulate the hopes and dreams of America, and do so with the hope of becoming president. Isn’t that wonderful?

“It’s possible because we do believe that humanity has redeeming qualities, and the resurrection of Christ gives us that faith,” said Mr. Curtis, who is president of the Hampton Ministers Conference, a national association of black ministers.

Philip L. Blackwell, senior pastor at the First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple, said he would weave an anecdote into his sermon about a black friend of his who had been stopped by the police, who were suspicious because he was driving an expensive car, which he owned.

“The church needs to be a community within which the pain can be shared,” said Mr. Blackwell, who is white and leads an urban, racially mixed congregation. “The grievances can be aired, and the power of that can be directed toward the ‘new creation’ that is portrayed in the Resurrection.”

The whole controversy started, after all, with a minister, preaching, in a church.

Television programs showed recorded parts of sermons by Mr. Wright, who is nationally known for his work in creating economic development programs in the inner city, inspiring many other black pastors to do the same, and for his fiery, prophetic preaching style. In the excerpts, Mr. Wright thunders that the government has inflicted AIDS on black people, and that the United States deserved the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

Mr. Obama responded with a major address that examined race relations through the eyes of blacks and whites, and called for Americans to open up an honest dialogue about race.

Many ministers said they would preach without explicitly mentioning Mr. Obama because they wanted to avoid alienating politically diverse congregations. They are also aware that some churches accused of making political endorsements have seen their tax-exempt status investigated by the Internal Revenue Service.

The response to the controversy from the pulpit will vary, of course, depending on a church’s denomination, racial composition and political and theological leanings, as well the predilections of the pastor. The Wright controversy is a natural topic for those in the United Church of Christ, a predominantly white denomination that includes Mr. Obama’s and Mr. Wright’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago (the largest church in the denomination).

Clergy members from Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and white evangelical churches are, very generally, less likely to incorporate the Wright controversy into their sermons than are those at black and mainline Protestant churches.

The Rev. Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and lead pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minn., said he would not be preaching about the racial issues raised by Mr. Obama’s speech and expected few other evangelical pastors to, either.

“Easter is about Easter and the Resurrection of Jesus, and it’s pretty unlikely that any other topic would eclipse that,” Mr. Anderson said. “That’s not to say those other topics aren’t important, but this is the most important.”

Most evangelical churches, he said, “are Bible-driven, not current-events-driven.”

In some churches, the evils of racism have long been common fare. In others, it is barely ever mentioned. But with immigration changing the nation’s ethnic balance, many congregations are struggling with the kinds of resentments that Mr. Obama touched on in his speech.

Monsignor Patrick Bishop, of Transfiguration Catholic Church in Marietta, Ga., said his parish had recently transformed from being almost all white to including blacks, Hispanics and Filipinos.

He said that next week, on the second Sunday of Easter, he would say in his homily: “Christ says in Him there is no east or west, north or south, slave or free, male or female. If a person cannot look beyond the color of their skin then they don’t really understand the Gospel.”

The Very Rev. Tracey Lind, dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, said she would preach about when Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” went to Jesus’ tomb and were met by an angel who rolled away the stone before the cave to reveal that Christ had risen from the dead.

“I’m going to talk about the stones that need to be rolled away from the tombs of lives, that are holding us in places of death and away from God,” Ms. Lind said. “One of the main stones in our churches, synagogues, mosques, communities, countries, world is the pervasive stone of racism. What Obama has done is moved the stone a little bit.

“I will ask our congregation to look at the stones in our lives,” she said.

Some ministers said their congregants were focused not on white racism, but on Mr. Wright’s remarks. The Rev. Dean Snyder, pastor of Foundry United Methodist church, which was the Clintons’ home church during President Bill Clinton’s tenure, said some of his congregants were aghast at Mr. Wright’s remarks.

During staff meetings this week at his church, Mr. Snyder said he noticed the rising awareness among some African-Americans of white Americans, he said, “who don’t understand the history of black people in this country and the role of the black church as a prophetic voice, and that in church you can say things that you couldn’t in larger society.”

The Rev. Kent Millard of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Indianapolis said he felt Mr. Obama had explained the reality of the relationship between a pastor and his congregants.

“Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is member of our congregation, and I would hope he would never be held accountable for everything I have said in the last 15 years,” said Dr. Millard, who is white. “Why is there any assumption that a person in church is expected to agree with everything a pastor says?”

Some black ministers said that their sermons might address how the reputation of a man many of them revere was reduced to sound bites. They pointed out that sermons in black churches covered a long and circuitous path from crisis to resolution, and it was unfair to judge the entire message on one or two sentences.

“I may not use his exact language,” said the Rev. Kenneth L. Samuel, pastor of Victory Church in Stone Mountain, Ga., “but I can tell you that the basic thrust of much of my preaching resonates with Dr. Wright. I don’t think I’m necessarily trying to preach people into anger, but I am trying to help people become conscious, become aware, to realize our power to make change in society.”

Mr. Samuel said his Easter sermon would be titled “Dangerous Proclamations,” and would focus on the Apostle Paul, “who was also under attack for his faith in Jesus, and for preaching the Resurrection.”

The Rev. Floyd Flake, senior pastor of Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral of New York in Queens, said, “The black preacher’s role is to present a prophetic word that represents a challenge, but also to give a priestly response that enables people to resolve the problem.” (Mr. Flake, a former member of Congress, has publicly endorsed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.)

On Easter, one of the nation’s foremost preachers, the Rev. James A. Forbes, senior minister emeritus at the Riverside Church in New York, said he would take Mr. Wright’s place preaching the 6 p.m. service at Trinity in Chicago. Dr. Forbes plans to preach about how the nation is in a “night season,” a dark, destabilizing time, given the war, the economy and the vitriol over race and gender in the political primary.

“It is nighttime in America,” Dr. Forbes said, “and I want to bring a word of encouragement.”

Reporting was contributed by Rebecca Cathcart, Catrin Einhorn, Brenda Goodman and Christopher Maag.

    Obama Talk Fuels Easter Sermons, NYT, 23.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/us/politics/23churches.html?hp

Episcopal Church Votes

to Oust Bishop Who Seceded

March 13, 2008
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

The Episcopal Church moved to remove the bishop of the San Joaquin Diocese in California on Wednesday, in reaction to the diocese’s unprecedented decision late last year to secede from the church over theological issues.

The bishop, John-David Schofield, is the first bishop to face such action as a result of the disputes over the church’s stance on homosexuality.

At its semiannual meeting, in Texas, the church’s House of Bishops voted “to consent to the deposition from the ordained ministry” of Bishop Schofield.

The vote and the events leading to it underscore the discord tearing at the Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the church is the American branch, since the church ordained the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, a gay man in a long-term relationship, as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.

In December, Bishop Schofield presided over a vote by his diocese, in the Central Valley of California, to split with the Episcopal Church and align itself with the Province of the Southern Cone, which is in South America.

After the vote, the Episcopal Church’s leadership said Bishop Schofield would have a few months to change his mind and the course of his diocese, which had about 8,800 members before the December vote. The bishop held to his position but later resigned from the church’s House of Bishops. The vote to remove him said he had “repudiated the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Episcopal Church.”

Bishops have been deposed in the past, including one four years ago for financial impropriety, said Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the chief pastor of the Episcopal Church. But experts said the church and dissident dioceses were treading new ground as those dioceses weigh leaving the church for another part of the 77-million-member global Communion.

“I have not abandoned the faith,” Bishop Schofield said in an e-mail statement. “It is the leadership of the Episcopal Church that is treating itself as a separate and unique church. They may do so, but they ought not expect everyone to follow teaching that serves only to undermine the authority of the Bible and ultimately leads to lifestyles that are destructive.”

Traditionalists at home and abroad assert that the Bible describes homosexuality as an abomination, and they consider the Episcopal Church’s ordination of Bishop Robinson as the latest and most galling proof of its rejection of biblical authority.

In the last four years, the Anglican Communion, the world’s third-largest Christian body, has edged closer to fracture over the issue. In the United States, several dozen individual congregations out of nearly 7,700 have split with the Episcopal Church. But the San Joaquin vote was the first time an entire diocese chose to secede. About three-quarters of San Joaquin’s 47 parishes have followed the bishop. Those Episcopalians who remained are working with the church’s leadership to reconstitute the diocese with a new bishop.

Experts on the church said the deposing of Bishop Schofield had set the stage for the next phase of the conflict, which would most likely be lawsuits over diocesan and parish property.

The Rev. Ephraim Radner, a leading Episcopal conservative and professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College in Toronto, echoed other experts when he said the removal of Bishop Schofield would send a message to others considering a split with the church. Two other bishops have been warned not to proceed with votes to secede. Episcopal bishops denied, however, that the vote to depose the bishop was “punitive.”

“I don’t think we are sending messages but dealing with matters at hand,” Bishop Suffragan Catherine S. Roskam of New York said in a conference call. “We have dealt with it with sober conversation, dealt with it prayerfully and even regretfully.”

    Episcopal Church Votes to Oust Bishop Who Seceded, NYT, 13.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/us/13bishop.html

Southern Baptists Back a Shift on Climate Change

March 10, 2008
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

Signaling a significant departure from the Southern Baptist Convention’s official stance on global warming, 44 Southern Baptist leaders have decided to back a declaration calling for more action on climate change, saying its previous position on the issue was “too timid.”

The largest denomination in the United States after the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, with more than 16 million members, is politically and theologically conservative.

Yet its current president, the Rev. Frank Page, signed the initiative, “A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change.” Two past presidents of the convention, the Rev. Jack Graham and the Rev. James Merritt, also signed.

“We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues has often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice,” the church leaders wrote in their new declaration.

A 2007 resolution passed by the convention hewed to a more skeptical view of global warming.

In contrast, the new declaration, which will be released Monday, states, “Our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed.”

The document also urges ministers to preach more about the environment and for all Baptists to keep an open mind about considering environmental policy.

Jonathan Merritt, the spokesman for the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative and a seminarian at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., said the declaration was a call to Christians to return to a biblical mandate to guard the world God created.

The Southern Baptist signatories join a growing community of evangelicals pushing for more action among believers, industry and politicians. Experts on the Southern Baptist Convention noted the initiative marked the growing influence of younger leaders on the discussions in the Southern Baptist Convention.

While those younger Baptists remain committed to fight abortion, for instance, the environment is now a top priority, too.

“In no way do we intend to back away from sanctity of life,” said the Rev. Dr. Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Ala.

Still, many powerful Southern Baptist leaders and agencies did not sign the declaration, including the convention’s influential political arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Dr. Barrett Duke, vice president for public policy at the commission, played down the differences between the declaration and the Southern Baptist Convention’s position.

The declaration says in fact that lack of scientific unanimity should not preclude “prudent action,” which includes changing individual habits and giving “serious consideration to responsible policies that effectively address” global warming.

The declaration is the outgrowth of soul-searching by Mr. Merritt, 25. The younger Mr. Merritt said that for years he had been “an enemy of the environment.” Then, he said, he had an epiphany.

“I learned that God reveals himself through Scripture and in general through his creation, and when we destroy God’s creation, it’s similar to ripping pages from the Bible,” Mr. Merritt said.

    Southern Baptists Back a Shift on Climate Change, NYT, 10.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/us/10baptist.html

Pope, ahead of U.S. trip,

speaks of abortion, gays

Fri Feb 29, 2008
2:52pm EST
Reuters
By Phil Stewart

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, ahead of his first trip to the United States, praised Americans on Friday who oppose gay marriage and abortion and called for global nuclear disarmament.

In an address to new U.S. ambassador Mary Ann Glendon, Benedict touched on issues he will likely raise on his April 15-20 visit, during which he will meet President George W. Bush in Washington and address the United Nations.

The Vatican timed the April 10-15 visit to take place before the final phase of the U.S. presidential campaign in order to avoid anything that could be seen as trying to influence the vote.

But in his address to Glendon, 69, a Harvard law professor who has been a consultant to various Vatican departments, Benedict touched on sensitive political issues.

He said Americans' appreciation of religion's role in public life is "reflected in the efforts of so many of your fellow citizens and government leaders to ensure legal protection for God's gift of life from conception to natural death."

Benedict also spoke of safeguarding the family and "the institution of marriage, acknowledged as a stable union between a man and a woman."

Gay marriage is a hot political issue in the United States.

Massachusetts is the only U.S. state that allows same-sex marriage while several states allow civil unions for gay couples. More than 25 states have constitutional amendments barring same-sex marriage.

The pontiff also told Glendon, a close friend of Bush, that the world's problems extended well beyond terrorism.

"The progress of the human family is threatened not only by the plague of international terrorism, but also by such threats to peace as the quickening pace of the arms race and the continuance of tensions in the Middle East," the pope said.

He called for "trust in, and commitment to" international organizations like the United Nations to foster dialogue to diffuse global tensions.

His call for "patient and transparent" nuclear disarmament negotiations came as the United States pushes ahead with plans to build a global missile defense shield, opposed by Russia.

Washington says the shield is meant to protect it and allies from rogue states such as Iran and North Korea.

Glendon, a Pittsfield, Massachusetts native who in 1994 became the first woman to lead a Vatican delegation to a U.N. conference, said the German-born Pontiff would receive a warm welcome in Washington and New York.

"You will be among friends," she said, noting that Benedict's predecessor John Paul II made seven U.S. visits that were "opportunities for a conversation on the important issues of the day".

Glendon is the second woman U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.
 

(Additional reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Jon Boyle)

    Pope, ahead of U.S. trip, speaks of abortion, gays, R, 29.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSL2933948520080229

Poll Finds a Fluid Religious Life in U.S.

February 26, 2008
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

WASHINGTON — More than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion, according to a survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The report, titled “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” depicts a highly fluid and diverse national religious life. If shifts among Protestant denominations are included, then it appears that 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations.

For at least a generation, scholars have noted that more Americans are moving among faiths, as denominational loyalty erodes. But the survey, based on telephone interviews with more than 35,000 Americans, offers one of the clearest views yet of that trend, scholars said. The United States Census does not track religious affiliation.

It shows, for example, that every religion is losing and gaining members, but that the Roman Catholic Church “has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes.” The survey also indicates that the group that had the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated. Sixteen percent of American adults say they are not part of any organized faith, which makes the unaffiliated the country’s fourth-largest “religious group.”

Detailing the nature of religious affiliation — who has the numbers, the education, the money — signals who could hold sway over the country’s political and cultural life, said John Green, an author of the report and a senior fellow on religion and American politics at Pew.

Michael Lindsay, assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University, echoed that view. “Religion is the single most important factor that drives American belief attitudes and behaviors,” said Mr. Lindsay, who had read the Pew report. “It is a powerful indicator of where America will end up on politics, culture, family life. If you want to understand America, you have to understand religion in America.”

In the 1980s, the General Social Survey by the National Opinion Research Center indicated that 5 percent to 8 percent of the population described itself as unaffiliated with a particular religion.

The Pew survey, available on the Web at http://religions.pewforum.org/ , was conducted between May and August of 2007. The margin of sampling error ranges from plus or minus one percentage point for the total sample to two points for Catholics and eight points for Hindus.

In the Pew survey 7 percent of the adult population said they were unaffiliated with a faith as children. That segment increases to 16 percent of the population in adulthood, the survey found. The unaffiliated are largely under 50 and male. “Nearly one in five men say they have no formal religious affiliation, compared with roughly 13 percent of women,” the survey said.

The rise of the unaffiliated does not, however, mean that Americans are becoming less religious. Contrary to assumptions that most of the unaffiliated are atheists or agnostics, most described their religion “as nothing in particular.” Pew researchers said later projects would delve more deeply into their beliefs and practices and would try to determine if the unaffiliated remained so as they aged.

The other groups that have gained the most people, in net terms, are nondenominational Protestant churches, which are largely evangelical and, in many cases, megachurches; Pentecostals; and the Holiness Church, also an evangelical denomination.

While the ranks of the unaffiliated have been growing, Protestantism has been declining, the survey found. In the 1970s, Protestants accounted for some two-thirds of the population. The Pew survey found they now make up about 50 percent. Evangelical Christians account for a slim majority of Protestants, and those who leave one evangelical denomination usually move to another, rather than to mainline churches.

Prof. Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, said large numbers of Americans leaving organized religion and large numbers still embracing the fervor of evangelical Christianity pointed to the same desires.

“The trend is towards more personal religion, and evangelicals offer that,” Professor Prothero said, explaining that evangelical churches tailored much of their activities to youths.

“Those losing out are offering impersonal religion,” he said, “and those winning are offering a smaller scale: mega-churches succeed not because they are mega but because they have smaller ministries inside.”

The percentage of Catholics in the American population has held steady for decades at about 25 percent. But that masks a precipitous decline in native-born Catholics. The proportion has been bolstered by the large influx of Catholic immigrants, mostly from Latin America, the survey found.

The Roman Catholic Church has lost more adherents than any other group: about one-third of respondents raised Catholic said they no longer identified as such. Based on the data, the survey showed, “this means that roughly 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics.”

Immigration continues to influence American religion greatly, the survey found. The majority of immigrants are Christian, and almost half are Catholic. Muslims rival Mormons as having the largest families. And Hindus are the best-educated and among the richest religious groups, the survey found.

“I think politicians will be looking at this survey to see what groups they ought to target,” Professor Prothero said. “If the Hindu population is negligible, they won’t have to worry about it. But if it is wealthy, then they may have to pay attention.”

Experts said the wide-ranging variety of religious affiliation could set the stage for further conflicts over morality or politics, or new alliances on certain issues, as religious people have done on climate change or Jews and Hindus have done over relations between the United States, Israel and India.

“It sets up the potential for big arguments,” said Mr. Green of Pew, “but also for the possibility of all sorts of creative synthesis. Diversity cuts both ways.”

    Poll Finds a Fluid Religious Life in U.S., NYT, 26.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/us/26religion.html

For Muslim Students, a Debate on Inclusion

February 21, 2008
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

SAN JOSE — Amir Mertaban vividly recalls sitting at his university’s recruitment table for the Muslim Students Association a few years ago when an attractive undergraduate flounced up in a decidedly un-Islamic miniskirt, saying “Salamu aleykum,” or “Peace be upon you,” a standard Arabic greeting, and asked to sign up.

Mr. Mertaban also recalls that his fellow recruiter surveyed the young woman with disdain, arguing later that she should not be admitted because her skirt clearly signaled that she would corrupt the Islamic values of the other members.

“I knew that brother, I knew him very well; he used to smoke weed on a regular basis,” said Mr. Mertaban, now 25, who was president of the Muslim student group at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, from 2003 to 2005.

Pointing out the hypocrisy, Mr. Mertaban won the argument that the group could no longer reject potential members based on rigid standards of Islamic practice.

The intense debate over whether organizations for Muslim students should be inclusive or strict is playing out on college campuses across the United States, where there are now more than 200 Muslim Students Association chapters.

Gender issues, specifically the extent to which men and women should mingle, are the most fraught topic as Muslim students wrestle with the yawning gap between American college traditions and those of Islam.

“There is this constant tension between becoming a mainstream student organization versus appealing to students who have a more conservative or stricter interpretation of Islam,” said Hadia Mubarak, the first woman to serve as president of the national association, from 2004 to 2005.

Each chapter enjoys relative autonomy in setting its rules. Broadly, those at private colleges tend to be more liberal because they draw from a more geographically dispersed population, and the smaller numbers prompt Muslim students to play down their differences.

Chapters at state colleges, on the other hand, often pull from the community, attracting students from conservative families who do not want their children too far afield.

At Yale, for example, Sunnis and Shiites mix easily and male and female students shocked parents in the audience by kissing during the annual awards ceremony. Contrast that with the University of California, Irvine, which has the reputation for being the most conservative chapter in the country, its president saying that to an outsider its ranks of bearded young men and veiled women might come across as “way Muslim” or even extremist.

But arguments erupt virtually everywhere. At the University of California, Davis, last year, in their effort to make the Muslim association more “cool,” board members organized a large alcohol-free barbecue. Men and women ate separately, but mingled in a mock jail for a charity drive.

The next day the chapter president, Khalida Fazel, said she fielded complaints that unmarried men and women were physically bumping into one other. Ms. Fazel now calls the event a mistake.

At George Washington University, a dodge ball game pitting men against women after Friday prayers drew such protests from Muslim alumni and a few members that the board felt compelled to seek a religious ruling stating that Islamic traditions accept such an event.

Members acknowledge that the tone of the Muslim associations often drives away students. Several presidents said that if they thought members were being too lax, guest imams would deliver prayer sermons about the evils of alcohol or premarital sex.

Judgment can also come swiftly. Ghayth Adhami, a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, recalled how a young student who showed up at a university recruitment meeting in a Budweiser T-shirt faced a few comments about un-Islamic dress. The student never came back.

Some members push against the rigidity. Fatima Hassan, 22, a senior at the Davis campus, organized a coed road trip to Reno, Nev., two hours away, to play the slot machines last Halloween. In Islam, Ms. Hassan concedes, gambling is “really bad,” but it was men and women sharing the same car that shocked some fellow association members.

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Ms. Hassan said. “I am chill about that whole coed thing. I understand that in a Muslim context we are not supposed to hang out with the opposite sex, but it just happens and there is nothing you can do.”

But as Saif Inam, the vice president of the chapter at George Washington put it, “At the end of the day, I don’t want God asking me, ‘O.K. Saif, why did you organize events in which people could do un-Islamic things in big numbers?’ ”

The debate boils down to whether upholding gender segregation is forcing something artificial and vaguely hypocritical in an American context.

“As American Islam gets its own identity, it is going to have to shed some of these notions that are distant from American culture,” said Rafia Zakaria, a student at Indiana University. “The tension is between what forms of tradition are essential and what forms are open to innovation.”

American law says men and women are equal, whereas Muslim religious texts say they “complement” each other, Ms. Zakaria said. “If the law says they are equal, it’s hard to see how in their spiritual lives they will accept a whole different identity.”

The entire shift of the association from a foreign-run organization to an American one took place over arguments like this.

The Americans won out partly because the number of Muslim American college students hit a critical mass in the late 1990s, and then, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, foreign students, fearful of their visas being revoked, started avoiding a group that was increasingly political.

Some critics view strict interpretation of the faith as part of the association’s DNA. Organized in the 1960s by foreign students who wanted collective prayers where there were no mosques, the associations were basically little slices of Saudi Arabia. Women were banned. Only Muslim men who prayed, fasted and avoided alcohol and dating were welcomed. Meetings, even idle conversations, were in Arabic.

Donations from Saudi Arabia largely financed the group, and its leaders pushed the kingdom’s puritan, Wahhabi strain of Islam. Prof. Hamid Algar of the University of California, Berkeley, said that in the 1960s and 1970s, chapters advocated theological and political positions derived from radical Islamist organizations and would brook no criticism of Saudi Arabia.

That past has given the associations a reputation in some official quarters as a possible font of extremism, but experts in American Islam believe college campuses have become too diverse and are under too much scrutiny for the groups to foster radicals.

Zareena Grewal, a professor of religion and American studies at Yale, pointed to several things that would repel extremists. Members are trying to become more involved in the American political system, Professor Grewal said, and the heavy presence of women in the leadership would also deter them. Members “are not sitting around reading ‘How to Bomb Your Campus for Dummies,’ ” she said.

Its leaders think the organization is gradually relaxing a bit as it seeks to maintain its status as the main player for Muslim students.

“There were drunkards in the Prophet Muhammad’s community; there were fornicators and people who committed adultery in his community, and he didn’t reject them,” Mr. Mertaban said. “I think M.S.A.’s are beginning to understand this point that every person has ups and downs.”

    For Muslim Students, a Debate on Inclusion, NYT, 21.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/education/21muslim.html?hp

Religion Joins Custody Cases, to Judges’ Unease

February 13, 2008
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

MADISON, Ala. — On a January night nine years ago, Laura Snider was saved.

A 27-year-old single mother at the time, Mrs. Snider felt she had ruined her life through a disastrous marriage and divorce. But in her kitchen that night, after reading pamphlets and Bible passages that her boss had pointed her to, she realized she was a sinner, she said, she prayed for forgiveness, and put her trust in Christ.

Four years later, the conservative brand of Christianity Mrs. Snider embraced became the source of a bitter, continuing custody battle over her only child, Libby Mashburn.

Across the country, child-custody disputes in which religion is the flash point are increasing, part of a broader rise in custody conflicts over the last 30 years, lawyers, judges and mediators say.

“There has definitely been an increase in conflict over religious issues,” said Ronald William Nelson, a Kansas family lawyer who is chairman of the custody committee of the American Bar Association’s family law section. “Part of that is there has been an increase of conflicts between parents across the board, and with parents looking for reasons to justify their own actions.” Another factor, he said, is the rise of intermarriage and greater willingness by Americans to convert.

Nobody keeps track of who wins in these religious disputes, but lawyers say that judges are just as likely to rule in favor of the more religiously engaged parent as the other way around. That is because, for constitutional reasons, judges are reluctant to base their rulings primarily on the religious preferences of parents.

Judges do not want to take on custody disputes rooted in religion, said lawyers like Gaetano Ferro, who until recently served as president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. Mr. Ferro said, “How will a judge say in any rational fashion that Islam is better than Buddhism, Catholicism better than Judaism, or Methodism better than Pentecostalism?”

As a result, more and more states have tried to keep custody disputes out of court by mandating mediation. But the effect has been piecemeal, and religious disputes have proven to be among the most difficult to resolve, lawyers said.

From the age of 1 month, Mrs. Snider’s daughter had lived with her, and later Mrs. Snider’s new husband, Brian Snider, with occasional visits to her biological father.

But in 2003, when Libby was 6, an Alabama court gave primary custody to her father, William Mashburn, after he and Mrs. Snider’s own family argued that the strict religious upbringing Libby received at her mother’s home, which involved modest dress, teachings about sin and salvation, and limited exposure to popular culture, was damaging her.

“We were easy targets because we were made to look like cultists,” Mrs. Snider, 36, said. “I think whether anyone admits it or not, almost all of the ruling had to do with religion. Nothing I had done was called into question except that.”

Generally, custody disputes are resolved outside the courtroom, lawyers said.

Such cases have increased, however, because a generation ago, mothers almost always got custody and were responsible for nearly all aspects of children’s upbringing. But now, both parents are usually involved in raising children after divorce, and that can lead to dispute. Data regarding custody cases are not uniform, according to the National Center for State Courts, but for 10 states for which it has data from 2002, all show an increase in custody cases coming to trial.

Conflicts sometimes arise when an interfaith marriage dissolves or when one parent converts to a different religion after divorce.

In Oregon, a dispute between James Boldt and his former wife, Lia, was recently decided by the State Supreme Court. Mr. Boldt, the custodial parent, converted to Judaism after the divorce and sought to have their son, now 12, convert, and be circumcised.

The court ruled that custodial parents could generally decide if a child should be circumcised. But given the son’s age, it ordered the lower court to ascertain his wishes. If they conflict with his father’s, the court may have to reconsider the custody arrangement, the court ruled.

Tensions can emerge when one parent takes a turn toward fundamentalism. In 2006, the United States Supreme Court let stand a decision by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania that permitted Stanley Shepp to tell his 14-year-old daughter about polygamy.

Mr. Shepp and his former wife, Tracey Roberts, were Mormons living in York, Pa., when they married. But Mr. Shepp espoused polygamy as a tenet of their faith.

Ms. Roberts contends that Mr. Shepp spoke to one of her daughters from a previous marriage about marrying him, which he denies. She left Mr. Shepp and has primary custody of their daughter. He was excommunicated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for his polygamist views and is now part of a Mormon fundamentalist movement in Utah.

Mr. Shepp petitioned for better-defined custody rights for his daughter, but Ms. Roberts objected because he had exposed the child to polygamist Mormon communities. The court upheld Mr. Shepp’s right to teach his daughter about polygamy, saying it could not find evidence that such teaching harmed her physical or mental health.

Judges risk violating the separation of church and state if they try to choose the faith a child should be raised in, legal experts said. But in situations like Libby Mashburn’s, judgments about parenting can become entwined with religion.

In upholding the rulings of lower courts to grant primary custody to Mr. Mashburn, the Supreme Court of Alabama said the Sniders’s involvement in missionary work took Libby away from her extended family in Alabama. The Sniders are quietly, unapologetically fundamentalist. They believe that American culture, even conservative denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention, has drifted perilously far from biblical teachings. They attend a large Independent Baptist church in Madison, where the music, the sanctuary and the congregants are unadorned and old-fashioned.

Women wear skirts as a sign of modesty. They do not swim in mixed company. They eschew rock music and nearly all popular culture. They do not drink, smoke or swear.

The Sniders have raised Libby, now 11, in that tradition. But it has put them at odds with Mr. Mashburn and Mrs. Snider’s family. Mr. Mashburn and his lawyer declined to comment .

Mrs. Snider said she understood that Libby might wear pants at her father’s home or go to the movies. But she insisted that Mr. Mashburn not swear or drink in front of Libby or expose her to inappropriate movies and music, which, she said, he has repeatedly done.

The Sniders have repeatedly appealed to win back primary custody. They are awaiting yet another decision from a hearing in November.

At the last hearing, Libby, who spends about 40 percent of her time with the Sniders, testified against Mr. Mashburn.

“I’m more of my mom’s religion, and my dad sometimes talks bad about my mom,” she said. “He called it a cult, and it’s definitely not a cult. It kind of makes me mad sometimes. Maybe he thinks her religion may be bad for me, but I think mainly he doesn’t like my mom and is using that as an excuse.”

Some states like California and Connecticut have taken innovative steps to get parents to resolve custody issues outside court. In Connecticut, for example, those seeking a court order have to meet with a family-relations specialist in an effort to negotiate. If that fails, they attend a daylong session to settle their differences before a panel that includes a lawyer and a mental health professional.

Even after a case goes to court, little may be resolved.

Aaron Petty of Minneapolis and Gineen Gove of Black River Falls, Wis., had their daughter, Basyl, 17 years ago. The couple split up when Basyl was 4. Soon afterward, Ms. Gove married, and she and her husband converted to Old Order Amish.

As Mr. Petty saw his daughter over the years, he became concerned, he said, when Basyl was about 11 and he learned that the Goves would not let her go to school past eighth grade, a common decision among the Amish.

Mr. Petty petitioned for primary custody so that Basyl might continue her education. “This case wasn’t about religion for me,” he said. “It was about her education.”

He won the case when Basyl was 14, but she disappeared. Mr. Petty said he suspected Basyl was living within the Amish community. The Goves declined to talk about the case.

“I wanted to offer my daughter options for her future, in case she grew up and didn’t remain Amish,” Mr. Petty said in a phone interview. “At 12, 13, 14, making lasting drastic decisions based on faith isn’t an appropriate time.”

Mr. Petty’s voice caught as he continued. “Was that case worth fighting? In hindsight, no. I haven’t seen my daughter in two-and-a-half years.”

    Religion Joins Custody Cases, to Judges’ Unease, NYT, 13.2.2008,http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/us/13custody.html?hp

Colleges Seek to Protect Church Tills

February 12, 2008
Filed at 2:32 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- The globe-trotting priest from Connecticut drove a Jaguar, shopped at Bergdorf Goodman and bought jewelry from Cartier, all of it with money stolen from his church's coffers. By the time the parish finance council caught on, he had embezzled $1.3 million.

Many U.S. churches have been victims of embezzlement over the years, reflecting not just moral weakness on the part of the wrongdoers, but lax financial controls. Often, church budgets are overseen by volunteers or employees with little guidance or professional training.

Now, some colleges are hoping to prevent such faith-shattering abuses by offering programs devoted specifically to managing church finances and personnel.

Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and Boston College started programs in September, and Villanova University outside Philadelphia is offering an online master's degree in church management beginning this summer.

The concept is becoming more popular despite some among the faithful who bristle at the thought of the church as a business, said Kerry Robinson, executive director of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management, a Roman Catholic group.

''It is true that the church is not a company, and we respect and acknowledge that,'' Robinson said. ''But it is comprised of people, finances and facilities. Catholic theology demands that those are managed well -- and not just well, but to the highest, exemplary degrees of stewardship.''

Better financial controls might have led to an earlier uncovering of the priest sexual-abuse scandal, said Charles Zech, director of Villanova's Center for the Study of Church Management. Numerous financial red flags were missed as churches quietly settled with victims and paid for treatment for priests, he said.

More than 60 Catholic dioceses responding to a survey by Zech and a colleague reported embezzlements within the past five years. The survey got responses from only about half of those contacted, but 60 amounts to around one-third of the nation's dioceses. About a half-dozen of the dioceses that responded reported thefts of more than $500,000.

''If folks were better trained in management, a lot of problems that churches face today could have been avoided,'' Zech said.

Just last year, the Associated Press found reports of more than 20 churches in 17 states dealing with embezzlement cases. The cases included clergy or church employees who were either charged with, sentenced for, convicted of or pleaded guilty to stealing religious funds.

The frauds involved many denominations, and included a Roman Catholic priest in Virginia who admitted stealing at least $400,000 from his parishioners and a Lutheran youth minister in Pennsylvania charged with embezzling more than $68,000.

Last fall, Boston College -- a Catholic school, like Duquesne and Villanova -- began offering a master's in pastoral ministry with a concentration in church management. It also offers dual master's degrees in ministry and business.

Boston College theology professor Thomas Groome said he became convinced the programs were needed after attending a convocation of clergy and laity a few years ago.

''We were speaking two different languages,'' Groome said. ''The business people were talking about economies of scale. The bishops and the theologians were talking about the church being a sacrament of God's reign in the world.''

Jon Jakoblich, one of about nine students in Boston College's on-campus program, enrolled in hopes of landing a management role in a Catholic parish. Jakoblich, 25, said that he wants to help with strategic planning and leadership, and that this kind of education is necessary ''to sustain the long-term health of the church.''

At Villanova, the two-year, part-time master's program is expected to garner about two dozen applications from Catholics and Protestants alike, Zech said. So far, about half the applicants are clergy. Courses include financial reporting and controls; civil law and church law for church administrators; and personnel management.

The Rev. Frank McGrath, the new pastor at victimized St. John Roman Catholic Church in Darien, Conn., said pastors should receive some administrative training, either at seminaries or from the diocese after being ordained.

A private detective hired in 2006 to investigate McGrath's big-spending predecessor, the Rev. Michael Jude Fay, found that he had secret bank accounts and flagrantly abused church credit cards.

''Anything he wanted, he charged. And nobody stopped him for years and years and years,'' said investigator Vito Colucci Jr. ''There was no accountability.''

A second investigation ordered by the Bridgeport Diocese found that the parish finance council had not met regularly in recent years, largely because of Fay's absences from the parish. Fay was diagnosed with cancer in 2001 and frequently cited his health when asked about church finances.

The diocese has since instituted stricter financial controls and appointed a deacon with more than 30 years of management experience to oversee the new initiatives. The changes include an Internet-based accounting system that all 87 parishes began using last May; new financial reports; and an updated parish accounting manual.

Fay is set to report to federal prison in April to begin serving more than three years. But some parishioners were so hurt they left.

''They may never return. And their spiritual lives may never be restored,'' McGrath said in a statement submitted in court. ''The deepest impact of Father Fay's misconduct cannot be quantified because it transcends dollars.''

    Colleges Seek to Protect Church Tills, NYT, 12.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Stopping-Church-Embezzlement.html

Upstate, Drop in Catholics Leads to Drop in Churches

February 10, 2008
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS

JAMESVILLE, N.Y. — Armed sheriff’s deputies removed the last man from the Catholic church here 10 days ago, pasting “No Trespassing” signs on the doors as they left and surrounding the perimeter of the grounds with crime-scene tape reading: “Do Not Cross.”

It was the end of a seven-month vigil by parishioners trying to keep the church open.

“We were told that if we go as far as the parking lot, we will be arrested,” said Mary Cargian, 78, who married at the church, St. Mary’s, in 1967 and had worshiped there ever since.

For 217 days, 100 volunteers took turns occupying St. Mary’s, where the door locks had been changed just before a priest celebrated the last Mass on June 30. When the Mass ended, some volunteers stayed, and then the occupants took turns. They gathered in the church for prayer services on Sundays, continued to raise donations and even filed an appeal with the Vatican, arguing that the 108-year-old church was worth saving.

The church is one of 30 that have been closed or merged by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse since last spring as part of a broad and turbulent reorganization expected to affect most of the diocese’s remaining 154 parishes in the coming years.

Over the past decade, dioceses nationwide have been consolidating parishes in the face of rising heating costs, aging priests and shrinking congregations, prompting angry sit-ins and protests in Boston, Chicago and Detroit. But the situation in Syracuse and other fading factory towns upstate is more acute, as the number of Catholics has shrunk even faster than the population in general.

“We knew back in the early ’80s that we were going to have a diminished number of clergy, but what we didn’t realize was that upstate New York would take such a hit with the loss of business, industries and people,” said the Rev. James P. Lang, vicar of parishes for the Diocese of Syracuse.

“There came a point when we had to make a decision,” Father Lang said. “We were either going to spend our resources to keep our buildings open or we were going to adapt to this new reality.”

Two years ago, the Archdiocese of New York announced plans to close 31 of its 409 parishes, mostly in Manhattan and the Bronx, and open five new ones, four of them in the far suburbs of Orange and Dutchess Counties, which are among the fastest-growing areas in the state. Three of the upstate dioceses, Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, have lost fully a quarter of their churches: They had 590 churches in 2005, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, which tracks such data for the church, and have 440 today, the dioceses said.

The shifting demographics driving the church closings are most pronounced in the mid-Atlantic states, the upper Midwest and in old industrial hubs throughout the Northeast, where the Catholic immigrants who once made up a significant portion of the work force have decamped for the South and West since the manufacturing sector began its collapse in the 1970s.

“The loss in population is a political problem whose repercussions have been felt not just on the tax base and the infrastructure of those communities, but also in other areas, including religious institutions,” said Chester Gillis, chairman of the theology department at Georgetown University. “The bottom line is simple,” Professor Gillis said. “If you have less people donating to the church, it becomes unrealistic — and it is financially irresponsible, really — to keep a church building open.”

In the dioceses of Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, which together cover 27 counties in central and western New York, the reshuffling has reached well beyond city limits — from inner-ring suburbs that have suffered from the spillover effects of the population drain to more stable communities like Jamesville, a hamlet of about 1,500 bordering the southeastern edge of Syracuse. In many of these places, churches have closed or merged with other parishes, while in a few areas, new churches have been built to accommodate growing congregations.

Within the eight counties encompassed by the Diocese of Buffalo, the total population declined to 1.5 million in 2005 from 1.8 million in 1970, and the number of Catholics fell to 700,000 from 950,000. The diocese had 275 churches in 2005, when it began restructuring; after closings announced on Saturday, there will be 204, a spokesman, Kevin A. Keenan, said.

“What we were finding was that most, if not all, of the parish collections were going to maintenance, and that a lot of these parishes simply weren’t growing,” Mr. Keenan said. The new Catholic immigrants who have moved into Buffalo and surrounding communities, mostly African and Eastern European refugees, “are not enough to offset the losses,” he added.

The Diocese of Rochester, which serves 12 counties, had 159 parishes in 2001; now, it has 136. In the city of Rochester alone, the diocese closed half of its 30 churches between 1970 and 2004, said Doug Mandelaro, the diocese’s director of stewardship.

Marilyn Catherine, 59, who lives in Rochester, was among the parishioners who worked for several months in 2005 on a plan to merge four city churches into one — in part because the congregations had dwindled through the years, and in part because the diocese did not have enough priests.

The churches, within five miles of one another, had all been built by immigrants and each had its own character. One had a mostly elderly congregation, while another catered largely to refugees from Nigeria and Sudan. And without exception, parishioners held deep attachments to the church buildings themselves. Now, a polyglot congregation thrives at St. Monica’s in Rochester’s 19th Ward.

“There was a lot of suffering during this process,” said Ms. Catherine, who moved from Long Island to Rochester, her husband’s hometown, 30 years ago. “Now, we call ourselves the resurrection people because we were able to take something that made a lot of us sad and create a new community.”

The Rochester diocese has, meanwhile, opened seven new churches in the past 30 years, in suburbs like Pittsford, one of the few communities upstate with a median family income above $100,000 and a median home value above $175,000, according to a 2005 study by the Buffalo-based newspaper Business First.

“These churches are all thriving,” said the diocese’s Mr. Mandelaro.

For many of St. Mary’s parishioners here in Jamesville, the closing has been confounding. The church — built by Irish immigrants in 1899 and enlarged 32 years later to make room for the Poles, Italians and Ukrainians who came to work at a local quarry — had a solid congregation and a healthy endowment that financed a food pantry for 1,200 people and a popular religious education program, said Ciarrai Eaton, president of the parish council.

The first hint of trouble came in 2001, when the diocese turned St. Mary’s into a mission, meaning that it would no longer have a resident priest, and asked churchgoers to propose ways to deal with its demographics and personnel challenges. The congregation at St. Mary’s submitted four plans, one of which would have parishioners running the church’s finances and programs and a visiting priest celebrating Mass. In 2005, two years before the diocese released its list of church closings, some members of the congregation filed the appeal with the Vatican; it is still pending.

“All we asked for was a priest to come by on weekends for the services, and through volunteerism we would do the rest,” said Christopher Prosak, 51, who attended St. Mary’s with his five children.

But Father Lang, the diocesan vicar, said that given the diocese’s dwindling number of priests, it made sense to close St. Mary’s, since its worshipers could be served by another church, Holy Cross, less than five miles away. “It was a matter of figuring out how to be best organized with the limited human resources that we have,” he said.

The parishioners’ vigil began as soon as the church closed. “We had doctors, accountants, social workers, teachers — a lot of people who would be there on their days off, on weekends, whenever they could,” said Ms. Eaton, 28, a seamstress who stayed overnight most Mondays at St. Mary’s with her husband, Fred, and their baby daughter, Moira.

Danielle E. Cummings, the diocesan spokeswoman, said that church leaders at first saw the vigil as a way to give the congregation “time to grieve” the loss of their church. But, she conceded in an interview, letting it last as long as it did was a mistake. The decision to stop it came when officials heard that a nonpriest had taken communion wafers to the church.

“At that point, we said, ‘That’s it, it’s over, we have to get them out and seal the church,’ ” Ms. Cummings said.

Some St. Mary’s families have joined other congregations, but Ms. Eaton and several dozen families are still holding out hope that their church will reopen. They continue to gather for prayer services on Sundays, on the sidewalk.

“We’re trying to maintain our congregation working as close to normal as we can,” Ms. Eaton said. “We’re like family. And we know it’s the people who make the parish.”

    Upstate, Drop in Catholics Leads to Drop in Churches, NYT, 10.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/nyregion/10church.html

Presbyterians Vote on Lesbian Clergy

January 16, 2008
Filed at 6:25 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

RICHMOND, Calif. (AP) -- A Presbyterian deacon who has twice been denied ordination because of her sexual orientation can move forward with her bid to join the clergy.

The regional body of the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted 167-151 Tuesday night in support of Lisa Larges' application, despite the denomination's long-standing ban on openly gay ministers. Larges, 44, still must submit to an interview with the regional body as soon as April, church officials said.

Larges said after the vote that she was proud of the church members' decision, despite the heavy opposition.

''The church is a beautiful, messy thing,'' she said. ''It's about loving the church in spite of the church. It's about being part of a movement to call the church back to its best self.''

While the meeting represented a third try for Larges, it was thought to be the first test of a policy adopted by the Presbyterian national assembly giving local presbyteries the right to ordain candidates who declare conscientious objections to specific church teachings, said Jerry Van Marter, news director for the Presbyterian Church (USA).

The constitution of the church says only members in traditional man-woman marriages or who are sexually abstinent may serve as clergy, elders and deacons. Larges has submitted a statement to the Presbytery of San Francisco declaring her disagreement with that policy, calling it a ''mar upon the church and a stumbling block to its mission.''

The presbytery represents 77 churches and about 29,000 parishioners in the San Francisco Bay area.

Those who oppose Larges' application said they would appeal Tuesday's decision through the church court.

''The presbytery's action constitutes a willful disengagement from the denomination's requirements, breaking trust with every other presbytery by not requiring compliance with church mandates,'' said the Rev. Mary Holder Naegeli, who presented the minority report at the meeting.

The church has other openly gay ministers, Van Marter said. The current policy banning the ordination of sexually active gays and lesbians to the ministry was enacted in 1978, and a number of ministers who were ordained before then have since come out to their congregations.

------

Associated Press Writer Marcus Wohlsen in San Francisco contributed to this story.

    Presbyterians Vote on Lesbian Clergy, NYT, 16.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Presbyterians-Gays.html

Reporter’s Notebook

In Heart of Islamic World, Bush Puts Forth His Faith

January 15, 2008
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — President Bush’s Christianity is so central to his life that it is not surprising that it would figure prominently in a visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

What is striking, though, is how much his faith is coloring his approach to the biggest foreign policy challenges: the war in Iraq, the push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, and his broader appeal for democracy as a counterweight to combating extremism in the Islamic world from Iran to Lebanon.

As he traveled from Israel to the Persian Gulf and, on Monday, to Saudi Arabia, keeper of Islam’s holiest sites, Mr. Bush repeatedly cited monotheistic faith, contending that it served as the foundation for freedom, justice and representative government.

“A great new era is unfolding before us,” Mr. Bush said in a speech on Sunday in an opulent hotel in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. “This new era is founded on the equality of all people before God. This new era is being built with the understanding that power is a trust that must be exercised with the consent of the governed — and deliver equal justice under the law.”

Mr. Bush’s brand of Christianity has unquestionably shaped his unswerving support for Israel, a support that is shared by many American evangelical Christians. But in Bethlehem, after touring the Church of the Nativity — built atop the biblical birthplace of Jesus — he found in his faith the theological foundation for the creation of a Palestinian state.

“Someday I hope that as a result of a formation of a Palestinian state, there won’t be walls and checkpoints, that people will be able to move freely in a democratic state,” he said, having seen Israel’s security barriers and checkpoints for himself. “That’s the vision, greatly inspired by my belief that there is an Almighty, and a gift of that Almighty to each man, woman and child on the face of the earth is freedom.”

Mr. Bush’s wars in the Islamic world, his use of the word “crusade” to describe an effort to curb terrorism, and his strong support for Israel have made him a reviled figure in the Islamic world, undercutting such ecumenical appeals.

In an interview with Al Arabiya television on the eve of his trip, he clearly sought to temper the view that his faith has put him in opposition to Islam. “I pray to the same God as a Muslim prays,” he declared. And when asked how the Muslim world would judge his presidency, he replied, “I would hope, at least, at the very minimum, people would say that George W. Bush respected my religion.”

Little Insight Inside Blog

When the White House announced that Mr. Bush’s senior aides would write a blog about the president’s trip to the Middle East, it was tempting to imagine breezy, behind-the-scenes accounts — not the dish, of course, but perhaps some insights from the inner circle.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, say, musing on the inability of women to exercise in hotel gyms in Saudi Arabia, or to drive.

Instead, there was the account by the White House counselor, Ed Gillespie, of Mr. Bush’s meeting with the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, in the West Bank. “Resolve in Ramallah,” the headline went, pretty much setting the tone for the resthttp://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/mideast/notes/, which might be expected of the man whose job is to shape Mr. Bush’s message and image.

Mr. Bush’s tour of Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum, and his trip to Galilee on Friday produced the not-so-revelatory headline, “Remembrance and Faith in the Holy Land.”

That item opened with a tantalizing clause — “After a later-than-usual dinner at Prime Minister Olmert’s residence ...” — but Mr. Gillespie dished no more, even though the dinner was, the Israeli accounts said, a raucous affair. It was said that Mr. Bush buttonholed two wavering members of Mr. Olmert’s cabinet, while an Israeli lawmaker buttonholed Mr. Bush about the case of the American spy Jonathan Pollard, to Mr. Olmert’s chagrin.

The national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, joined the blog on Saturday, describing the president’s meetings in Kuwait with the top military commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus. But the contents were more or less like his press briefings. “General Petraeus described continued progress on the security side but emphasized that there was still hard work to do...” and so on.

There are some disclosures, though — not necessarily illuminating the making of policy, but humanizing the people who do so.

Mr. Gillespie wrote that during a visit to the Church of the Beatitudes in Galilee, Mr. Bush did so much giggling with a couple of the nuns that “I was worried someone’s knuckles were going to get smacked with a ruler!”

Year of the Frequent Flier

Mr. Bush, in fact, has been an indifferent tourist throughout his presidency, preferring to keep his trips short and rarely making time to take in the sites. Now, as he travels more, with at least six more overseas trips planned this year, he appears to have embraced tourism at last.

He squeezed in time to visit Bethlehem last Thursday. He took five hours on Friday to visit Yad Vashem and Galilee, where Jesus is said to have lived most of his life, prompting more than one aide to remark that Mr. Bush walked in the footsteps of Jesus.

After the speech in Abu Dhabi on Sunday, he spent an afternoon and evening with the emirate’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, at a tent encampment in the desert. The prince made some barbecue and showed off his falcons, one of which fluttered nervously on Mr. Bush’s arm. “He’s never had a press conference before,” the president told reporters.

On Monday, he flew to Dubai and toured the Sheik Saeed al Maktoum House, a 19th-century building overlooking the Persian Gulf that is a museum of photographs and historic documents of the emirate.

On Tuesday, he will visit Al Janadriyah Farm, the country retreat of the Saudi Arabian king, Abdullah, where he maintains 150 Arabian stallions. That trip repays the king’s visit, when he was crown prince, to Mr. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex.

    In Heart of Islamic World, Bush Puts Forth His Faith, NYT, 15.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/world/middleeast/15prexy.html

Bush visits biblical sites

Fri Jan 11, 2008
8:32am EST
Reuters
By Tabassum Zakaria

MOUNT OF BEATITUDES, Israel (Reuters) - Sending a symbolic message to Israeli and Palestinian leaders, U.S. President George W. Bush visited on Friday the site where Jesus is believed to have intoned "blessed are the peacemakers".

Near the hilltop where Christians like himself believe Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, two robed Franciscan friars, one of them reading to Bush from the Gospels, escorted the president to a jetty on the Sea of Galilee.

Asked what it was like to be walking in Jesus's footsteps, Bush replied: "It's an amazing experience."

Wrapping up his first presidential visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank, Bush was leaving Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with a forceful message of his own: "now is the time to make difficult choices."

He told them, in a challenge to skepticism deepened by the past seven years of violence and diplomatic impasse, that he believed Israel and the Palestinians would sign a peace treaty by the time he left office in January 2009.

Holding the hands of two nuns, a beaming Bush entered the Franciscan chapel on the Mount of Beatitudes, overlooking the ruins of Capernaum where Christians believe Jesus performed miracles, including walking on water in the Sea of Galilee.

The chapel features eight carved Latin beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount, including the passage: "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God."

He also toured the ruins of an ancient synagogue at Capernaum, or Kfar Nahum in Hebrew, where tradition says Saint Peter lived.

HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL

Bush had been flown by helicopter to northern Israel after touring Jerusalem's Yad Vashem memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust.

Wearing a black skullcap, he walked somberly past photographs of victims. At a ceremony in the stark Hall of Remembrance, Bush rekindled an eternal flame and laid a wreath on a stone slab under which ashes of victims of six death camps are buried.

"I would hope if many people in the world would come to this place, it would be a sobering reminder that evil exists and a call that when we find evil, we must resist it," Bush said at the memorial.

"I guess I came away with this impression, that I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God -- that in the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls, young and old, stood strong for what they believe."

In his talks with Olmert and Abbas, both politically weak leaders, Bush sought to create momentum towards establishing a Palestinian state, after a November summit in Annapolis, Maryland intended to jump-start peace talks.

Before leaving for Kuwait, Bush said he hoped to return before his term ends to mark the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding, an event Israelis will celebrate in early May.

After Kuwait, Bush will also visit Arab allies in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt before heading home next week. He will ask them to support his Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking efforts and to help curb the growing regional influence of Iran.

"They can do a lot of things," Bush said.

Arab allies could provide diplomatic support to Abbas, give him greater financial support, and "begin to reach out to Israel and indicate in a tangible way that they support this diplomatic process", he said.

(Writing by Jeffrey Heller; editing by Keith Weir)

    Bush visits biblical sites, R, 11.1.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL1152633220080111

Catholics play vital role in helping migrants to U.S

Fri Jan 11, 2008
10:26am EST
Reuters
By Robin Emmott

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico (Reuters) - At a Catholic-run shelter just across the border from Laredo, Texas, dozens of Latin American migrants say grace and tuck into a hearty meal of sausages, beans and rice, before trying to swim across the Rio Grande into the United States.

Weary migrants on their journey north often recharge their batteries at a network of similar shelters run by the Roman Catholic Church -- a lifeline sanctioned by the Vatican, despite increased U.S. efforts to keep out illegal immigrants.

"Migration is a human right and migrants are some of the world's most vulnerable people. It is the church's obligation to help them," said the Rev. Francisco Pellizzari, an Italian-Argentine missionary who runs the Nazareth migrant shelter in Nuevo Laredo.

After long treks to the border, often from as far away as Central America, men, women and children at the shelter swap their torn clothes for fresh ones, heal their injuries and telephone family members for cash for their crossing.

The Nuevo Laredo shelter has been granted a papal blessing in a Vatican certificate that hangs proudly on the wall.

Many Catholic Churches in the United States have welcomed Hispanics, with some seeing their congregations double in size. They set up soup kitchens and offer support to families hit by workplace raids and deportations.

"It is time for some compassion in the immigration debate," said Sister Christine Feagan, who ministers to Hispanics at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Iowa. "Welcome the stranger.".

But in a U.S. election year with illegal immigration one of the most passionate issues, some candidates have a tough message for undocumented immigrants.

ANGER AT CATHOLIC CHURCH

Among the Republican candidates who take a tough line on immigration, one of the most outspoken is Mike Huckabee, a Baptist preacher who has drawn strong support from evangelicals.

Many religious conservatives in the United States take a sharply contrasting view of immigration from that of the Catholic Church.

Some are angry that the Catholic Church helps people who break the law. Others accuse it of using support for immigration as a way to win back members as the church loses ground to evangelicals and secularism in Latin America.

"The Roman Catholic Church is aiding and abetting the criminal invasion of America from Mexico," wrote Ralph Ovadal, pastor of the Pilgrims Covenant Church in Wisconsin, in a booklet sold on the church's Web site.

Without the shelters in Mexico, most migrants would be forced to beg for food, sleep on streets, in the hot sun and freezing cold of the desert or on the muddy banks of the Rio Grande before attempting to cross.

"I'm extremely grateful for this shelter, but even without it, I would still try to get across," said 19-year-old Guatemalan coffee picker Raul Mintis, looking at a map of the United States in the Nuevo Laredo shelter.

The church denies any wrongdoing and says it is stepping in to fill the void created by the lack of a U.S. immigration policy and the failure of Latin American countries to create more jobs for their people.

"While the governments of the United States and Latin America fail to provide workable policies, the church will do what it must to help the migrant," said Rafael Romo, Archbishop of Tijuana on Mexico's border with California. "We can't let these people be treated like animals."
 

(Additional reporting by Lizbeth Diaz in Tijuana, editing by Chris Wilson)

    Catholics play vital role in helping migrants to U.S, R, 11.1.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1128221420080111

Abused Muslim Women in U.S. Gain Advocates

January 6, 2008
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

CHICAGO — After enduring seven years of beatings from her husband, a young Yemeni-American woman recently fled to a local shelter, only to find that the heavy black head scarf she wore as an observant Muslim provoked disapproval.

The shelter brought in a hairdresser, whose services she accepted without any misgivings. But once her hair was styled, administrators urged her to throw off her veil, saying it symbolized the male oppression native to Islam that she wanted to escape.

Instead the woman, who asked for anonymity because she feared further violence from her relatives, decamped to the Hamdard Center for Health and Human Services in suburban Chicago, a shelter that caters mainly to Muslim women by not serving pork and keeping prayer rugs handy. Such shelters are extremely rare nationwide, activists say, because Muslim Americans only recently began confronting the issue of spousal abuse.

Domestic violence among Muslims has long straddled a blurry line between culture and religion, but now scattered organizations founded by Muslim American women are creating a movement to define it as an unacceptable cultural practice. The problem occurs among American Muslims at the same rate as other groups, activists say, but is even more sensitive because raising the issue is considered an attack on the faith.

“The Muslim community is under a lot of scrutiny, so they are reluctant to look within to face their problems because it will substantiate the arguments demonizing them,” said Rafia Zakaria, a political science graduate student at Indiana University who is starting a legal defense fund for Muslim women. “It puts Muslim women in a difficult position because if they acknowledge their rights, they are seen as being in some kind of collusion with all those who are attacking Muslim men. So the question is how to speak out without adding to the stereotype that Muslim men are barbaric, oppressive, terrible people.”

The answer, she and other activists have concluded, is to show that Muslim Americans are tackling the problem.

“Domestic violence is an issue we can deal with as a community, and not by saying we don’t have this problem, which is obviously a lie,” Ms. Zakaria said.

Some activists describe being expelled from mosques and holiday fairs when they first tried to broach the topic five years ago, but they have achieved a wider audience by allying themselves with sympathetic clerics.

The Yemeni-American woman sought advice from several imams after her Yemeni husband of just a few months started to slap, punch and degrade her.

The clerics offered marriage counseling, but only if the husband came too, a condition she knew doomed the idea. Her sister suggested she lose weight and be more obedient. Her father encouraged obedience, too, while her husband hit her through three pregnancies. After she filed for divorce, she said, her father hauled her home and hit her too, for shaming him.

“Both my dad and my husband told me that women don’t talk back,” said the 29-year-old woman. “They told me the Koran said I had to be obedient, and I answered that it does not say beat up your wife.”

At Hamdard, calls for help come from Muslim women as far afield as Wisconsin, Kentucky and Louisiana, shelter workers said, far more than they can accommodate with just 11 beds. They turned away 647 women and children in 2007, said Maryam Gilani, the director of Hamdard’s domestic violence program, noting that about 55 percent of the women the center helped were Muslim. Some large, wealthy Muslim communities, like the one in the San Francisco area, have been unable to raise money for a shelter, which activists attribute to the wish to label the problem as foreign to Islam.

“There was resistance, and there still is,” said Ms. Gilani, adding that opponents dismissed shelters as some kind of brothel. “There are some who say what we do is not right, you have to stay with your husband and make it work. They try to turn it either into a religious thing, or they say that it is just a normal thing that happens in the family.”

The challenge for most organizations is getting accurate legal information to women who are often closeted at home and may not speak English. Hamdard developed several novel solutions. Briefing area grocery store owners and hairdressers that cater to Muslims produced numerous referrals. More often, it organizes mosque seminars about breast cancer, then slips in a few minutes about domestic violence.

Activists describe mosques as the most effective way to reach Muslims because immigrant societies remain heavily patriarchal and because American mosques serve as community centers. The latter also means that immigrant imams ill-equipped to deal with social problems are prone to give battered women advice like “Read the Koran more,” or will try couples counseling, which can bring disastrous consequences at home.

One outspoken cleric is Imam Muhammad Magid, who runs a collective of seven mosques in suburban Virginia and is vice president of the Islamic Society of North America, the country’s main Muslim umbrella organization. Anyone getting married at one of his mosques must undergo marriage counseling during which domestic abuse is discussed.

But activists expect real change will only come with the next generation of Muslim women here, raised in an American context that condemns such violence.

In most Muslim countries, the law is rooted in a combination of the Koran and tradition, so immigrants are more reticent.

“It is much more difficult there to say I want a divorce, I want custody or my husband is forcing me to have sex without my permission,” said Samira Ansari, a family lawyer in San Jose, Calif. “Because they don’t get that legal support back home, it takes them a while to understand what exists here.”

Mr. Magid said older immigrants in particular refused to hold men accountable and expected imams to advise the wife to return to her husband.

“So many people emphasize trying to keep the family together regardless of the pain or consequences,” he said. “We tell them that the foundation of the family is peace and tranquillity and if that doesn’t exist, then the family doesn’t exist as a unit.”

To counter opposition rooted in religious texts, Mr. Magid and others use the example of Prophet Muhammad. There is no record of him striking one of his wives; rather, he would withdraw when angered. The raging debate comes with Chapter 4, Verse 34 in the Koran, long interpreted as giving husbands the right to strike their wives as the final step in an escalating series of punishments for being rebellious.

Maha B. Alkhateeb, who helped edit a book on domestic violence called “Change From Within,” is among the leading activists pushing a new interpretation of the verse that understands it as calling for women to be obedient to God.

But given that the Koran is considered the unassailable word of God, it is particularly difficult for young, often secular women to promote a new interpretation.

Although few men cite the Koran as justification for hitting their spouses, Ms. Alkhateeb said that in every seminar she organized about ending domestic violence, at least one man invariably asked on what authority the verse could be reinterpreted.

Toward that end, Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, the outreach director for Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., is trying to set up a nationwide movement of Muslim men who will lobby for the new interpretation.

“That is the linchpin, the fulcrum that justifies domestic violence in the Muslim context,” the imam said.

    Abused Muslim Women in U.S. Gain Advocates, NYT, 6.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/us/06muslim.html?hp

Evolution Book Sees No Science-Religion Gap

January 4, 2008
The New York Times
By CORNELIA DEAN

In 1984 and again in 1999, the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s most eminent scientific organization, produced books on the evidence supporting the theory of evolution and arguing against the introduction of creationism or other religious alternatives in public school science classes.

On Thursday, it produced a third. But this volume is unusual, people who worked on it say, because it is intended specifically for the lay public and because it devotes much of its space to explaining the differences between science and religion, and asserting that acceptance of evolution does not require abandoning belief in God.

“We wanted to produce a report that would be valuable and accessible to school board members and teachers and clergy,” said Barbara A. Schaal, a vice president of the academy, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University and a member of the panel that produced the book.

The panel, convened by the academy and the Institute of Medicine, its medical arm, was headed by Francisco Ayala, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Dominican priest.

The 70-page book, “Science, Evolution and Creationism,” says, among other things, that “attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist.” And it offers statements from several eminent biologists and members of the clergy to support the view.

In the book, which will be available on the Web site of the National Academies (www.nas.edu), the panel reports that evidence for the theory of evolution is overwhelming and growing. It cites findings from DNA research, fossil discoveries and the observations scientists have made about emerging diseases, like SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome.

The book also denounces the arguments for a form of creationism called intelligent design, calling them devoid of evidence, “disproven” or “simply false.”

    Evolution Book Sees No Science-Religion Gap, NYT, 4.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/us/04evolve.html

At Huckabee Central, Cheers for Evangelical Base

January 4, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

DES MOINES — Just as the Republican caucuses began on Thursday at 6:30 p.m., a small group of women and children joined hands in the middle of the ballroom at Mike Huckabee’s headquarters here and began to pray for his election.

Mr. Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, rode a crest of evangelical Christian support to victory on Thursday over his rival Mitt Romney, capping a remarkable ascent over the last two months from near the bottom of the Republican field. A poll of people entering the Republican caucuses on Thursday showed more than 8 in 10 of his supporters identified themselves as evangelicals.

The same surveys showed extraordinary turnout among evangelicals, who represented some 60 percent of Republican caucusgoers. In years past, Republican Party leaders in Iowa put evangelical turnout at about 40 percent.

Mr. Romney’s advisers had been saying that if evangelical turnout rose to more than 50 percent, victory would be impossible for Mr. Romney, whose Mormon faith is regarded as heretical by many evangelicals. Mr. Romney’s past support for abortion rights also troubled many Christian conservatives.

Despite some major stumbles in the final stretch of his Iowa campaign as he endured a ferocious assault on his record from Mr. Romney, Mr. Huckabee struck a chord among Iowa Republicans with a distinctive mixture of humor, Christian conservatism and economic populism.

His stump speeches evoked comparisons to the prairie populism of William Jennings Bryan. And he charmed audiences with a witty and extemporaneous speaking style honed over 10 years in the pulpit as a preacher and local televangelist before he entered politics; he is a former governor of Arkansas. He told voters to pick a candidate who was “consistent” and “authentic,” an unstated contrast to Mr. Romney’s recent conversion to opposing abortion rights.

What most distinguished Mr. Huckabee from the rest of the Republican field, though, were his escalating appeals to the economic anxieties of lower-income voters. He emphasized his own roots as “the son of a fireman who worked a second job,” denounced stagnant wages and rising inequality, and portrayed his underfinanced fight with Mr. Romney as “the people” against “the Wall Street-to-Washington axis of power”

“People would rather elect a president who reminds them of the guy they work with, not that guy who laid them off,” Mr. Huckabee said at a campaign stop Thursday morning, invoking an implicit contrast with Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts.

The centerpiece of his economic policies is the Fair Tax, a proposal to replace all payroll and income taxes with the combination of a national sales tax and cash rebates for the poor. Enthusiasts like Mr. Huckabee describe it as a way to jump-start the nation’s economy and diminish inequality. Critics call it regressive and unworkable, and it has never gone far in Washington.

Mr. Huckabee’s success has startled and unnerved many in his own party. His campaign has met derision and doubt from all three factions of the coalition that has made up the Republican Party since the election of President Ronald Reagan: antitax, foreign policy and social conservatives.

Antitax activists fault his record of spending on transportation, education and health care as governor of Arkansas. Hawks complain that his comments about courting the good will of other nations put him to the left of some Democrats on matters of foreign affairs, and they express anger at his criticism of President Bush’s “arrogant, bunker mentality” foreign policy.

Even his natural allies among Christian conservative leaders have been slow to embrace Mr. Huckabee, in part because he sometimes appears to distance himself from their movement. He often faults fellow Christian conservatives, for example, for focusing too much on “the gestation period” in their respect for human life.

In the final days of the race, Mr. Huckabee deviated further from what has been Republican orthodoxy. He stopped merely trumpeting the taxes that he cut in Arkansas and started defending the taxes he raised to pay for better roads, schools, health care, or parks that he said benefited working people.

Just days before the caucuses, he twice reversed himself on the question of whether he would respond to Mr. Romney’s criticisms with equally pointed attacks of his own, then drew loud guffaws from a roomful of reporters for appearing to want it both ways by screening for them an attack advertisement that he said he had decided not to run.

For most of the race, Mr. Huckabee’s shoestring campaign consisted of little more than a campaign manager, a press secretary and his daughter. He could not afford polls, focus groups or expert briefings, guiding his campaign largely by instinct.

His sudden surge in the polls at times left him appearing unprepared for the questions he faced, stumbling over details like the geography of Pakistan or suggesting erroneously that more illegal immigrants came from Pakistan than any other non-Latin-American country.

Despite his ascent in Iowa, he faces daunting obstacles as he moves on to New Hampshire, where Christian conservatives are much less influential. Mr. Huckabee still badly trails the field in fund-raising. He raised less than $2.5 million in the first three quarters of 2007 and said he ended the Iowa caucus with about $2 million in the bank. By comparison, Mr. Romney raised nearly $70 million, including more than $17 million in personal loans he made to his campaign.

“God help you and thank you for all you have done,” Mr. Huckabee told his supporters on Thursday night. “And now we have a long journey ahead of us.

Mr. Huckabee has been traveling Iowa with his three dogs on his bus, and in the latest sign of the seat-of-the-pants nature of his campaign his aides were still struggling last night to find a way to transport the dogs to New Hampshire for the next leg of the race.

    At Huckabee Central, Cheers for Evangelical Base, NYT, 4.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/us/politics/04repubs.html?hp

Religion Today

January 3, 2008
Filed at 12:12 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

DENVER (AP) -- On the day she is to become a woman, Monica Reyes sits in front of the church for Mass. Her white dress -- sewn in her mother's Mexican hometown -- spills over her chair like an oversized lampshade.

The priest urges her to live as a daughter of God. Her parents give her a gold ring shaped like the number 15. Near the end of the service, Reyes lays a bouquet of roses before a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Then she steps through the worn, wooden doors of St. Joseph's, a Roman Catholic parish for generations of poor, Hispanic immigrants, and into a 20-seat white Hummer limo that rents for $150 an hour.

Before long, a stretch Lincoln Town Car arrives for the next Quinceanera Mass.

An elaborate coming-of-age ritual for Hispanic girls on their 15th birthday, the Quinceanera has long been divisive in the U.S. Catholic Church, where it's viewed as either an exercise in excess or a great opportunity to send a message about faith and sexual responsibility.

The latter view won an important endorsement last summer, when the Vatican approved a new set of prayers for U.S. dioceses called Bendicion al cumplir quince anos, or Order for the Blessing on the Fifteenth Birthday.

Consider it an acknowledgment of the changing face of American Catholicism. Hispanics account for nearly 40 percent of the nation's 65 million Catholics and 71 percent of new U.S. Catholics since 1960, studies show.

Here in the Archdiocese of Denver, Hispanic ministry leaders view the Quinceanera craze as not just a chance to strengthen faith and family, but as a weapon against teen pregnancy.

Before Reyes could get her Quinceanera Mass, she and her parents had to enroll in a four-week curriculum introduced last year at Hispanic-dominated parishes that combines Catholicism 101 with a strong pro-chastity message.

''Some girls come to the class expecting to be taught how to dance,'' said Alfonso Lara, the archdiocese's Hispanic Ministry coordinator.

The girls in Reyes' class gathered in a stuffy room with a map of Mexico on the wall and a crucifix on the table.

One lesson included tips for safe dating (avoid dating Web sites in favor of group outings in public places like the mall or family barbecues). Then there is an explanation of the difference between simple abstinence (a way to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases), and chastity (living like Jesus and Mary).

Monica Reyes is the model pupil. Once her Quinceanera is over, the high school junior her sister calls a ''girl's girl'' will be allowed to go to parties and date, as many of her classmates do. But Reyes isn't eager to join them.

''I'm still too young,'' she said. ''I could have a bad experience. So I'd rather wait.''

In Mexico and other Latin American countries, the Quinceanera once signaled that a girl was officially on the marriage market. The downside to that legacy: The Quinceanera Mass is sometimes seen as sexual coming-of-age moment.

Although teen pregnancy rates have generally been in decline across ethnic lines over the last 15 years, 51 percent of Hispanic teens get pregnant before age 20, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

''Even now, immigrant parents don't talk to their young daughters about sex,'' said Timothy Matovina, director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. ''There is not an open conversation going on about the value of waiting till marriage or the economic pitfalls of becoming a single mother.''

Matovina said the Denver archdiocese's efforts will resonate with some families and be ignored by others, much like couples who go through the motions of marriage preparation classes to get a church wedding.

A blend of European court traditions and ceremonies from Latin American countries, the Quinceanera at times has the feel of an out-of-control prom in the United States.

A $400 million-a-year industry has sprouted up catering to Hispanic immigrants seeking to maintain cultural traditions while showing they've made it in their new countries, offering everything from Quinceanera planners and cruises to professional ballroom dancers to teach the ceremonial waltz.

At the same time, the ritual is a point of tension with the Catholic church because Catholic families want their faith to be part of the celebration yet it isn't a sacrament, like marriage.

The Reyes family does not attend Mass regularly, but would never consider the Quinceanera legitimate without the blessing of a priest. A portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe watches over the living room of the family's apartment.

''The reason to have the Mass is to be blessed, and to say thanks to God,'' said Monica's mother, Luz.

The family spared no expense, and the tension showed at times. Walking out of St. Joseph's in her gold lame dress, Luz Reyes said to no one in particular, ''Money, money, money.''

The family estimates it spent a staggering $20,000 on the Quinceanera, relying on savings, family and friends to pay for two limos, rental of a banquet hall, a buffet of Mexican and American comfort food, dresses, a DJ and more.

The cost is one reason that Monica's 14-year-old sister, Marisol, shared the church altar and dance floor with her older sister. The family couldn't fathom finding the money for another Quinceanera so soon.

Lara, of the Denver Archdiocese, said one goal of the classes is to send the message that it's all right to arrive at church in a minivan instead of a Hummer -- unless there's plenty of money to send the girl to college, too.

The expense is worth it to the Reyes family, even if only now they will begin saving for college.

''It's a prize for them being good,'' Luz Reyes said.

It's also the American dream realized. Reyes is giving her daughters something she never got growing up in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where her Quinceanera dress was a tattered gown and dessert was a simple layer cake.

There were perhaps 15 people at the Reyes' Quinceanera Mass. The rental hall, Martha's Golden Palace, has a capacity of 500, and Monica welcomed most of her classmates, a favorite teacher and the police officer assigned to her high school.

After an hour, the DJ turned down the deafening border music and strobe lights, and played the waltz that Monica and her court had been practicing for weeks in her apartment complex parking lot.

Later, Monica wiped away tears as she danced with her grandfather.

On the dance floor, she changed from flat shoes into heels, signaling her departure from childhood.

Her first meal as a woman was a bowl of beans washed down with strawberry soda.

''The big thing isn't to have a party,'' Monica said. ''It's that you're going from a little girl to a woman. You're thanking God you have been in this world for 15 years.''

Religion Today, NYT, 3.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Religion-Today.html