History > 2011 > USA > Faith (IV)

Bishops Say Rules on Gay Parents

Limit Freedom of Religion

December 28, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Roman Catholic bishops in Illinois have shuttered most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in the state rather than comply with a new requirement that says they must consider same-sex couples as potential foster-care and adoptive parents if they want to receive state money. The charities have served for more than 40 years as a major link in the state’s social service network for poor and neglected children.

The bishops have followed colleagues in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts who had jettisoned their adoption services rather than comply with nondiscrimination laws.

For the nation’s Catholic bishops, the Illinois requirement is a prime example of what they see as an escalating campaign by the government to trample on their religious freedom while expanding the rights of gay people. The idea that religious Americans are the victims of government-backed persecution is now a frequent theme not just for Catholic bishops, but also for Republican presidential candidates and conservative evangelicals.

“In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Ill., a civil and canon lawyer who helped drive the church’s losing battle to retain its state contracts for foster care and adoption services.

The Illinois experience indicates that the bishops face formidable opponents who also claim to have justice and the Constitution on their side. They include not only gay rights advocates, but also many religious believers and churches that support gay equality (some Catholic legislators among them). They frame the issue as a matter of civil rights, saying that Catholic Charities was using taxpayer money to discriminate against same-sex couples.

Tim Kee, a teacher in Marion, Ill., who was turned away by Catholic Charities three years ago when he and his longtime partner, Rick Wade, tried to adopt a child, said: “We’re both Catholic, we love our church, but Catholic Charities closed the door to us. To add insult to injury, my tax dollars went to provide discrimination against me.”

The bishops are engaged in the religious liberty battle on several fronts. They have asked the Obama administration to lift a new requirement that Catholic and other religiously affiliated hospitals, universities and charity groups cover contraception in their employees’ health plans. A decision has been expected for weeks now.

At the same time, the bishops are protesting the recent denial of a federal contract to provide care for victims of sex trafficking, saying the decision was anti-Catholic. An official with the Department of Health and Human Services recently told a hearing on Capitol Hill that the bishops’ program was rejected because it did not provide the survivors of sex trafficking, some of whom are rape victims, with referrals for abortions or contraceptives.

Critics of the church argue that no group has a constitutional right to a government contract, especially if it refuses to provide required services.

But Anthony R. Picarello Jr., general counsel and associate general secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, disagreed. “It’s true that the church doesn’t have a First Amendment right to have a government contract,” he said, “but it does have a First Amendment right not to be excluded from a contract based on its religious beliefs.”

The controversy in Illinois began when the state legislature voted in November 2010 to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples, which the state’s Catholic bishops lobbied against. The legislation was titled “The Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Unions Act,” and Bishop Paprocki said he was given the impression that it would not affect state contracts for Catholic Charities and other religious social services.

In New York State, religious groups lobbied for specific exemption language in the same-sex marriage bill. But bishops in Illinois did not negotiate, Bishop Paprocki said.

“It would have been seen as, ‘We’re going to compromise on the principle as long as we get our exception.’ We didn’t want it to be seen as buying our support,” he said.

Catholic Charities is one of the nation’s most extensive social service networks, serving more than 10 million poor adults and children of many faiths across the country. It is made up of local affiliates that answer to local bishops and dioceses, but much of its revenue comes from the government. Catholic Charities affiliates received a total of nearly $2.9 billion a year from the government in 2010, about 62 percent of its annual revenue of $4.67 billion. Only 3 percent came from churches in the diocese (the rest came from in-kind contributions, investments, program fees and community donations).

In Illinois, Catholic Charities in five of the six state dioceses had grown dependent on foster care contracts, receiving 60 percent to 92 percent of their revenues from the state, according to affidavits by the charities’ directors. (Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Chicago pulled out of foster care services in 2007 because of problems with its insurance provider.)

When the contracts came up for renewal in June, the state attorney general, along with the legal staff in the governor’s office and the Department of Children and Family Services, decided that the religious providers on state contracts would no longer be able to reject same-sex couples, said Kendall Marlowe, a spokesman for the department.

The Catholic providers offered to refer same-sex couples to other agencies (as they had been doing for unmarried couples), but that was not acceptable to the state, Mr. Marlowe said. “Separate but equal was not a sufficient solution on other civil rights issues in the past either,” he said.

Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Rockford decided at that point to get out of the foster care business. But the bishops in Springfield, Peoria, Joliet and Belleville decided to fight, filing a lawsuit against the state.

Taking a completely different tack was the agency affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which, like the Catholic Church, does not sanction same-sex relationships. Gene Svebakken, president and chief executive of the agency, Lutheran Child and Family Services of Illinois, visited all seven pastoral conferences in his state and explained that the best option was to compromise and continue caring for the children.

“We’ve been around 140 years, and if we didn’t follow the law we’d go out of business,” Mr. Svebakken said. “We believe it’s God-pleasing to serve these kids, and we know we do a good job.”

In August, Judge John Schmidt, a circuit judge in Sangamon County, ruled against Catholic Charities, saying, “No citizen has a recognized legal right to a contract with the government.” He did not address the religious liberty claims, ruling only that the state did not violate the church’s property rights.

Three of the dioceses filed an appeal, but in November filed a motion to dismiss their lawsuit. The Dioceses of Peoria and Belleville are spinning off their state-financed social services, with the caseworkers, top executives and foster children all moving to new nonprofits that will no longer be affiliated with either diocese.

Gary Huelsmann, executive director of Catholic Social Services of Southern Illinois, in the Belleville Diocese, said the decision was excruciating for everyone.

“We have 600 children abused and neglected in an area where there are hardly any providers,” he said. “Us going out of business would have been detrimental to these children, and that’s a sin, too.”

The work will be carried on, but the Catholic Church’s seminal, historic connection with it has been severed, noted Mr. Marlowe, the spokesman for the state’s child welfare agency. “The child welfare system that Catholic Charities helped build,” he said, “is now strong enough to survive their departure.”

    Bishops Say Rules on Gay Parents Limit Freedom of Religion, NYT, 28.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/us/for-bishops-a-battle-over-whose-rights-prevail.html

Where Crèches Once Stood, Atheists Now Hold Forth

December 21, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — The elaborate Nativity scenes rose in a city park along the oceanfront here every December for nearly six decades. More than a dozen life-size dioramas depicted the Annunciation, Mary and Joseph being turned away at the inn and, of course, the manger.

This always angered Damon Vix, who worked off and on in Santa Monica and considers himself a devout atheist, so to speak. How could it be, he asked himself each year, that the city could condone such an overtly religious message?

So, a few years ago, he petitioned the city and received his own space, using it to put up a sign offering “Reason’s Greetings.” But this year, he wanted more. Mr. Vix gathered a few supporters and applied for dozens of spaces in Palisades Park, a patch of green on a bluff overlooking the sandy beaches that this city is famous for.

Suddenly, city officials realized they had far more requests for space than they could fulfill, they said, and created a lottery. When it was finished, the atheists had received a vast majority of the spaces. The Christian groups were forced to choose three scenes from their typical 14.

Now, the city is embroiled in a seasonal controversy it has somehow avoided for decades.

“We’re trying to balance something that has been a real tradition here and also live within federal law,” said Barbara Stinchfield, the director of community services for the city. “We were trying to accommodate all the groups that were interested in the most fair way we could.”

Ms. Stinchfield has been somewhat surprised at the intensity of the debate — which has been a hot topic for days in local newspapers and on radio shows and blogs.

“People keep asking why we do what we do,” she said, sounding a bit weary. “It’s really a simple answer: the law regulates a park as a traditional public forum, and we’re trying to do that.”

Hunter Jameson, the president of the group that organizes the Nativity scenes, said he did not believe the city had done anything wrong. The most “extremely irksome” issue, he said, is that Mr. Vix and the other atheists seem most focused on pushing out the Christian scenes. Much of the space the atheists secured is sitting unused, and for the most part small white signs bearing secular quotations have replaced the Nativity scenes.

Under the city’s rules, any group was allowed to apply for as many as 14 spaces. Because Mr. Vix had seven people applying for the maximum amount, they were more likely to get the spaces in the lottery.

“Rather than use it to put forth a message of their own, they’ve really shown that their goal is just an effort to take something away rather than give anything to the community,” Mr. Jameson said. “They’re trying to censor something that the community has clearly shown it appreciates.”

Adding to his unhappiness, he said, is that none of the atheist applicants live in Santa Monica. (Mr. Jameson himself lives a few miles away, but attends church in the city.)

“The idea that religious speech is less protected than other free speech is an attack on the First Amendment, and the attempt of these people to block us is a real attack on our rights,” Mr. Jameson said. “This is just our way of saying ‘Merry Christmas.’ ”

Mr. Vix said he had encouraged the atheists to leave some of the spaces blank. If they put up as many messages as the Christians had, he said, there would be a backlash, and he predicted that the city would cancel the December tradition altogether. He also said the atheists had been trying only to receive the same amount of space that the churches had for years.

Mr. Vix said that from the time he first saw the displays in the early 1990s, he considered them a “blatant government support of religion.”

“I strongly believe in government and have my whole life,” he said, “and our founding fathers created the separation of church and state. If we don’t exercise our rights, we lose them. So I really felt the need to highlight the inherent problem.”

The Nativity scenes are not the only signs of religion this time of year. Rabbi Eli Levitansky, who helps to run the Chabad Jewish outreach programs in the area, said Santa Monica might have the “highest concentration of public menorahs” of any city in the country. (To keep score: there are 60 such menorahs scattered across the city’s 8.3 miles.)

Rabbi Levitansky, who grew up in Santa Monica, does not see a problem with the Nativity scenes and said that most people he knew — religious and not — were upset about the changes this year. “To come in and create chaos for no reason whatsoever, other than to just take away from the joy of the holidays for other people, is shallow and an improper thing to do,” he said.

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said the Santa Monica situation was “one of the cutest success stories of the season.” This year, the Wisconsin-based group has put up its own version of a manger in the Wisconsin State Capitol, with Einstein, Darwin and Emma Goldman standing as the wise men and a black female doll as the featured infant.

The displays in Santa Monica are not nearly as elaborate. One of Mr. Vix’s favorite signs sits right in the middle of the park, but few passers-by stopped one recent afternoon to read the quote from Robert Ingersoll, the 19th-century writer and orator:

“Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.”

    Where Crèches Once Stood, Atheists Now Hold Forth, NYT, 21.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/us/santa-monica-nativity-scenes-replaced-by-atheists.html

Paula E. Hyman,

Who Sought Rights for Women in Judaism,

Dies at 65

December 17, 2011
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

Paula E. Hyman, a social historian who pioneered the study of women in Jewish life and became an influential advocate for women’s equality in Jewish religious practice, including their ordination as rabbis, died on Thursday at her home in New Haven. She was 65.

The cause was breast cancer, said her husband, Dr. Stanley Rosenbaum.

Dr. Hyman, a professor of modern Jewish history at Yale University, wrote 10 books about the Jewish experience in Europe and the United States, many of them focused on women’s roles in various communities before and after the immense Jewish migrations of the 19th and 20th centuries.

She spotlighted the special stresses confronting married Jewish women from Eastern Europe when they arrived in the United States, for instance: although they were used to working outside the home, even as primary breadwinners in some ultrareligious families, they were initially housebound in America, where custom placed married women in the home.

In her books Dr. Hyman chronicled how married Jewish women from Eastern and Western Europe overcame such customs to become full partners in family businesses, a major part of the New York garment work force and leaders of successful community protests like the Lower East Side kosher meat boycott of 1902 and the New York rent strike of 1907.

Her works are considered seminal in creating a new field of historical study — part women’s history, part Jewish history, part history of immigration in America.

“The field of American Jewish women’s history as a scholarly enterprise owes its origins to Paula Hyman,” said Hasia R. Diner, a professor of history at New York University and director of the university’s Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History.

Colleagues said Dr. Hyman’s work was informed by twin, deep-rooted and sometimes conflicting bonds: to Judaism and to feminism. When she was a graduate student at Columbia in 1972, she and a dozen other Jewish feminists delivered a historic manifesto to hundreds of rabbis gathered for the annual meeting of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly.

Titled “Jewish Women Call for Change,” it demanded full equality for women in the practice of Conservative Judaism, one of the three major Jewish denominations. The Conservative denomination accommodated modern culture more than the Orthodox branch but less so than the Reform, which ordained an American woman as a rabbi for the first time that year.

“Call for Change” addressed the Conservative leaders because they continued to observe many Orthodox rules excluding women: denying them full participation in rituals, denying their right to initiate religious divorces and barring them from becoming rabbis and cantors. The bans on ordination and full participation have since been lifted, while the right to initiate divorce is still denied.

Partly to further the cause, Dr. Hyman agreed in 1981 to become dean of undergraduates at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Upper Manhattan, the flagship educational institution of the Conservative movement. Hired by the seminary’s chancellor, Rabbi Gerson D. Cohen, an outspoken supporter of women’s equality, she was the first woman to hold the post. Rabbi Cohen ordained the first female Conservative rabbi in 1985.

Paula Ellen Hyman was born on Sept. 30, 1946, in Boston, the oldest of three children of Sydney and Ida Hyman. Her father was an office manager; her mother worked as a bookkeeper. Her interest in Jewish tradition and history led her to enroll simultaneously at Radcliffe College and the Hebrew Teachers College of Boston, now known as Hebrew College.

After graduating in 1968 from Radcliffe, she pursued her graduate studies at Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D. in 1975. In 1969 she married Dr. Rosenbaum, who survives her, as do their daughters, Judith and Adina Rosenbaum; her mother; two sisters, Toby and Merle Hyman; and two grandchildren.

Influenced by the feminist movement of the 1960s, Dr. Hyman sought to apply “consciousness raising” principles to Jewish traditions that, in her view, made women second-class members of their own cultural communities, said Martha Ackelsberg, a fellow Columbia graduate student and now a professor of government at Smith College. Dr. Hyman organized discussion groups that evolved into the organization Ezrat Nashim (“Women’s Help”), which conceived and presented the “Call for Change.”

Dr. Hyman’s early scholarly work focused on Jewish life in France at the turn of the last century following the Dreyfus affair. She subsequently wrote about Jewish assimilation in Europe during the same period.

In 1976, she and two colleagues wrote “The Jewish Woman in America,” an unabashedly feminist view of the Jewish immigrant experience, in which Dr. Hyman argued that Jewish women worked as hard as men, accomplished great things and did it all while managing households single-handedly. It was, she said, “the only book for which I received fan letters.”

The academic interest sparked by that book produced many of the 700 scholarly articles collected in 1997 in the two-volume historical encyclopedia “Jewish Women in America,” which Dr. Hyman and Dr. Deborah Dash Moore edited.

In an essay for the Jewish Women’s Archive, Dr. Hyman described the small dinner party held by some of the original signers of the “Call for Change” manifesto on Oct. 24, 1983, the day the Jewish Theological Seminary opened its rabbinical school to women. “It seemed like a prolonged struggle,” she recalled saying at the time.

But “in the context of Jewish history,” she added, “11 years was like the blink of an eye.”

    Paula E. Hyman, Who Sought Rights for Women in Judaism, Dies at 65, NYT, 17.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/nyregion/paula-e-hyman-who-sought-rights-for-women-in-judaism-dies-at-65.html

Goodbye to ‘Gays, Guns & God’

December 8, 2011
9:00 pm
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN

How do you praise the sanctity of traditional heterosexual marriage when the best-known nuptials of the year, between a Kardashian and a basketball player, lasted all of 72 days? Or, for that matter, when a possible Republican nominee for president, Newt Gingrich, cares so much about marriage that he’s tried it three times?

You don’t. The above mockeries of marriage are just the latest reasons one of the most potent wedge issues of American politics — the banner of gays, guns and God — will have little impact next year.

This trio is usually trotted out in big swaths of the West, in rural or swing districts and in Southern states at the cusp of the Bible Belt. The proverbial three G’s was the explanation in Thomas Frank’s entertaining book “What’s the Matter With Kansas” for why poor, powerless whites would vote for a party that promises nothing but tax cuts for the rich.

It’s misleading to think people will vote against their economic interests simply because a candidate doesn’t mouth the same pieties as them as they do. But the cultural cudgel works to a point. I’ve certainly seen the three G’s launched late in a campaign, to great effect. Jim Inhofe won a Senate seat in Oklahoma in 1994 using the three G’s as an overt slogan.

At the same time, I’ve watched smart politicians, like Montana’s two-term Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, blunt the attack by showing off their guns and waving away the God and gay questions as none-of-your-business intrusions.

But this year I think we’ve reached a tipping point on these heartless perennials. When George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, political sophisticates were stunned by a national exit poll in which 22 percent of voters picked “moral issues” from a list of things that mattered most — more than any other concern. This was heralded as the high-water triumph for evangelicals.

Later analysis showed that the phrase “moral issues” was being used rather broadly by voters, from concern about character to worry over poverty. It was a catch-all. Still, the ranking of moral issues as the top reason to pick a president came as a surprise.

Now look at this week’s New York Times/CBS News Poll of likely Republican caucus-goers in Iowa, about as conservative a cohort of voters as anywhere in the country. Iowa, for Republicans, is where gays, guns and God will grow in political fields long after corn is no longer planted for ethanol subsidies.

Topping the list of voter concerns was the economy and jobs — picked by 40 percent of respondents, followed by the budget deficit at 23 percent. Social issues came in a distant third, with 9 percent. And the candidate who polled highest as the one who “most represents the values you try to live by,” Michele Bachmann, has nothing to show for that rating in the overall race, where she is in fifth place.

But the decline of the three G’s hasn’t stopped a few of the dead-enders in the Republican field from raising the flag. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, last seen trying to find a verb to follow “oops,” is out this week with a very specific culture-war ad in Iowa, vowing to end “Obama’s war on religion,” whatever that is.

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian,” says Perry, in a folksy drawl. “But you don’t need to be in a pew every Sunday to know that there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” The surprise here is that he actually completed several sentences, though it may have required a number of takes.

Perry and Rick Santorum, another badly wounded culture warrior, blasted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week for saying that the United States would assist human rights groups fighting for tolerance in countries where people have been imprisoned, and even killed, for their sexual orientation.

“This administration’s war on traditional values must stop,” said Perry, siding, apparently, with mullahs living in caves.

This is Perry’s last gasp; in desperation, he shows how this particular balloon has run out of hot air. Poll after poll has found that Americans now overwhelmingly favor letting gays serve openly in the military — a sentiment backed even by a sizable majority of Republicans.

The gay marriage issue is moving in the same direction. Earlier this year, Gallup reported that, for the first time in its tracking of the issue, a majority of Americans believe same-sex marriage should be legal. In 1996, only 27 percent felt that way.

Which brings us to guns. President Obama has done nothing to curb gun use. If anything, he’s expanded gun rights. There are probably a dozen Democrats in Congress from the West who know more about guns than Mitt Romney or Professor Newt Gingrich. That dog, as they say, will not hunt — not this year.

The irony is that two of the G’s could actually hurt Republicans in 2012. Conservative orthodoxy is badly out of step with emerging majority support for full citizenship rights of gays. And with religion, some Republicans have already made an issue of Romney’s Mormonism, and Gingrich’s switch to Roman Catholicism. In Gingrich’s case, questions have been raised about how a multiple-married man could win the favor of high-ranking Catholic clerics who usually look askance at people who ditch their wives.

Do we dare expect these two fine men to be the ones, at long last, to bring an end to the gays, guns and God wedge issue, even if it’s by accident?

    Goodbye to ‘Gays, Guns & God’, NYT, 8.12.2011,
    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/goodbye-to-gays-guns-god/

Charismatic Church Leader,

Dogged by Scandal, to Stop Preaching for Now

December 4, 2011
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON and ROBBIE BROWN

LITHONIA, Ga. — At the height of his power, Bishop Eddie L. Long would pack tens of thousands of people into his megachurch in the suburbs of Atlanta.

With his well-cut suits, passion for Bentleys, and dynamic, accessible style of preaching, he quickly climbed the list of the nation’s most powerful religious leaders.

He built his ministry, which stretches to Kenya and other countries, on a strong message of conservative Christianity that included promises of prosperity and attacks on homosexuality.

But life inside Bishop Long’s home had been crumbling. And on Sunday, members of his dwindling congregation heard news they had been bracing for.

Their charismatic bishop, who in May settled with five young men who accused him of sexual coercion and who has fought a series of other legal battles, said he was temporarily stepping away from the pulpit to try to save his marriage.

The announcement came after his wife, Vanessa Long, 53, filed for divorce Thursday. Friday, she recanted after “prayerful reflection” but later in the day changed her mind and said she did intend to end their marriage of 21 years. They have four children.

“Vanessa and I are working together in seeking God’s will in our current circumstances,” Bishop Long, 58, said in a statement issued by the church, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church.

During services on Sunday, he told congregants that he was still their senior pastor and would continue to provide spiritual direction, but that he needed time to take care of “some family business.” Members attending services pledged support and said they would stay until his return.

“He needs to be with his family,” said Marilyn Arnold, a business manager. “It’s hard on his family. When he comes back, we’ll be here.”

But not everyone remains a believer. Valencia Miller, a property manager in Lithonia, said she left the church after the young men who accused the bishop of sexual impropriety came forward.

“A lot of us left. I mean, a lot,” she said in an interview Sunday.

Like others, she hopes that Bishop Long turns this temporary break into a permanent one.

“The church needs a cleansing,” she said. “I’m real disappointed. He was a man we all looked up to.”

Bishop Long took over the congregation in 1987 when it had a few hundred members. He built a following of 25,000, according to the church’s Web site, and reached millions more on TV.

Just after Easter, Bishop Long settled a lawsuit in which young men claimed that the pastor offered gifts, trips, and emotional and spiritual guidance that eventually led to sexual relations. One of the young men, Maurice Robinson, said in court records that his relationship with Bishop Long began when he was 15 and that on a trip to New Zealand the two engaged in sexual acts.

Bishop Long initially vowed to fight the charges, proclaiming his innocence and comparing himself to David who fought Goliath.

“I have five rocks and I haven’t thrown one yet,” he said when the charges were revealed.

Details of the settlement were to be kept secret, but people with knowledge of the case have put it at several million dollars paid over a period of years.

Some of the men have since spoken out, so lawyers for the church have tried to get part of the money returned, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

There have been other legal battles. Ten former members who attended church investment seminars are suing him, claiming he coerced them into investment deals that cost them their retirement savings. He recently reached a settlement in a lawsuit over a $2 million bank loan, much of which went unpaid after a real estate deal that went bad.

In 2007, Bishop Long was one of a half-dozen ministers whose tax-exempt status was investigated by a Senate committee.

Support for Bishop Long continues to shrink. Just before the sexual coercion settlement was announced, the Rev. Bernice King, the youngest daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., left the church.

On Sunday, a small group of antigay, religious protesters stood outside the church urging Bishop Long to step down permanently. They said they planned to return every month until he left.

“He has a serious moral character flaw,” said Isaac Richmond, 73, the minister at the Church of Human Development in Memphis. “It’s a moral question and he’s a religious figure. We don’t want that image as a role model for young men in the African-American community.”

The Rev. Timothy McDonald, a Baptist minister in Atlanta and chairman of the group African-American Ministers in Action, said that attendance at the church had dropped to 4,000 from about 8,000 at one point this year. Still, he said, it remains a powerful force. “Even on his bad days, if he gets 4,000 or 5,000, he’s still larger than 94 or 95 percent of most churches,” he said.

Frank Cook, a contract administrator who has been a member for 20 years, is not going anywhere. “It’s all about restoring, forgiving and loving,” he said in an interview on Sunday. “We love Bishop Long and we’re going to keep coming.”

    Charismatic Church Leader, Dogged by Scandal, to Stop Preaching for Now, NYT, 4.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/us/eddie-long-beleaguered-church-leader-to-stop-preaching.html

After American Jewish Outcry,

Israel Ends Ad Campaign Aimed at Expatriates

December 2, 2011
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER and JOSEPH BERGER

JERUSALEM — One video advertisement shows a Jewish elderly couple distraught that their Israeli granddaughter in the United States thinks Hanukkah is Christmas. Another shows a clueless American boyfriend who does not get why his Israeli expatriate girlfriend is saddened on Israel’s memorial day. A third shows a toddler calling “Daddy! Daddy!” to his napping Israeli expatriate father, who finally awakens when the child switches to Hebrew: “Abba!”

For many American Jews, the Israeli government-sponsored ads, intended to cajole Israelis living in the United States to come home, smacked of arrogance, ignorance and cultural disrespect of America. Jewish groups in the United States expressed outrage, saying they were causing a rift with American Jews who support Israel. On Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aborted the campaign.

The ads — short videos and billboard posters — were intended to touch the sensibilities of Israeli expatriates and tap into their national identity, according to the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, which oversaw the campaign.

But critics said the ads implied that moving to America led to assimilation and an erosion of Jewish consciousness. The Jewish Federations of North America called them insulting. Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, called the videos “heavy-handed, and even demeaning.”

Israeli officials defended the desire to encourage Israeli expatriates to return, but the reaction of American Jewry, a crucial mainstay of support for Israel, clearly caused alarm.

“We are very attentive to the sensitivities of the American Jewish community,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu. “When we understood there was a problem, the prime minister immediately ordered the campaign to be suspended.”

The ads were placed by the Ministry for Immigrant Absorption, headed by Sofa Landver, who immigrated to Israel from Russia in 1979. She belongs to the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party led by Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. The party takes a hard line on the peace process with the Palestinians and advocates exchanging parts of Israel heavily populated by Arab citizens for Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank.

A spokesman for the ministry, Elad Sonn, said no insult had been intended; the ministry “respects and cherishes” the American Jewish community, and “we wish to apologize to those who might have been offended.”

Some of the videos were still accessible Friday on the ministry’s Web site (http://www.moia.gov.il/Moia_en/ReturningHomeProject/).

Beckoning the Jewish diaspora, of course, has always been a component of Zionism, a foundation for the Jewish homeland. Immigrants are referred to almost reverentially as “olim,” Hebrew for “going up.” Israelis who leave are “yordim,” Hebrew for “going down,” often uttered disdainfully.

The videos ran on Web sites popular with expatriates. Billboard versions went up in American communities where expatriates live.

Some Israeli officials were mystified by the belatedness of the reaction; the campaign is a few months old. Attention increased after an item on it appeared on the Jewish Channel, a cable station, and a blog was posted this week by Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for The Atlantic.

“The idea, communicated in these ads, that America is no place for a proper Jew, and that a Jew who is concerned about the Jewish future should live in Israel, is archaic, and also chutzpadik, if you don’t mind me resorting to the vernacular,” Mr. Goldberg said.

On Thursday, the Jewish Federations of North America issued a memo that said: “While we recognize the motivations behind the ad campaign, we are strongly opposed to the messaging that American Jews do not understand Israel. We share the concerns many of you have expressed that this outrageous and insulting message could harm the Israel-Diaspora relationship.”

Steven Bayme, director of contemporary Jewish life at the American Jewish Committee, said that the campaign’s skepticism of Jewish life in the United States contributed to the angry reaction, particularly the message that Israelis should not marry American Jews. “We’re talking about one Jewish people, and certainly encouraging marriage within the Jewish people is something everyone would sign on to,” he said.

Mr. Foxman called the campaign “a reflection of the ignorance that exists in Israel of Jewish life in America, its vitality, its creativity.” Still, he said, Israel’s decision to stop the ads showed “that they’re listening and it does matter how we feel.”

 

Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, and Joseph Berger from New York.

    After American Jewish Outcry, Israel Ends Ad Campaign Aimed at Expatriates, NYT, 2.12.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/world/middleeast/after-american-outcry-israel-ends-ad-campaign-aimed-at-expatriates.html

New Translation of Catholic Mass Makes Its Debut

November 27, 2011
The New York Times
By SHARON OTTERMAN

Roman Catholics throughout the English-speaking world on Sunday left behind words they have prayed for nearly four decades, flipping through unfamiliar pew cards and pronouncing new phrases as the church urged tens of millions of worshipers to embrace a new translation of the Mass that more faithfully tracks the original Latin.

The introduction of the new English translation of the Roman Missal, the book of texts and prayers used in the Mass, appeared to pass smoothly in churches, despite some confusion and hesitancy over the new words.

But behind the scenes, the debate over the new translation has been angry and bitter, exposing rifts between a Vatican-led church hierarchy that has promoted the new translation as more reverential and accurate, and critics, among them hundreds of priests, who fear it is a retreat from the commitment of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s to allowing people to pray in a simple, clear vernacular as they participate in the church’s sacred rites.

There was no reference to that history Sunday morning in the cavernous nave of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where Msgr. Robert T. Ritchie, in purple robes to mark the start of Advent, told thousands of worshipers, “Today is a special day — today is the start of a new translation of the Mass,” and directed them to follow the new words listed on laminated pew cards.

But when Monsignor Ritchie said to the assembly, “The Lord be with you,” many reflexively responded with the words that have been used for decades, declaring, “And also with you,” rather than with the new response, “And with your spirit.”

And though he had carefully studied the new service, even Monsignor Ritchie lost his place at one point, raising his eyebrows as he flipped through the missal, looking for the right words before the start of communion.

Across the Atlantic, the scene was similar at Westminster Cathedral in London, where the pews were filled with worshipers clutching freshly printed pamphlets under soaring, dark stone ceilings.

The Rev. Alexander Master, celebrating the Mass, made no direct mention of the change, but his sermon centered on the concept of upheaval, which, he said, had been “especially marked” this year. What the future holds, he said, “is known only to God.”

The new translation, phased in throughout the English-speaking world over the past year, was officially introduced over the weekend in every English-language Mass in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and India.

Because the form of the Mass was not changed — just the details of the translation — many Catholics reacted mildly.

Rebecca Brown, a parishioner at St. James Cathedral in Seattle, said she felt well prepared for the new translation. “I’m not fond of the linguistic choices, how it rolls off the tongue,” Ms. Brown said. “But on the other hand, the Catholic Church is always about renewal and reforming itself. This is just one of those changes.”

“It was interesting,” said Danielle McGinley, 31, a parishioner at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles. “It feels more like a Spanish Mass to me. The Spanish Mass is a more literal translation. I like it.”

But George Lind, 73, in New York, had a more visceral reaction. He tried to say the new language at the Church of the Holy Cross in Times Square during the Saturday night Mass, he said, but he became so angry that he had to stop speaking.

“I am so tired of being told exactly what I have to say, exactly what I have to pray,” he said. “I believe in God, and to me that is the important thing. This is some attempt on the part of the church hierarchy to look important.”

Most of the changes are within the prayers the priests say, but there are some notable differences in the responses by worshipers. The Nicene Creed, the central profession of faith, now starts with “I believe in one God” instead of “We believe in one God.” Jesus is now “consubstantial with the Father” rather than “one in Being with the Father.” Communion begins with the words, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof,” instead of “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you.”

The mixed emotions in the pews broadly mirrored the reception that the new translation has received from clergy and liturgical scholars. More than 22,000 people, including many priests, endorsed a petition, on the Web site whatifwejustsaidwait.org, to postpone the introduction of the new Mass. An association of hundreds of Irish priests called for the translation to be scrapped.

The Rev. Anthony Ruff, a scholar of Latin and Gregorian chant at St. John’s University and seminary in Collegeville, Minn., worked on parts of the latest translation with the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, but he left after he became “increasingly critical of the clunky text and the top-down secretive process” with which it was being created, he said.

“The syntax is too Latinate — it’s not good English that will help people pray,” he said in an interview. “Rome got its way in forcing this on us, but it is a Pyrrhic victory because it is not bringing the whole church together around a high quality product.”

Catholics throughout the world worshiped in Latin until Vatican II, when the church granted permission for priests to celebrate Mass in other languages. The English translation used until this weekend was published in the early 1970s and modified in 1985. Scholars then began work on a new translation, and by 1998 a full draft of the new missal was completed and approved by bishops’ conferences around the English-speaking world.

But Rome never approved that translation, and instead, in 2001, issued new guidelines requiring that the language of the Mass carefully follow every word of the Latin text, as well as the Latin syntax, where possible. That marked a dramatic philosophical shift from the more flexible principle of “dynamic equivalence” that had guided the earlier translations.

The Rev. Michael Ryan, pastor of St. James Cathedral in Seattle, who started the Web petition to postpone the new text, said he believed that nearly all critics among clergy would nonetheless use the new translation.

“I am not going to change a word, because the only way it will get evaluated is if people hear it as it is,” he said. “I trust the people will indeed speak up.”

The Rev. Daniel Merz, associate director of the secretariat of divine worship for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is in charge of promulgating the changes in America, said the text had been widely discussed before it was put into use. He said the new translation was more poetic and filled with imagery.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a document that’s been so consulted in the history of the world,” he said.

“Over time, we have realized that there is a better way to pray,” he added. “Not that the old way was bad, but we hope and believe that this new way is better.”

 

Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Los Angeles, Isolde Raftery from Seattle

and Ravi Somaiya from London.

    New Translation of Catholic Mass Makes Its Debut, NYT, 27.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/nyregion/for-catholics-the-word-was-a-bit-different-amen.html

The Unbelievers

November 25, 2011
The New York Times
By EMILY BRENNAN

RONNELLE ADAMS came out to his mother twice, first about his homosexuality, then about his atheism.

“My mother is very devout,” said Mr. Adams, 30, a Washington resident who has published an atheist children’s book, “Aching and Praying,” but who in high school considered becoming a Baptist preacher. “She started telling me her issues with homosexuality, which were, of course, Biblical,” he said. “ ‘I just don’t care what the Bible says about that,’ I told her, and she asked why. ‘I don’t believe that stuff anymore.’ It got silent. She was distraught. She told me she was more bothered by that than the revelation I was gay.”

This was in 2000, and Mr. Adams did not meet another black atheist in Washington until 2009, when he found the Facebook group called Black Atheists, which immediately struck a chord. “I felt like, ‘100 black atheists? Wow!’ ” he said.

In the two years since, Black Atheists has grown to 879 members from that initial 100, YouTube confessionals have attracted thousands, blogs like “Godless and Black” have gained followings, and hundreds more have joined Facebook groups like Black Atheist Alliance (524 members) to share their struggles with “coming out” about their atheism.

Feeling isolated from religious friends and families and excluded from what it means to be African-American, people turn to these sites to seek out advice and understanding, with some of them even finding a date. And having benefited from the momentum online, organizations like African Americans for Humanism and Center for Inquiry-Harlem have well-attended meet-up groups, and others like Black Atheists of America and Black Nonbelievers have been founded.

African-Americans are remarkably religious even for a country known for its faithfulness, as the United States is. According to the Pew Forum 2008 United States Religious Landscape Survey, 88 percent of African-Americans believe in God with absolute certainty, compared with 71 percent of the total population, with more than half attending religious services at least once a week.

While some black clergy members lament the loss of parishioners to mega-churches like Rick Warren’s and prosperity-gospel purveyors like Joel Osteen, it is often taken for granted that African-Americans go to religious services. Islam and other religions are represented in the black community, but with the assumption that African-Americans are religious comes the expectation that they are Christian.

“That’s the kicker, when they ask which church you go to,” said Linda Chavers, 29, a Harvard graduate student. The question comes up among young black professionals like her classmates as casually as chitchat about classes and dating. “At first,” she said, “they think it’s because I haven’t found one, and they’ll say, ‘Oh I know a few great churches,’ and I don’t know a nice way to say I’m not interested,” she said.

Even among those African-Americans who report no affiliation, more than two-thirds say religion plays a somewhat important role in their lives, according to Pew. And some nonbelieving African-Americans have been known to attend church out of tradition.

“I have some colleagues and friends who identify as culturally Christian in a way similar to ethnic Jews,” said Josef Sorett, a religion professor at Columbia University. “They may go to church because that’s the church their family attends, but they don’t necessarily subscribe to the beliefs of Christianity.”

Given the cultural pull toward religion, less than one-half of a percent of African-Americans identify themselves as atheists, compared with 1.6 percent of the total population, according to Pew. Black atheists, then, find they are a minority within a minority.

In 2008, John Branch made his first YouTube video, “Black Atheism.” With the camera tight on his face, Mr. Branch, now 27, asks, “What is an atheist? An atheist is simply someone who lacks a belief in God.” Half kidding, he goes on, “We’re not drinking blood. We’re not worshiping Satan.” The video has received more than 40,000 hits.

“I think it attracted so much attention because, in the black community, not believing in God is seen as a thing for white people,” said Mr. Branch, a marketing strategist in Raleigh, N.C. “I hate that term, ‘acting white,’ but it’s used.”

According to Pew, the vast majority of atheists and agnostics are white, including the authors Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.

Seeking a public intellectual of their own, some black atheists have claimed the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, interpreting his arguments against teaching intelligent design in the classroom to be an endorsement of atheism. But Dr. deGrasse Tyson is loath to be associated with any part of the movement. When contacted last week by e-mail, he noted a Twitter exchange he had in August, in which he told a follower, “Am I an Atheist, you ask? Labels are mentally lazy ways by which people assert they know you without knowing you.”

Jamila Bey, a 35-year-old journalist, said, “To be black and atheist, in a lot of circles, is to not be black.” She said the story the nation tells of African-Americans’ struggle for civil rights is a Christian one, so African-Americans who reject religion are seen as turning their backs on their history. This feels unfair to Ms. Bey, whose mother is Roman Catholic and whose father is Muslim, because people of different faiths, and some with none, were in the movement. The black church dominated, she said, because it was the one independent black institution allowed under Jim Crow laws, providing free spaces to African-Americans who otherwise faced arrest for congregating in public.

Recognizing the role of churches in the movement, Ms. Bey still takes issue when their work is retold as God’s. “These people were using the church, pulling from its resources, to attack a problem and literally change history. But the story that gets told is, ‘Jesus delivered us,’ ” Ms. Bey said. “Frankly, it was humans who did all the work.”

Garrett Daniels wrote on the Facebook group page of Black Atheists, “I CAME out that I’m an atheist to my family.” He added, “I’m not disowned and they apparently don’t love me any less.” A member responded: “Good for you. Seeking out religion just to fit in will drive you crazy.”

The Facebook discussion boards for these groups often become therapy sessions, and as administrator of the Black Atheist Alliance, Mark Hatcher finds himself a counselor. “My advice is usually let them know you understand their religion and what they believe, but you have to take a stand,” he said.

This strategy has worked for Mr. Hatcher, 30, a graduate student who started a secular student group at the historically black Howard University. For two of his Facebook friends, though, it has not worked, and they moved to Washington, not to sever ties with their families as much as to keep their sanity.

Now that Facebook groups have connected black atheists, meet-ups have started in cities like Atlanta, Houston and New York.

On a gray Saturday in October, 40 members of African Americans for Humanism, including Mr. Hatcher, Ms. Bey and Mr. Adams, met at a restaurant in Washington to celebrate the first anniversary of holding meet-ups. Speakers discussed plans to broaden services like tutoring and starting a speaking tour at historically black colleges.

“Someone’s sitting on the fence, saying, ‘I go to church, and all my friends and my family are there, how am I supposed to leave?’ ” Mr. Hatcher said on stage. “That’s where we, as African-American humanists, say, ‘Hey look, we have a community over here.’ ”

After the speeches, Mr. Hatcher looked at the attendees mingling, laughing, hugging one another. “I feel like I’m sitting at a family reunion,” he said.

Seated beside Mr. Hatcher was his girlfriend, Ellice Whittington, a 26-year-old chemical engineer he met through a black atheist Facebook group. He lived in Washington and she in Denver, so their relationship progressed slowly, she said, over long e-mails. But Mr. Hatcher said he fell immediately. “We bonded over music. She loved Prince.”

As for being nonreligious in the black community, Ms. Whittington said, “It definitely makes your field of candidates a whole lot smaller.”

She added, “It scared some men to hear me say I don’t believe in God the way you do. I’ve heard people say, ‘How can you love somebody if you don’t believe in God?’ ”

ON his blog “Words of Wrath,” Wrath James White is an outspoken critic of Christianity and of African-Americans’ “zealous embracement of the God of our kidnapper, murders, slave masters and oppressors.”

Though his atheism is a well-worn subject of debate with his wife and his mother (a minister), Mr. White, a 41-year-old Austin-based writer, avoids discussing it with the rest of his family. Though he won’t attend Christmas services this year, and hasn’t in years, he said, his family assumes he’s just “not that interested in religion.” To say explicitly he is an atheist, he said, “would break my grandmother’s heart.”

The pressure he feels to quiet his atheism is at the heart of a provocative statement he makes on his blog: “In most African-American communities, it is more acceptable to be a criminal who goes to church on Sunday, while selling drugs to kids all week, than to be an atheist who ... contributes to society and supports his family.”

Over the phone, Mr. White said he does feel respected for his education and success, but because he cannot talk freely about his atheism, it ultimately excludes him. When he lived in Los Angeles, he watched gang members in their colors enter the church where they were welcomed to shout “Amen” (they had sinned but had been redeemed) along with everyone else.

“They were free to tell their story,” Mr. White said, while his story about leaving religion he keeps to himself — and the Internet.

    The Unbelievers, NYT, 25.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/fashion/african-american-atheists.html

Focusing on the Jewish Story of the New Testament

November 25, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK OPPENHEIMER

SAN FRANCISCO — Growing up Jewish in North Dartmouth, Mass., Amy-Jill Levine loved Christianity.

Her neighborhood “was almost entirely Portuguese and Roman Catholic,” Dr. Levine said last Sunday at her book party here during the annual American Academy of Religion conference. “My introduction to Christianity was ethnic Roman Catholicism, and I loved it. I used to practice giving communion to Barbie. Church was like the synagogue: guys in robes speaking languages I didn’t understand. My favorite movie was ‘The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima.’ ”

Christianity might have stayed just a fascination, but for an unfortunate episode in second grade: “When I was 7 years old, one girl said to me on the school bus, ‘You killed our Lord.’ I couldn’t fathom how this religion that was so beautiful was saying such a dreadful thing.”

That encounter with the dark side of her friends’ religion sent Dr. Levine on a quest, one that took her to graduate school in New Testament studies and eventually to Vanderbilt University, where she has taught since 1994. Dr. Levine is still a committed Jew — she attends an Orthodox synagogue in Nashville — but she is a leading New Testament scholar.

And she is not alone. The book she has just edited with a Brandeis University professor, Marc Zvi Brettler, “The Jewish Annotated New Testament” (Oxford University Press), is an unusual scholarly experiment: an edition of the Christian holy book edited entirely by Jews. The volume includes notes and explanatory essays by 50 leading Jewish scholars, including Susannah Heschel, a historian and the daughter of the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel; the Talmudist Daniel Boyarin; and Shaye J. D. Cohen, who teaches ancient Judaism at Harvard.

As any visitor to the book expo at this conference discovered, there is a glut of Bibles and Bible commentaries. One of the exhibitors, Zondervan, publishes hundreds of different Bibles, customized for your subculture, niche or need. Examples include a Bible for those recovering from addiction; the Pink Bible, for women “who have been impacted by breast cancer”; and the Faithgirlz! Bible, about which the publisher writes: “Every girl wants to know she’s totally unique and special. This Bible says that with Faithgirlz! sparkle!”

Nearly all these Bibles are edited by and for Christians. The Christian Bible comprises the Old and New Testaments, so editors offer a Christian perspective on both books. For example, editors might add a footnote to the story of King David, in the Old Testament books I and II Samuel, reminding readers that in the New Testament, David is an ancestor of Jesus.

Jewish scholars have typically been involved only with editions of the Old Testament, which Jews call the Hebrew Bible or, using a Hebrew acronym, the Tanakh. Of course, many curious Jews and Christians consult all sorts of editions, without regard to editor. But among scholars, Christians produce editions of both sacred books, while Jewish editors generally consult only the book that is sacred to them. What’s been left out is a Jewish perspective on the New Testament — a book Jews do not consider holy but which, given its influence and literary excellence, no Jew should ignore.

So what does this New Testament include that a Christian volume might not? Consider Matthew 2, when the wise men, or magi, herald Jesus’s birth. In this edition, Aaron M. Gale, who has edited the Book of Matthew, writes in a footnote that “early Jewish readers may have regarded these Persian astrologers not as wise but as foolish or evil.” He is relying on the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo, who at one point calls Balaam, who in the Book of Numbers talks with a donkey, a “magos.”

Because the rationalist Philo uses the Greek word “magos” derisively — less a wise man than a donkey-whisperer — we might infer that at least some educated Jewish readers, like Philo, took a dim view of magi. This context helps explain some Jewish skepticism toward the Gospel of Matthew, but it could also attest to how charismatic Jesus must have been, to overcome such skepticism.

This volume is thus for anybody interested in a Bible more attuned to Jewish sources. But it is of special interest to Jews who “may believe that any annotated New Testament is aimed at persuasion, if not conversion,” Drs. Levine and Brettler write in their preface. “This volume, edited and written by Jewish scholars, should not raise that suspicion.”

Jews who peek inside these forbidding covers will also find essays anticipating the arguments of Christian evangelists. Confronted by Christians who extol their religion’s conceptions of neighbor love or the afterlife, for example, many Jews do not know their own tradition’s teachings. So “The Jewish Annotated New Testament” includes essays like “The Concept of Neighbor in Jewish and Christian Ethics” and “Afterlife and Resurrection.”

At a panel discussion before the book party, Drs. Brettler and Levine conceded that the New Testament’s moments of anti-Semitism would be too much for some to overlook (especially protective Jewish mothers).

“I told one woman I knew that her son might really like this book,” Dr. Brettler said. “She said, ‘If he wants it, he can buy it for himself.’ ”

Thirty years ago, when Dr. Levine was starting graduate school, an aunt asked her why she was reading the New Testament. “I said, ‘Have you read it?’ and she said, ‘No, why would I read that hateful, anti-Semitic disgusting book?’ ”

But Dr. Levine insists her aunt, like other Jews, had nothing to fear. “The more I study New Testament,” Dr. Levine said, “the better Jew I become.”

    Focusing on the Jewish Story of the New Testament, NYT, 25.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/us/a-jewish-edition-of-the-new-testament-beliefs.html

Bishops Open ‘Religious Liberty’ Drive

November 14, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

BALTIMORE — The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops opened a new front in their fight against abortion and same-sex marriage on Monday, recasting their opposition as a struggle for “religious liberty” against a government and a culture that are infringing on the church’s rights.

The bishops have expressed increasing exasperation as more states have legalized same-sex marriage, and the Justice Department has refused to go to bat for the Defense of Marriage Act, legislation that established the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman.

“We see in our culture a drive to neuter religion,” Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the bishops conference, said in a news conference Monday at the bishops’ annual meeting in Baltimore. He added that “well-financed, well-oiled sectors” were trying “to push religion back into the sacristy.”

Archbishop Dolan also came prepared to answer questions about the sexual-abuse scandal at Penn State University, which has reminded so many observers of the Catholic Church’s own abuse scandal. He said that the accusations against a former university football coach were a reminder that sexual abuse is a universal problem that affects most institutions.

“Every time that once again takes over the headlines we once again bow our heads in shame,” the archbishop said. “We know what you’re going through, and you can count on our prayers.”

The bishops are struggling to reclaim the role they played in the 1980s and into the ’90s as a nationally recognized voice on the moral dimension of public policy issues like economic inequality, workers’ rights, immigration and nuclear weapons proliferation. Since then, however, they have reordered their priorities, with abortion and homosexuality eclipsing poverty and economic injustice.

But as the sexual-abuse scandal largely overshadowed their agenda in the last decade, their pronouncements on politics and morality have been met with indifference even by many of their own flock. The bishops issue guidelines for Catholic voters every election season, a document known as “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” which is distributed in many parishes. But the bishops were informed at their meeting on Monday that a recent study commissioned by Fordham University in New York found that only 16 percent of Catholics had heard of the document, and only 3 percent had read it.

Nevertheless, the bishops remain a forceful political lobby, powerful enough to nearly derail the president’s health care overhaul two years ago over their concerns about financing for abortion. Last week, the White House, cognizant of the bishops’ increasing ire, invited Archbishop Dolan to a private meeting with President Obama, their second. Archbishop Dolan said they talked about the religious liberty issue, among others.

“I found the president of the United States to be very open to the sensitivities of the Catholic community,” Archbishop Dolan said in the news conference. “I left there feeling a bit more at peace about this issue than when I entered.”

But in an impassioned address to the prelates, Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., the chairman of the bishops’ newly established committee on religious liberty, said the church would urge priests and laypeople to take up the religious liberty cause. Bishop Lori said that in states like Illinois and Massachusetts, and in the District of Columbia, Catholic agencies that received state financing had been forced to stop offering adoption and foster care services because those states required them to help same-sex couples to adopt, just as they helped heterosexual couples.

Bishop Lori said in his speech, “The services which the Catholic Church and other denominations provide are more crucial than ever, but it is becoming more and more difficult for us to deliver these services in a manner that respects the very faith that impels us to provide them.”

The bishops have also been lobbying the Department of Health and Human Services to expand the religious exemption to the mandate in Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul that requires private insurers to pay for contraception. The exemption, as currently written, would still require Catholic hospitals and universities to cover birth control for most of their employees — which the church says is a violation of its religious freedom.

Some liberal Catholic commentators have criticized the bishops’ priorities, saying they are playing into the culture wars. John Gehring, Catholic outreach coordinator with Faith in Public Life, a liberal religious advocacy group in Washington, said, “The bishops speak in hushed tones when it comes to poverty and economic justice issues, and use a big megaphone when it comes to abortion and religious liberty issues.”

    Bishops Open ‘Religious Liberty’ Drive, NYT, 14.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/us/bishops-renew-fight-on-abortion-and-gay-marriage.html

Jamestown Thought

to Yield Ruins of Oldest U.S. Protestant Church

November 13, 2011
The New York Times
By THEO EMERY

JAMESTOWN — For more than a decade, the marshy island in Virginia where British colonists landed in 1607 has yielded uncounted surprises. And yet William M. Kelso’s voice still brims with excitement as he plants his feet atop a long-buried discovery at the settlement’s heart: what he believes are the nation’s oldest remains of a Protestant church.

The discovery has excited scholars and preservationists, and unearthed a long-hidden dimension of religious life in the first permanent colony.

It may prove to be an attraction for another reason: the church would have been the site of America’s first celebrity wedding, so to speak, where the Indian princess Pocahontas was baptized and married to the settler John Rolfe in 1614. The union temporarily halted warfare with the region’s tribal federation.

Last week Mr. Kelso, the chief archaeologist at the site, hopped into the excavated pit topped with sandbags and pointed to where Pocahontas would have stood at the altar rail. Orange flags marked the church’s perimeter. The pulpit would have been to the left and a baptismal font behind, with a door opening toward the river.

“I’m standing where Pocahontas stood,” Mr. Kelso said, gesturing to the earth at his feet. “I can almost guarantee you that.”

It would have been unthinkable for the intrepid settlers, as ambassadors of country, crown and church, not to erect a building for worship and conversion of Native Americans in their Virginia Company encampment.

Nor is it the nation’s oldest house of worship: Britain’s earlier “lost colony” in North Carolina may have had a church, and remnants of 16th-century Catholic churches and missions have been identified, according to Mr. Kelso. But the 2010 discovery and continuing excavation has generated excitement partly due to the size of the 1608 structure — at 64 feet by 24 feet, it was an architectural marvel for its time — and also because of how little has been understood about religion in Jamestown.

Some scholars lament that popular knowledge of colonial-era religion has been flattened into a view of the Virginians as greedy and indolent, while later colonists in Plymouth, Mass., were pious and devout.

The distinction is rooted in their origins. While Virginians were largely loyal to the Church of England, the pilgrims in Plymouth repudiated the church and came to America to escape it.

“Fundamentally, they’re different places,” said David D. Hall, a scholar of colonial religion at Harvard Divinity School.

Religion would still have been central to Jamestown, and theories abound as to why there has been scant attention. Histories tend to emphasize commercial pursuits of its colonists, and scholars also point to the Civil War: with the Union victory, the story of Northern colonial virtues — including piety — triumphed over those of the South. Another view is that Plymouth had a prolific printer and Jamestown did not.

“You have two very different Christian experiences; both of them can be equally rich and nuanced, but one tended to leave a much richer and more layered testimony about itself,” said Richard Pickering, deputy director of program innovation at Plimoth Plantation, the recreated colonial village in Plymouth that uses the historical spelling of the name.

There is also a practical reason: until recently, relics of early Jamestown were underground. For centuries, the fort was believed washed into the James River. But Mr. Kelso, unconvinced, began digging along the river’s banks in 1994.

By 1996, he was certain he had located James Fort’s perimeter. The site has since yielded about 1.4 million artifacts, many of them stored in a locked, fireproof laboratory nearby.

But the original church remained elusive. Then, last fall, the archaeologists located remnants of a new structure beneath Civil War earthworks.

“Every one of our colleagues had goose bumps. It was something we’ve been looking for 17 years,” said the senior staff archaeologist, Danny Schmidt, 33, who first worked at Jamestown as a high school intern in 1994.

The dig has continued through the fall. The graves will be investigated in the spring, Mr. Kelso said.

“This is as close as you can get to a time capsule,” he said.

The church would have been the fort’s biggest structure by far. Paul A. Levengood, president and chief executive officer of the Virginia Historical Society, said a conspicuous church served a political purpose for the British.

“To put up a big church on this island in the Chesapeake region was a very clear political sign as well, saying, ‘We’re here, stay out, we claim this area, and we’re willing to fight you,’ ” he said.

The site will mark the spot of perhaps the best-known part of Jamestown’s history, the wedding of Pocahontas, who adopted the name Rebecca after her baptism and marriage.

Popular knowledge of that wedding could enhance attention to religion at Jamestown, said James Horn, vice president of research and historical interpretation at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, which manages the park. He said the church may be partially reconstructed atop the site.

H. Wade Trump III, a Williamsburg pastor who traces his ancestry back to the Jamestown colonists, sees the site as a New World Jerusalem where the nation’s religious heritage began.

“This church would be a place for Christians from all over the country to see where their roots are,” Mr. Trump said. “This is really the birthplace of the Judeo-Christian faith in America.”

Today, James Fort resembles an outdoor archaeology classroom, with school groups and tourists watching archaeologists at work just feet away.

Barbara Costin, 70, of Beaverdam, Va., made a circuit of the fort with her friend Marshall Healey, 82. Ms. Costin wondered if the discovery of the church was not an extension of the mission to convert native inhabitants, and exploit their land and wealth.

“Power, control — that’s what it’s about,” she said.

Myron Semchuk, 64, visiting from Norwalk, Conn., took a different view, calling the discovery “fascinating,” another key to the nation’s origin.

“The rights that we enjoy today had their roots here. This is where they first started,” he said. “And those religious beliefs, I think, were the foundation.”

    Jamestown Thought to Yield Ruins of Oldest U.S. Protestant Church, NYT, 13.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/us/ruins-of-oldest-us-protestant-church-may-be-at-jamestown.html

Nuns Who Won’t Stop Nudging

November 12, 2011
The New York Times
By KEVIN ROOSE

ASTON, Pa.

NOT long ago, an unusual visitor arrived at the sleek headquarters of Goldman Sachs in Lower Manhattan.

It wasn’t some C.E.O., or a pol from Athens or Washington, or even a sign-waving occupier from Zuccotti Park.

It was Sister Nora Nash of the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia. And the slight, soft-spoken nun had a few not-so-humble suggestions for the world’s most powerful investment bank.

Way up on the 41st floor, in a conference room overlooking the World Trade Center site, Sister Nora and her team from the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility laid out their advice for three Goldman executives. The Wall Street bank, they said, should protect consumers, rein in executive pay, increase its transparency and remember the poor.

In short, Goldman should do God’s work— something that its chairman and chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, once remarked that he did. (The joke bombed.)

Long before Occupy Wall Street, the Sisters of St. Francis were quietly staging an occupation of their own. In recent years, this Roman Catholic order of 540 or so nuns has become one of the most surprising groups of corporate activists around.

The nuns have gone toe-to-toe with Kroger, the grocery store chain, over farm worker rights; with McDonald’s, over childhood obesity; and with Wells Fargo, over lending practices. They have tried, with mixed success, to exert some moral suasion over Fortune 500 executives, a group not always known for its piety.

”We want social returns, as well as financial ones,” Sister Nora said, strolling through the garden behind Our Lady of Angels, the convent here where she has worked for more than half a century. She paused in front of a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. “When you look at the major financial institutions, you have to realize there is greed involved.”

The Sisters of St. Francis are an unusual example of the shareholder activism that has ripped through corporate America since the 1980s. Public pension funds led the way, flexing their financial muscles on issues from investment returns to workplace violence. Then, mutual fund managers charged in, followed by rabble-rousing hedge fund managers who tried to shame companies into replacing their C.E.O.’s, shaking up their boards — anything to bolster the value of their investments.

The nuns have something else in mind: using the investments in their retirement fund to become Wall Street’s moral minority.

A  PROFESSORIAL woman with a sculpted puff of gray hair, Sister Nora grew up in Limerick County, Ireland. She dreamed of becoming a missionary in Africa, but in 1959, she arrived in Pennsylvania to join the Sisters of St. Francis, an order founded in 1855 by Mother Francis Bachmann, a Bavarian immigrant with a passion for social justice. Sister Nora took her Franciscan vows of chastity, poverty and obedience two years later, in 1961, and has stayed put ever since.

In 1980, Sister Nora and her community formed a corporate responsibility committee to combat what they saw as troubling developments at the businesses in which they invested their retirement fund. A year later, in coordination with groups like the Philadelphia Area Coalition for Responsible Investment, they mounted their offensive. They boycotted Big Oil, took aim at Nestlé over labor policies, and urged Big Tobacco to change its ways.

Eventually, they developed a strategy combining moral philosophy and public shaming. Once they took aim at a company, they bought the minimum number of shares that would allow them to submit resolutions at that company’s annual shareholder meeting. (Securities laws require shareholders to own at least $2,000 of stock before submitting resolutions.) That gave them a nuclear option, in the event the company’s executives refused to meet with them.

Unsurprisingly, most companies decided they would rather let the nuns in the door than confront religious dissenters in public.

“You’re not going to get any sympathy for cutting off a nun at your annual meeting,” says Robert McCormick, chief policy officer of Glass, Lewis & Company, a firm that specializes in shareholder proxy votes. With their moral authority, he said, the Sisters of St. Francis “can really bring attention to issues.”

Sister Nora and her cohort have gained access to some of the most illustrious boardrooms in America. Robert J. Stevens, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, has lent her an ear, as has Carl-Henric Svanberg, the chairman of BP. Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, was so impressed by their campaign against G.E.’s involvement in nuclear weapons development that he took a helicopter to their convent to meet with the nuns. He landed the helicopter in a field across the street.

The Sisters of St. Francis are hardly the only religious voices challenging big business. They have teamed up on shareholder resolutions with other orders, including the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth and the Sisters of St. Dominic of Caldwell, both in New Jersey. The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, the umbrella group under which much of Sister Nora’s activism takes place, includes Jews, Quakers, Presbyterians and nearly 300 faith-based investing groups. The Vatican, too, has weighed in with a recent encyclical, condemning “the idolatry of the market” and calling for the establishment of a central authority that could stave off future financial crises.

“Companies have learned over time that the issues we’re bringing are not frivolous,” said the Rev. Seamus P. Finn, 61, a Washington-based priest with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate and a board member of the Interfaith Center. “At the end of every transaction, there are people that are either positively or negatively impacted, and we try to explain that to them.”

On a recent Saturday morning, 12 members of the Sisters of St. Francis shareholder advocacy committee gathered in Our Lady of Angels, a cavernous, hushed building housing 80 nuns that if not for the eerie quiet would resemble an Ivy League dorm. As three nuns talked in the foyer, their tales of nieces and nephews echoing through the halls, the advocacy group, which includes several lay people, gathered in the Assisi Room for its quarterly meeting.

After a prayer, a group recitation from Psalm 68 (“The protector of orphans and the defender of widows is God in God’s holy dwelling”) and a round of applause for a nun celebrating her 50th anniversary, or golden jubilee, as a member of the order, they settled down to business.

Sister Nora, in a gray-checked jacket and a pink blouse overlaid with a necklace bearing the Franciscan cross known as a Tau, began by updating the group on its finances. In addition to its shareholder advocacy program, the committee has a social justice fund from which it allocates low-interest loans, in amounts up to $60,000, to organizations that fit with its mission. This quarter, it lent money to the Disability Opportunity Fund, a nonprofit that helps the disabled; and the Lakota Funds, a group trying to finance a credit union on a Native American reservation in South Dakota.

LATER, over lunch in the cafeteria downstairs, the Sisters of St. Francis discussed the delicate dance they face in their shareholder advocacy program — pushing corporations to change their actions, while not needling them so much on sensitive issues like executive pay that bigwigs like Mr. Blankfein, at Goldman Sachs, are not willing to meet with them.

“We’re not here to put corporations down,” Sister Nora said, between bites of broccoli salad. “We’re here to improve their sense of responsibility.”

“People who have done well have a right to their earnings,” added Sister Marijane Hresko, when the topic of executive compensation comes up. “What we’re talking about here is excess, and how much money is enough for any human being.”

Sister Nora nodded. “I can’t exclude people like Lloyd Blankfein from my prayers, because he’s just as much human as I am,” she said. “But we like to move them along the spectrum.”

Goldman tries to maintain a polite relationship. “We have found our conversations with Sister Nora Nash and other I.C.C.R. members to be very insightful and instructive,” a spokesman said.

But change has not been speedy. Despite some successes — such as a campaign directed at Wal-Mart that the nuns say led the company to stop selling adult video games — the insider-heavy nature of corporate share structures means that the Sisters of St. Francis rarely succeed in real-world terms, even when their ideas prove popular. Most of their submissions receive less than 20 percent of the shareholder vote, and many get stuck in single digits.

“I honestly don’t know if it’s been effective or not, but they do highlight issues other shareholders don’t,” Mr. McCormick of Glass, Lewis says.

Still, Sister Nora, who would give her age only as “late 60s,” said she would keep pushing companies to do the right thing. Lately, she has been particularly interested in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the natural gas collection technique that has been the subject of controversy over its environmental and chemical impact. She has been attending rallies for the antifracking cause, and has submitted resolutions to oil corporations including Chevron and Exxon, encouraging them to put firmer controls in place.

“My work will never be done,” she says. “God has his ways.”

Soon, Sister Nora will go on retreat, an annual Franciscan rite in which nuns retire to solitude for a week of contemplation and prayer. There, she will gather her strength, rebuild her fighting spirit and emerge ready for the next round of resolutions and closed-door meetings.

She has even identified her next target: Family Dollar, one of the many deep-discount chains that sell cheap imported goods to Americans who generally do not know, or necessarily care, where those products come from. Sister Nora wants to make sure Family Dollar’s suppliers have fair labor policies, and she is concerned about whether its products are free of toxins.

“They just got a new president,” Sister Nora says. “I have a letter ready to go Monday.”

    Nuns Who Won’t Stop Nudging, NYT, 12.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/business/sisters-of-st-francis-the-quiet-shareholder-activists.html

In Tebow Debate, a Clash of Faith and Football

November 7, 2011
The New York Times
By GREG BISHOP

Tim Tebow is an N.F.L. quarterback, and Tim Tebow is an outspoken Christian. And while quarterback controversies are almost as common as quarterbacks, who play perhaps the most scrutinized position in American sports, what has erupted around Tebow this season is altogether different.

At the intersection of faith and football, the fervor that surrounds both Tebow’s beliefs and his struggles in his second season for the Denver Broncos has escalated into a full-blown national debate over religion and its place in sports.

While Tebow is not the first openly religious athlete, the circumstances surrounding his performance this season are so unusual, the N.F.L. is experiencing a rare, if not unprecedented, religious feud. The latest chapter in the Book of Tebow played out Sunday, when he threw two touchdown passes in the Broncos’ upset of the Oakland Raiders, perhaps saving his status as the starter, but not ending the larger debate.

“The role religion plays here is enormous,” said Kurt Warner, the former N.F.L. quarterback and a similarly outspoken Christian athlete. “When somebody professes their faith, and I was that guy for a long time, people automatically think when you praise God it’s because He makes passes go straighter or helps win games. When you lose, they say, your faith doesn’t belong here. Your God’s not helping you win.”

To his most fervent supporters — and there are many — Tebow was never just a quarterback. He was a champion of Christianity in shoulder pads, a wholesome, fearsome football player who loved God and touchdowns, in that order. If detractors found Tebow preachy, if he seemed too good to be true, he still won two national championships and a Heisman Trophy at the University of Florida, securing his legend as one of the greatest college players ever.

Drafted last year by the Broncos, he played sparingly his rookie season. Now, his struggles to adapt to the N.F.L. have changed the tenor of the debate around him, made it nastier, more personal, more intense. Supporters have reacted to criticism of Tebow as an indictment on religion, while detractors seem to delight in every wayward pass.

Just last year, Tebow drew national attention for his antiabortion commercial broadcast during the Super Bowl. In the past three weeks, he has become the most discussed and most polarizing figure in sports, strange territory for a replacement player on a last-place team. Opponents mocked his celebration pose — kneeling, in prayer, which became an Internet meme known as Tebowing — and his coach offered a lukewarm vote of confidence.

One columnist in Denver called Tebow the worst quarterback in football. Another columnist in Canada labeled Tebow the “Kim Kardashian of sports,” for the intense reaction he elicited. Online, the torrent of mockery and criticism has been fierce. Blog posts included “God explains why he let Tim Tebow fail” and Twitter exploded in hateful vitriol, to which the Sports Illustrated writer Joe Posnanski mused: “I believe Tim Tebow isn’t an N.F.L. starter and I want him to prove me wrong because I believe he’s a great guy. Is that allowed?”

In sheer volume and intensity, the comments section on an ESPN article best captured the storm known as Tebow mania. They ranged from critical to crude under the theme “X is > Tebow,” with X being “eating your kids” among the options, as moderators struggled to delete the escalating venom.

“This isn’t so much about Tim Tebow,” said Lincoln Blumell, an assistant professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University and a former college quarterback. “This is about people and about religion in sports.”

When he starred at the University of Calgary, Blumell prayed at his locker before and after games. Early on, though, he decided that any expressions of faith beyond that, on the field, would feel insincere.

Tebow took the opposite approach, and to Blumell and most others, that felt genuine, too. Tebow inscribed Bible verses on the black patches worn under his eyes, a practice since banned by the N.C.A.A. He preached to prisoners in America and circumcised babies in the Philippines, where his parents were missionaries. Blumell watched Tebow’s final college game, from the Sugar Bowl stands on Jan. 1, 2010, witnessing a “remarkable polarity in the crowd with religious undertones.” He turned to a friend and said, “Tebow’s going to be president.”

As vice president at Nielsen Sports, Stephen Master measures an athlete’s endorsement potential based on awareness and appeal. Nationally, the company tested Tebow after the draft in 2010 and again before this season. Coming out of college, Tebow recorded an N-score of 141, “an incredible rating,” Master said, “M.V.P.-like.”

In the second test, Tebow’s N-score fell to a 41, which still ranks high. His positive appeal, though, dropped to 76 percent from 85 percent, while his negative appeal increased to 24 percent from 15 percent. Under negative appeal comments, responders wrote “overrated” and “annoying” and “overexposed” and “religious nut job.”

“There’s always a religious component there,” said Howell Scott, an evangelical blogger and pastor at a Baptist church in New Mexico. “And with Tebow, it’s often an anti-Christian bias. People want him to fall flat on his face.”

Scott refers to this as Tebow Derangement Syndrome, which his blog defined as “the acute onset of mockery and verbal ‘hatred’ in otherwise normal people in reaction to the football prowess and play — nay — the very existence of Tim Tebow.”

Tim Hasselbeck, a football analyst for ESPN, estimated that half the N.F.L. is similarly of faith. Yet while sports fans, as the retired player turned analyst Randy Cross noted, have “become numb to the first five seconds of an interview, only because it’s someone professing some form of faith,” Tebow seems to elicit scorn in a way that, say, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, or Warner, or other religious athletes, did not.

Warner believes the difference lies in the level of exposure and expectation. While both used football as a platform, Warner said, fans identified with his story, from grocery bagger to Super Bowl M.V.P., more than they identified with Tebow, who garnered a greater following and greater backlash, so much so that Warner felt compelled to reach out to his friend in recent weeks.

Reactions toward Tebow can seem polarized between those who lionize him as a mythological athlete and those who perhaps resent the idea that Tebow taps into some higher power on the field.

“I feel like it’s a little much,” Hasselbeck said. “At ESPN, with so many different outlets, you feel like you’re having the same conversation over and over again. There’s a lot of talk about him. You can’t say it’s just religion. At the same time, you hear a lot of things that sound like an attack on his beliefs.”

To Rich Gannon, the SiriusXM radio host and former N.F.L. quarterback, the religious overtones overshadow other possible reasons that Tebow is struggling: he did not get to spend the off-season around his teammates because of the N.F.L. lockout; the Broncos’ roster is largely bereft of talent; a new offensive system was installed before this season; and the top receiver was traded — the normal factors used to judge a quarterback.

Gannon said there should be a separation between Tebow the football player and Tebow the Christian athlete. On Sunday, with his job hanging in the balance, Tebow propelled the Broncos to one game outside first place in the muddled A.F.C. West.

His message: keep the faith.

    In Tebow Debate, a Clash of Faith and Football, NYT, 7.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/sports/football/in-tebow-debate-a-clash-of-faith-and-football.html

Swami Bhaktipada, Ex-Hare Krishna Leader, Dies at 74

October 24, 2011
The New York Times
By MARGALIT FOX

Swami Bhaktipada, a former leader of the American Hare Krishna movement who built a sprawling golden paradise for his followers in the hills of Appalachia but who later pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges that included conspiracy to commit the murders-for-hire of two devotees, died on Monday in a hospital near Mumbai, India. He was 74.

The cause was kidney failure, his brother, Gerald Ham, said.

Mr. Bhaktipada, who was released from prison in 2004 after serving eight years of a 12-year sentence, moved to India in 2008.

The son of a Baptist preacher, Mr. Bhaktipada was one of the first Hare Krishna disciples in the United States. He founded, in 1968, what became the largest Hare Krishna community in the country and presided over it until 1994, despite having been excommunicated by the movement’s governing body.

The community he built, New Vrindaban, is nestled in the hills near Moundsville, W.Va., about 70 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. Its conspicuous centerpiece is the Palace of Gold, an Eastern-inspired riot of gold-leafed domes, stained-glass windows, crystal chandeliers, mirrored ceilings, inlaid marble floors, sweeping murals, silk brocade hangings, carved teak pillars and ornate statuary.

New Vrindaban eventually comprised more than 4,000 acres — a “spiritual Disneyland,” its leaders often called it — with a live elephant, terraced gardens, a swan boat and bubbling fountains. A major tourist attraction, it drew hundreds of thousands of visitors in its heyday, in the early 1980s, and substantial annual revenue from ticket sales.

The baroque frenzy of the place stands in vivid contrast to the founding tenets of the Hare Krishna movement. Rooted in ancient Hindu scripture, the movement was begun in New York in the mid-1960s by an Indian immigrant, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. It advocates a spiritual life centered on truth, simplicity and abstinence from drugs, alcohol and extramarital sex.

But by the mid-1980s, New Vrindaban had become the target of local, state and federal investigations that concerned, among other things, the sexual abuse of children by staff members at its school and the murders of two devotees.

The resulting federal charges against Mr. Bhaktipada, a senior spiritual leader of the movement, and the ensuing international publicity did much to contravene the public image of the gentle, saffron-robed acolytes who had long been familiar presences in American airports.

He was the subject of a book, “Monkey on a Stick: Murder, Madness and the Hare Krishnas” (1988), by John Hubner and Lindsey Gruson, a former reporter for The New York Times, and a documentary film, “Holy Cow Swami” (1996), by Jacob Young.

Mr. Bhaktipada, also known as Kirtananda Swami, was born Keith Gordon Ham on Sept. 6, 1937, in Peekskill, N.Y., the youngest of five children of the Rev. Francis Gordon Ham and the former Marjorie Clark.

The elder Mr. Ham was a Baptist minister steeped in old-line tradition, Gerald Ham said.

“My father would fit in very well with some of the evangelical people we have today raising such a ruckus,” Mr. Ham said. “The Bible was inerrant. We were all indoctrinated and baptized and so forth. Keith, too.”

Keith Ham earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Maryville College in Maryville, Tenn., in 1959, graduating first in his class of 118. As a senior, he received a prestigious Woodrow Wilson fellowship for graduate study.

He entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to pursue a doctorate in American religious history. But in the early 1960s, his brother said, the university asked him to leave after a love affair he had with a male student came to light. He settled in New York, where he did graduate work in history at Columbia.

Like many young people then, his brother said, Keith Ham became an experimenter and a seeker, dabbling in LSD and above all looking for a spiritual haven. In 1966, after leaving Columbia without a degree, he met Swami Prabhupada, who was running a storefront mission on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He joined the Hare Krishnas and was initiated as a swami in 1967.

Mr. Bhaktipada rose quickly in the nascent movement. After seeing a notice in an alternative newspaper from a West Virginia man offering land to anyone willing to start an ashram there, he secured the property for New Vrindaban, named after a holy site in India. Work began there in 1968.

New Vrindaban’s initial costs exceeded half a million dollars. The money was raised largely by Mr. Bhaktipada’s followers, who sold caps and bumper stickers adorned with counterfeit team logos and cartoon characters, including Snoopy, at shopping malls and sporting events.

Sales of these products would ultimately generate more than $10 million for the community, according to court documents.

New Vrindaban opened in 1979, and by the 1980s the community had more than 500 members.

Mr. Bhaktipada appeared to have created an earthly paradise at first.

“I think most of the residents found him extremely charismatic, like a loving father,” Henry Doktorski, who was a member from 1978 to 1994 and who is writing a book about New Vrindaban. “That’s how I saw him, at least until I left. At that point I became convinced that he was not actually what he was claiming to be.”

In the mid-80s, former members began to accuse Mr. Bhaktipada of running New Vrindaban as a cult of personality. The Hare Krishnas’ governing body excommunicated him in 1987 and New Vrindaban itself the next year. But, proclaiming the community independent of the larger movement, he refused to step down.

In May 1990, a federal grand jury indicted Mr. Bhaktipada on six counts of mail fraud, including using the mail to send followers the counterfeit souvenirs they were to sell, and five counts of racketeering. The most serious racketeering charges centered on the murders of the two devotees, Charles St. Denis, killed in 1983, and Steve Bryant, killed in 1986.

According to court records, Mr. St. Denis was believed to have raped the wife of a New Vrindaban member and to have been killed in retribution. Mr. Bryant, the most vocal critic among the community’s ex-members, had publicly accused Mr. Bhaktipada of condoning the molestation of New Vrindaban’s schoolchildren and of having had sex with under-age boys.

A New Vrindaban member, Thomas Drescher, was convicted of murdering Mr. St. Denis. (Another member, Daniel Reid, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in exchange for testimony against Mr. Drescher.) In a separate trial, Mr. Drescher was convicted of murdering Mr. Bryant.

The indictment against Mr. Bhaktipada charged that he had engaged his followers to commit the murders. At trial, prosecutors argued that he had considered both of the murdered men threats to his multimillion-dollar empire.

In 1991, Mr. Bhaktipada was convicted on all six counts of mail fraud and three of the five counts of racketeering. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

In 1993, an appeals court vacated his convictions and ordered a new trial on the grounds that testimony about child molestation, Mr. Bhaktipada’s homosexuality and his mistreatment of the community’s women had been prejudicial.

In 1996, three days into his second trial, Mr. Bhaktipada accepted a plea bargain under which he pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering — which included mail fraud and conspiracy to commit both murders — while simultaneously denying his involvement in the murders.

He was sentenced to 20 years, later reduced to 12. After his release, Mr. Bhaktipada lived in Manhattan at the headquarters of his splinter group, the Interfaith League of Devotees, before moving to India.

Besides his brother, Gerald, a retired state archivist of Wisconsin, Mr. Bhaktipada is survived by two sisters, Joan Aughinbaugh and Shirley Rogers.

New Vrindaban was accepted back into the Hare Krishna movement in 1998. Today, the community endures, though with fewer than 250 members. The elephant is long gone.

Visitors are always welcome, according to New Vrindaban’s Web site, at $8 for adults and $6 for children. A snack bar serves Indian food, pizza and French fries.

    Swami Bhaktipada, Ex-Hare Krishna Leader, Dies at 74, NYT, 24.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/us/swami-bhaktipada-ex-hare-krishna-leader-dies-at-74.html

Accountability in Missouri

October 20, 2011
The New York Times

It has been seven years since the Roman Catholic Church’s investigative board of laity warned that, beyond the 700 priests dismissed for sexually abusing children, “there must be consequences” for the diocesan leaders who recycled criminal priests through unsuspecting parishes. American church authorities have done nothing to heed this caution.

Now state prosecutors in Missouri have shown the courage the prelates lacked. They indicted Bishop Robert Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph for allegedly failing to notify criminal authorities about a popular parish priest who is accused of taking pornographic photographs of young parochial schoolgirls — despite community alarms and evidence submitted to the diocese.

Bishop Finn, who professed his innocence under the indictment, had previously outraged church faithful by acknowledging that he knew of the photos last December but did not turn them over to the police until May.

This occurred despite the requirements of state law — and the bishop’s own policy vows — that suspected crimes against children be immediately reported. The priest, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, continued to attend church events and allegedly abuse children until he was indicted this year on 13 counts of child pornography.

Bishop Finn is only the first ranking prelate in the nationwide scandal to be held criminally liable for the serial misbehavior of a priest in his diocese. Investigations have shown that many more diocesan officials across the country worked assiduously to bury the scandal from public view over the years, despite continuing damage inflicted on thousands of innocent youngsters.

In 2004, the nation’s bishops promised unqualified cooperation with law enforcement. They instituted zero-tolerance reforms for priests but failed to create a credible process for bringing bishops to account. Missouri officials deserve credit for puncturing the myth that church law and a bishop’s authority can somehow take precedence over criminal law — and the safety of children.

    Accountability in Missouri, NYT, 20.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/opinion/accountability-in-the-catholic-church-in-missouri.html

Our Amish, Ourselves

October 20, 2011
The New York Times
By JOE MACKALL

Ashland, Ohio

BY the time I made my way to Mr. Stutzman’s farm to ask for his take on the renegade Amish of Bergholz, Ohio — a splinter group that includes several members recently arrested after participating in assaults on other Amish — I was too late to break the news. I knew I would be. Several of my fellow English (that is, non-Amish) residents of Ashland County had been to see Mr. Stutzman earlier that morning. All were eager to tell him of yet another Amish incident. And this was the best kind — a case of Amish-on-Amish violence.

English always stop by Mr. Stutzman’s place with news of the outside world, especially if the news reveals Amish indiscretion, or worse. A few years ago an Amish man in an adjacent county was sent to prison for sexually abusing his daughters. Traffic at Mr. Stutzman’s produce stand was heavy that day, he told me. Folks he’d never seen before stopped by to pick up a head of lettuce or a bushel of peppers. They stared hard into his face as they asked if he’d heard about the abuse. Springing bad news on our Amish neighbors is just something we do around here.

I live surrounded by the Swartzentruber Amish, widely considered the most conservative of all Amish. Around here, people seem either to love or hate them. Unlike those parts of America without large Amish populations that tend to romanticize the community, here things take on a more fundamental, some might even say practical, prejudice.

Around here people tire of swerving around buggies and dodging horse droppings. Around here people resent the amount of land bought up by the Amish and how they have their own kind of health insurance, an insurance called community. Around here people are convinced that the Amish are getting away with something, have figured out something, have too many secrets. Around here people love to poke holes in the fabric of Amish solidarity.

The assaults and arrests in Bergholz seem to fit a convenient narrative for people seeking to discredit the Amish. There’s evidence of a doctrinal split, which is as common in the community as straw hats and hay wagons. Schisms and splinter groups are prevalent among the Amish that I know. Mr. Stutzman’s neighbor, Mr. Gingerich, also a Swartzentruber, recently broke off from Mr. Stutzman’s group over the issue of adding a second lantern to buggies. Mr. Gingerich is set to move to Maine later this month to start his own settlement.

All Amish seem to fall into the trap of believing their way is the true Amish way. The Swartzentrubers believe that the more liberal Old Order groups and the even more liberal New Order groups live dangerously close to the modern world, a world from which all Amish are to remain separate. The more liberal orders deride Swartzentrubers for taking baths only on Saturdays, and they call them gruddel vullahs (or “woolly lumps”) for getting cows’ milk in their beards. So it comes as no surprise that the attacks in Bergholz, which included the forced cutting of hair, were the work of a splinter group that believed somebody had betrayed the true cause, if the attacks can be credited with such lofty motives.

Whatever the case, I know a few things for certain. The Swartzentruber Amish will continue taking baths only on Saturdays, believing this deliberate inattention to hygiene is evidence of living the true Amish way. I know that there will always be splits and schisms among the Amish. I know that many of the rural English of Ashland County will continue to dislike the Amish in general, even while maintaining genuine friendships with a few. I know that many Americans will continue to see the Amish as a backward cult of religious fanatics, but that many more will persist in mythologizing them, seeing in them what they need to see. I know that, as the writer Wendell Berry says, America’s view of the Amish is a “perfect blindness.”

The truest thing I can say about the Amish is that within a week, or even less, they will disappear from the media and from the nation’s consciousness. They will deliquesce — until the next newsworthy incident — into the background of contemporary America.

 

Joe Mackall, a professor of English and creative writing at Ashland University,

is the author of “Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish.”

    Our Amish, Ourselves, NYT, 20.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/opinion/our-amish-ourselves.html

Is Religion Above the Law?

October 17, 2011
9:00 pm
The New York Times
By STANLEY FISH

Stanley Fish on education, law and society.

The religion clause case recently argued before the Supreme Court — Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC — centers on the “ministerial exception,” the doctrine (elaborated over the last 40 years) that exempts religious associations from complying with neutral, generally applicable laws in some, but not all, circumstances.

In 2005 Cheryl Perich, a teacher in the Hosanna-Tabor Lutheran Evangelical School, returned from an extended sick leave (she had been diagnosed with narcolepsy) to find that her services were no longer wanted. She declined to resign as requested, and after a resolution satisfactory to her was not forthcoming she filed a disability discrimination suit. The church responded by terminating her as a teacher, alleging that its reason was theological, not retaliatory. The Missouri synod, the church explained, requires its adherents to resolve disputes rather than bring suit in civil court; in failing to follow this rule, Perich had transgressed a core Lutheran belief.

The church further argued that as a “commissioned minister” Perich fell under the ministerial exception even though the bulk of her time was spent teaching secular subjects. Perich (through her attorneys) replied that her duties were not primarily religious, and that the assertion of a doctrinal violation was an afterthought devised to serve as a pretext for an act of retaliation in response to her having gone to the courts in an effort to secure her rights.

So the issues are, first, was she a minister in the sense that would bring her under the exception (in which case the state could not intervene to protect her), and, second, was the doctrine the church invoked as the reason for its action truly central to its faith? (There are other issues in play but, as we shall see, two are more than enough.)

The most perspicuous example of a ministerial exception is the Catholic church’s limitation of membership in the priesthood to males. If a university were to have a rule that only men could serve as professors, it would be vulnerable to a suit brought under the anti-discrimination provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The difference (or so it has been asserted) is that there is no relationship between professorial skills and gender — a woman can perform the duties of a teacher of history or chemistry as well as a man — while the tradition of an all-male priesthood is rooted in religious doctrine. So the university would be engaged in discrimination pure and simple, whereas the church’s discrimination is a function of its belief that the all-male priesthood was initiated by Christ in his choice of the apostles.

Were the state to intervene and declare the tradition of an all-male priesthood and the doctrine underlying it unconstitutional, it would be forcing the church to conform to secular norms in violation both of the free exercise clause (the right of a religion to be governed by its own tenets would be curtailed) and the establishment clause (the state would in effect have taken over the management of the church by dictating its hiring practices). (I am rehearsing, not endorsing, these arguments.)

This clear-cut example — to which both sides in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC refer frequently — may be the only one (and it is only clear-cut because it has behind it 2,000 years of history). For the question quickly becomes one of boundaries — how far does the ministerial exception extend? To whom does it apply? Not only are there no answers to such questions, it is not obvious who is empowered to ask them.

If the ministerial exemption is to have any bite, there must be a way of distinguishing employees central to a religious association’s core activities from employees who play only a supporting role (the example always given is janitors). But if the line marking the distinction is drawn by the state, the state is setting itself up as the arbiter of ecclesiastical organization and thus falling afoul of the establishment clause. And if the line is drawn by the religious association, the religious association is being granted the power to deprive as many of its employees as it likes of the constitutional protections supposedly afforded to every citizen. It is these equally unpalatable alternatives — this Scylla and Charybdis — that the justices find themselves between in oral argument. What a mess!

It is tempting to bypass the mess by getting rid of the ministerial exception altogether and demanding that churches, synagogues and mosques obey the law just as everyone else does. But that draconian solution would imply that we get rid of the religion clause as well; for it would amount to saying that religion isn’t special, and both sides of the clause insist that it is. The free-exercise clause tells us that that religion is especially favored and the establishment clause tells us that it is especially feared (the state should avoid entanglement with that stuff). How do you honor the claims of free exercise without bumping up against the establishment clause by allowing exceptions to laws that everyone else must follow?

The difficulty is sometimes finessed by cabining free exercise in the private sphere. Free exercise, it is said, is fine as long as its scope is limited to the expression and profession of belief; but once it crosses over into actions the state has a duty to regulate, free exercise must give way to the authority of fair and neutral laws. (This is the holding of a line of cases from Reynolds v. United States [1878] to Employment Division v. Smith [1990].)

This cutting of the joint works fine for a religion that places minimal burdens on its adherents and asks only that they attend to the personal relationship between them and their God. But what about religions that expand the area of faith to include rites the faithful must celebrate and worldly actions they are expected to perform? What about religions that refuse to recognize, and even consider impious, the distinction between the private and the public spheres? Can the state step in and say, “No, you’re wrong; that practice you’re worried about isn’t really essential to your faith; give it up so that a system of laws put in place for everyone isn’t destroyed by exceptions.” Doesn’t society, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked at oral argument, “have a right at some point to say certain conduct is unacceptable, even if religious?”

The question is, at what point? And who gets to decide when that point has been reached? Indeed there is a question even more basic (and equally unanswerable except by fiat): who gets to say whether a “certain conduct” is religious and centrally so? A resolution of the Hosanna-Tabor case, Justice Samuel Alito observes, “depends on how central a teaching of Lutheranism” the injunction against “suing in a civil tribunal” really is. Before we can decide (he continues) whether the church’s asserted reason for terminating Perich is a pretext, we must determine whether this is in fact “a central tenet of Lutheranism.” And if we decide that it isn’t, wouldn’t we be “making a judgment about the relative importance of the Catholic doctrine that only males can be ordained as priests and the Lutheran doctrine that a Lutheran should not sue the church in civil courts?” And what authorizes the Court to do that in opposition to what the churches themselves say?

The same dilemma attends the other vexed question. How, wonders Chief Justice John Roberts, “do we decide who’s covered by the ministerial exception?” By getting to “the heart of the ministerial exception,” answers Douglas Laycock, speaking for the church. But that is simply to relocate the problem in a phrase that itself demands explication. Who’s to say where the heart is? In some churches, Justice Anthony Kennedy observes, there aren’t “full time ministers at all; they’re all ministers.” So does everyone fall under the exception and can a non-hierarchical church simply declare that none of its members can seek redress for acts of discrimination because they’re all ministers? Just before the oral argument concludes, Justice Sotomayor is still awaiting clarification: “So define minister for me again?”

She will be waiting forever. There is no way out of these puzzles, and that is exactly the conclusion Justice Stephen Breyer reaches: “I just can’t see a way … of getting out of the whole thing.” Justice Alito points to the absurdity of calling in expert witnesses to determine the truth of disputed matters of religion, but, he asks, “How are we going to avoid that? I just don’t see it.” Later he concludes that “you just cannot get away from evaluating religious issues,” which is of course exactly what the courts are not supposed to be doing.

So how will the case turn out? Clearly none of the justices wishes to pronounce as a theologian. And just as clearly none of them is happy with the prospect of a ministerial exception without defined limits. Breyer gestures in the direction of a solution that avoids the hard questions. Grant the Church the core doctrine it cites and inquire into whether Perich was given adequate notice of it. If she was, she loses; if she wasn’t, she wins. But no one will be satisfied with that maneuver, which will itself raise a host of new unanswerable questions in place of the questions supposedly avoided. All these questions were explored by John Locke at length in his “Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689), and at one point Locke gives voice to a weariness we might echo today: Would that “this business of religion were left alone.” But as long as there is a religion clause, that’s not an option.

    Is Religion Above the Law?, NYT, 17.10.2011,
    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/is-religion-above-the-law/

The Evangelical Rejection of Reason

October 17, 2011
The New York Times
By KARL W. GIBERSON and RANDALL J. STEPHENS

Quincy, Mass.

THE Republican presidential field has become a showcase of evangelical anti-intellectualism. Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann deny that climate change is real and caused by humans. Mr. Perry and Mrs. Bachmann dismiss evolution as an unproven theory. The two candidates who espouse the greatest support for science, Mitt Romney and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., happen to be Mormons, a faith regarded with mistrust by many Christians.

The rejection of science seems to be part of a politically monolithic red-state fundamentalism, textbook evidence of an unyielding ignorance on the part of the religious. As one fundamentalist slogan puts it, “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” But evangelical Christianity need not be defined by the simplistic theology, cultural isolationism and stubborn anti-intellectualism that most of the Republican candidates have embraced.

Like other evangelicals, we accept the centrality of faith in Jesus Christ and look to the Bible as our sacred book, though we find it hard to recognize our religious tradition in the mainstream evangelical conversation. Evangelicalism at its best seeks a biblically grounded expression of Christianity that is intellectually engaged, humble and forward-looking. In contrast, fundamentalism is literalistic, overconfident and reactionary.

Fundamentalism appeals to evangelicals who have become convinced that their country has been overrun by a vast secular conspiracy; denial is the simplest and most attractive response to change. They have been scarred by the elimination of prayer in schools; the removal of nativity scenes from public places; the increasing legitimacy of abortion and homosexuality; the persistence of pornography and drug abuse; and acceptance of other religions and of atheism.

In response, many evangelicals created what amounts to a “parallel culture,” nurtured by church, Sunday school, summer camps and colleges, as well as publishing houses, broadcasting networks, music festivals and counseling groups. Among evangelical leaders, Ken Ham, David Barton and James C. Dobson have been particularly effective orchestrators — and beneficiaries — of this subculture.

Mr. Ham built his organization, Answers in Genesis, on the premise that biblical truth trumps all other knowledge. His Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Ky., contrasts “God’s Word,” timeless and eternal, with the fleeting notions of “human reason.” This is how he knows that the earth is 10,000 years old, that humans and dinosaurs lived together, and that women are subordinate to men. Evangelicals who disagree, like Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, are excoriated on the group’s Web site. (In a recent blog post, Mr. Ham called us “wolves” in sheep’s clothing, masquerading as Christians while secretly trying to destroy faith in the Bible.)

Mr. Barton heads an organization called WallBuilders, dedicated to the proposition that the founders were evangelicals who intended America to be a Christian nation. He has emerged as a highly influential Republican leader, a favorite of Mr. Perry, Mrs. Bachmann and members of the Tea Party. Though his education consists of a B.A. in religious education from Oral Roberts University and his scholarly blunders have drawn criticism from evangelical historians like John Fea, Mr. Barton has seen his version of history reflected in everything from the Republican Party platform to the social science curriculum in Texas.

Mr. Dobson, through his group Focus on the Family, has insisted for decades that homosexuality is a choice and that gay people could “pray away” their unnatural and sinful orientation. A defender of spanking children and of traditional roles for the sexes, he has accused the American Psychological Association, which in 2000 disavowed reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality, of caving in to gay pressure.

Charismatic leaders like these project a winsome personal testimony as brothers in Christ. Their audiences number in the tens of millions. They pepper their presentations with so many Bible verses that their messages appear to be straight out of Scripture; to many, they seem like prophets, anointed by God.

But in fact their rejection of knowledge amounts to what the evangelical historian Mark A. Noll, in his 1994 book, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” described as an “intellectual disaster.” He called on evangelicals to repent for their neglect of the mind, decrying the abandonment of the intellectual heritage of the Protestant Reformation. “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” he wrote, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”

There are signs of change. Within the evangelical world, tensions have emerged between those who deny secular knowledge, and those who have kept up with it and integrated it with their faith. Almost all evangelical colleges employ faculty members with degrees from major research universities — a conduit for knowledge from the larger world. We find students arriving on campus tired of the culture-war approach to faith in which they were raised, and more interested in promoting social justice than opposing gay marriage.

Scholars like Dr. Collins and Mr. Noll, and publications like Books & Culture, Sojourners and The Christian Century, offer an alternative to the self-anointed leaders. They recognize that the Bible does not condemn evolution and says next to nothing about gay marriage. They understand that Christian theology can incorporate Darwin’s insights and flourish in a pluralistic society.

Americans have always trusted in God, and even today atheism is little more than a quiet voice on the margins. Faith, working calmly in the lives of Americans from George Washington to Barack Obama, has motivated some of America’s finest moments. But when the faith of so many Americans becomes an occasion to embrace discredited, ridiculous and even dangerous ideas, we must not be afraid to speak out, even if it means criticizing fellow Christians.

 

Karl W. Giberson is a former professor of physics, and Randall J. Stephens is an associate professor of history, both at Eastern Nazarene College. They are the authors of “The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age.”

    The Evangelical Rejection of Reason, NYT, 17.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/opinion/the-evangelical-rejection-of-reason.html

Amish Renegades Are Accused

in Bizarre Attacks on Their Peers

October 17, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM and DANIEL LOVERING

BERGHOLZ, Ohio — Myron Miller and his wife, Arlene, had been asleep for an hour when their 15-year-old daughter woke them and said that people were knocking at the door.

Mr. Miller, 45, a stocky construction worker and an Amish bishop in the peaceful farmlands of eastern Ohio, found five or six men waiting. Some grabbed him and wrestled him outside as others hacked at his long black beard with scissors, clipping off six inches. As Mr. Miller kept struggling, his wife screamed at the children to call 911, and the attackers fled.

For an Amish man, it was an unthinkable personal violation, and all the more bewildering because those accused in the attack are other Amish.

“We don’t necessarily fight, but it’s just instinct to defend yourself,” Mr. Miller recalled.

The attackers, the authorities said, had traveled from an isolated splinter settlement near Bergholz, south of the Miller residence. Sheriffs and Amish leaders in the region, home to one of the country’s largest concentrations of Amish, had come to expect trouble from the Bergholz group. It is said to be led with an iron hand by Sam Mullet, a prickly 66-year-old man who had become bitterly estranged from mainstream Amish communities and had had several confrontations with the Jefferson County sheriff.

But the violent humiliation that men from his group are charged with inflicting on their perceived enemies throughout this fall, using scissors and battery-operated clippers, came as a bizarre shock.

The assaults — four are known to the authorities — have stirred fear among the Amish and resulted in the arrests, so far, of five men, including three of Mr. Mullet’s sons, on kidnapping and other charges. Officials say that more arrests are possible.

In the first incident, on Sept. 6 in the town of Mesopotamia, a married couple who had left the Bergholz community four years ago, Martin and Barbara Miller, were attacked at night by five of their own sons and a son-in law, along with their wives, all of whom had elected to remain with Mr. Mullet, according to the victims. The gang left the father with a “ragged beard,” as a sheriff’s report described it, then turned on their mother — who is Mr. Mullet’s sister — and chopped off large patches of her hair.

“The beard is a key symbol of masculine Amish identity,” said Donald B. Kraybill, a sociologist and expert on the Amish at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. The women view their long hair, kept in a bun, as their “glory,” Dr. Kraybill said, and shearing it was “an attack on her personal identity and religious teaching.”

The men accused in the attack were released on bail. The elder Mr. Mullet has not been charged, although he remains under investigation. “I know that nothing moves out there unless he says it moves,” said Fred J. Abdalla, the sheriff of Jefferson County.

Federal prosecutors are considering whether to pursue federal hate-crime charges, according to the Cleveland office of the F.B.I.

The prosecutions are unusual because the Amish do not believe in revenge and prefer to settle disputes internally. The couple in Mesopotamia, Barbara and Martin Miller, have refused to testify, telling officers that they will “turn the other cheek.”

But others are cooperating with law enforcement.

“We want to see these people behind bars so this cult can be torn apart before it ends up like most of them do,” said Myron Miller, who lives in Mechanicstown. Many Amish regard Mr. Mullet as a danger to the wider community and above all to the 120 people in the settlement, including dozens of children growing up under his sway.

Mr. Miller now has a trimmed two-inch beard. He and his wife believe that the attack was retribution because, years ago, they helped one of Mr. Mullet’s sons leave Bergholz.

Mr. Mullet, through the front door of his large white house at the center of his Bergholz settlement, refused to speak a reporter last week and ordered him off the property.

In an earlier interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Mullet said that the recent attacks resulted from “religious differences,” and that he had not ordered the attacks, though he had known that they were taking place.

The remarks enraged other Amish. “It’s not a church issue, it’s plain revenge,” Arlene Miller said.

Many Amish say they no longer consider Mr. Mullet to be Amish or even a true Christian. While the Amish have a long history of schisms, clusters of congregations tend to have cooperative ties, and the fact that Mr. Mullet’s group is not linked to any other is a sign of their renegade status, said David McConnell, an anthropologist at the College of Wooster who studies the Amish.

On a recent morning, the Bergholz settlement of 18 or so families, a scattering of wooden buildings and mobile homes reached by dirt track in a mountain valley, appeared nearly deserted. Horses and cows munched on green pastures. Women in traditional bonnets and long dark dresses glanced at a stranger through windows.

Edward Mast, 18, one of Mr. Mullet’s grandsons, was working in the barn, where sturdy horses were stabled and buggies were parked.

Nearly all the men leave each morning in vans to work construction jobs, he said, paying “English” — the Amish term for non-Amish — drivers for transport. Some of the women teach the children at their own small school; all children leave school after eighth grade, usually to start working, he said.

Mr. Mast, who loves Mountain Dew and deer hunting, said he assumed that he would keep living in the community.

In 1995, when Mr. Mullet bought land in Bergholz, he was already known as a loner with a provocative attitude. But his conflicts with outsiders have increased in the last decade, according to Sheriff Abdalla and local Amish leaders. One follower was convicted of threatening to kill the sheriff after losing a custody battle; one of Mr. Mullet’s sons went to prison for molesting a 12-year-old girl.

Mr. Mullet’s central religious grievance apparently stems from his effort about five years ago to excommunicate families who had moved out. A group of Amish leaders told him that he did not have proper grounds to do so, and he has stewed with resentment ever since, according to the sheriff.

The Sept. 6 attack on Mr. Mullet’s sister and her husband sent ripples of anxiety through the Amish community.

The next day the sister, Barbara Miller, 57, at first refused to talk to officers from Trumbull County but then pointed at her husband’s ragged beard.

“They did that to him,” she said, according to the sheriff’s report. “And they did this to me,” she said, removing a bandana, revealing what the officers described as “several patches of hair missing.”

Mrs. Miller told the officers that she and her husband had quit Bergholz but that their children had remained and had become involved with what she called a cult.

Further episodes on Oct. 4 finally led to the arrests. A group of men were accused of attacks at two different homes after attending a horse auction, roaming over several counties in a hired trailer with a puzzled driver.

The first victims that night were a 74-year-old Amish bishop and his son in Mount Hope. Later that night, members of the same group allegedly assaulted Myron Miller.

Mr. Miller grabbed at the face of one assailant, and later found clumps of beard, not his own, on the ground, which the sheriff collected for evidence.

“It just terrified me that these guys were actually pulling me out of my house,” Mr. Miller recalled. “My whole family was terrified.”

    Amish Renegades Are Accused in Bizarre Attacks on Their Peers, NYT, 17.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/us/hair-cutting-attacks-stir-fear-in-amish-ohio.html

For Bachmann, God and Justice Were Intertwined

October 13, 2011
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

TULSA, Okla. — Michele Bachmann was 22 and newly married when, in the fall of 1979, she and 53 other aspiring lawyers arrived on the manicured campus of Oral Roberts University here. They were the inaugural class in an unusual educational experiment: a law school rooted in charismatic Christian belief.

“We hope to guide our students to a deeper understanding of their spiritual gifts and of their place in God’s kingdom,” the school’s dean, Charles Kothe, wrote in the first edition of its law review, The Journal of Christian Jurisprudence. The aim, he said, was to train the next generation of legal minds to “integrate their Christian faith into their chosen profession,” and to “restore law to its historic roots in the Bible.”

Today, as a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota seeking her party’s nomination for president, Mrs. Bachmann often talks of her work as a lawyer, describing herself as a “former federal tax litigation attorney,” though not identifying her employer as the Internal Revenue Service. She points to her master’s degree from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, from a nine-month program in tax law.

But the far more formative experience was one she rarely discusses in front of secular audiences: the legal education she received at Oral Roberts University, founded by the Christian televangelist and Pentecostal faith healer of that name. It was, one fellow student recalls, a “Petri dish of conservatism and Judeo-Christian thought.”

Mrs. Bachmann’s studies here exposed her to ideas — God is the source of law; the Constitution is akin to a biblical covenant, binding on future generations; the founders did not intend for a strict separation of church and state — that are percolating throughout the 2012 race for the presidency, as social conservative candidates like Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, court the evangelical Christian vote.

But the philosophy has its best-known advocate in Mrs. Bachmann, whose bid for the presidency has exposed a wider audience of Americans to views long espoused by social conservative scholars.

On the campaign trail, she bills herself as a “constitutional conservative,” and holds that judges must limit themselves to the text and original understanding of the Constitution, rather than regard it as a living document whose meaning can evolve. At a forum last month in South Carolina, she criticized President Obama’s policies on health care, immigration and education as unconstitutional, saying the 2012 election would turn on how candidates interpret “that sacred document.”

Here, Mrs. Bachmann worked as a research assistant to John Eidsmoe on his 1987 book, “Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers,” which argues that “religion and politics cannot be totally separated” and that “America was and to a large extent still is a Christian nation.“ She studied “legal institutions and values” with Herb Titus, a Harvard-trained lawyer who hears his philosophy in Mrs. Bachmann’s words.

“Her belief is consistent with a biblical and a Christian understanding of the Constitution,” Mr. Titus said.

It took Mrs. Bachmann seven years to graduate; she took a four-year hiatus that began before the birth of her first child. And the school itself was short-lived; it ran out of money and closed in 1986. The future congresswoman’s tenure spanned its entire existence, a time of great ferment among Christian conservatives who, buoyed by the political rise of Ronald Reagan, were flexing their political muscles.

Mrs. Bachmann, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was among them. As a student here, she put her legal skills to use working with Chris Klicka, another Oral Roberts graduate, who helped found the Home School Legal Defense Association. Together, Mrs. Bachmann told an evangelical Christian audience earlier this year, they researched state laws on home schooling, favored by many Christian parents (including, later, Mrs. Bachmann and her husband, Marcus) as an alternative to public education. That kind of activism was promoted.

“We were encouraged to make a difference,” said Rich Gradel, an Oral Roberts law graduate and solo practitioner in Tulsa. “A lot of us could have gone elsewhere. We came here because we felt — not everybody, but a whole lot of us — felt like God led us here.”

 

‘Mind, Body and Spirit’

With its 30-ton bronze sculpture of praying hands and 200-foot prayer tower offering a panoramic view of the 263-acre campus, Oral Roberts University was chartered in 1963 as an educational home for charismatic Christians. It placed a “particular emphasis,” its literature says, on “the Spirit-given ability to speak in tongues,” which Mr. Gradel and others said was common in chapel services here.

By the time Mrs. Bachmann arrived, the school was expanding. Chancellor Roberts, as he is still known here, envisioned an array of graduate schools — in medicine, nursing, dentistry, business, theology and law. He hoped for “cross-pollination,” so that budding lawyers, businessmen, theologians and health professionals could talk about how to carry God’s message “into every person’s world.”

The O. W. Coburn School of Law, financed largely by an Oklahoma businessman by that name (the father of Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma), opened in September 1979 with one dean, three professors (including Mr. Titus) and a law librarian. Byron R. White, the Supreme Court justice, spoke at the dedication ceremony.

The facilities were a big draw, former students say. There was a mock courtroom with an ornate wooden jury box, and a 150,000-volume law library. Classes were held in the Learning Resources Center, a huge diamond-shaped building with soaring arches and metallic gold trim designed to evoke Solomon’s Temple in ancient Jerusalem. To get to their classrooms, students walked past one of Oral Roberts’s favorite sayings in huge gold lettering: “Lawyers can be healers.”

Law students were held to the same strict standards as undergraduates. Physical education classes were mandatory; students had to maintain activity logs, in keeping with Mr. Roberts’s insistence on building “mind, body and spirit.” There was a dress code: modest skirts and dresses for women, shirts and ties for men. Beards were forbidden; a man’s hair could be no longer than halfway down the ear. Twice-weekly chapel attendance was required.

The school was not Mrs. Bachmann’s first choice. She had applied to a secular law school in her home state of Minnesota. But she told an evangelical Christian audience earlier this year that her husband had heard about “a new Christian law school” and encouraged her to attend. Records show both enrolled; Marcus Bachmann took classes for one semester toward a master of divinity degree.

In many respects, former professors and students say, O. W. Coburn was just like any secular law school, teaching students the nuts and bolts of torts, property law, contracts, and civil and criminal procedure. “We used the same kind of textbooks they used,” said Tim Harris, the Tulsa County district attorney, who graduated a few years ahead of Mrs. Bachmann. “We used the same Socratic method.”

But where secular law professors tend to analyze court decisions in the context of the Constitution, legislative actions and judicial precedent, professors here prodded students to also consider how biblical principles and Scripture would apply. In interviews, graduates say they infuse their Christian faith into their work in a variety of ways, perhaps counseling couples to avoid a divorce, or encouraging a businessman to honor a contract. Some are active in causes important to conservative Christians, like opposing abortion.

“As a criminal prosecutor, I look at the Ten Commandments — thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not murder,” Mr. Harris, the district attorney, said. “You’ve got law given to Moses by God and we have included that in our scheme of criminal law. We were challenged often to ask: Is there a biblical basis from which this came?”

 

Fight for Acceptance

That did not sit well with the American Bar Association, which at first refused to accredit the school. The association balked at the university’s requirement that students sign an honor code in which they recognized that “our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, is the Whole Man,” and pledged to “follow in his footsteps.” (The wording of the code is slightly altered today.)

“The A.B.A.’s argument was too much emphasis on the Christian aspect and not enough on the law,” said Roger Tuttle, a former professor and dean. The university sued on First Amendment grounds and won in 1981. But that first crop of students like Mrs. Bachmann, he said, “took a real gamble” in enrolling. Had the university lost its accreditation fight, they would have been ineligible to take the bar exam.

Classmates of Mrs. Bachmann recall her as bright, personable and engaged — “a pretty eager, keen student,” said Mark Stewart, a commercial litigator in Toronto. “Real bubbly” and “politically interested,” Mr. Gradel said. But after her second semester, in the spring of 1980, she and Marcus Bachmann left. Mike King, a Tulsa lawyer who was her study partner, said he suspected that she could no longer afford the tuition.

In 1982, Mrs. Bachmann gave birth to her son Lucas, the first of her five biological children, in Winona, Minn. (She eventually took in 23 foster children as well.) By the time she moved back to Tulsa to re-enroll for the 1984-85 academic year, a new professor had joined the faculty: Anita Hill.

Ms. Hill, who would later make headlines when she accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, was hired to address the bar association’s complaints that the faculty was overwhelmingly white and male, Mr. Tuttle said. Though the university would not release Mrs. Bachmann’s transcripts, Lucas Bachmann said he believed that Ms. Hill had been one of his mother’s professors. Ms. Hill, now at Brandeis University, declined to be interviewed.

Now Mrs. Bachmann was juggling motherhood and school. The family lived in graduate student housing, a complex of boxy apartments behind what is now a Wal-Mart. Marcus Bachmann worked as an activities coordinator at a nursing home — “We did a lot of bingo and buffets,” Lucas Bachmann said — while Michele hit the books.

She was on staff at the law review, where her duties included soliciting and editing articles, according to the journal’s editor, H. Wayne House. But her most powerful experience seems to have been her association with Mr. Eidsmoe, a minister, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and author who, she told a Christian audience in March, “had a great influence on me” and “taught me so much about our godly heritage.”

 

A Big Influence

It was Mr. Eidsmoe, she said, who first exposed her to the idea of home schooling, and who introduced her to the writings of David Barton, a self-taught evangelical historian whose organization, Wall Builders, promotes the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. (Last year, Mrs. Bachmann provoked a brief uproar on Capitol Hill when she proposed that Mr. Barton teach classes on the Constitution to incoming Republican freshmen.)

Mr. Eidsmoe, who has since run into controversy over remarks he made to an Alabama secessionist group, declined to be interviewed. Years after Mrs. Bachmann left Oral Roberts, he and Mr. Titus defended Judge Roy S. Moore, the Alabama chief justice who lost his seat for his refusal to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the courthouse. As a Minnesota lawmaker, Mrs. Bachmann took up the cause, boasting that she kept a copy of the Ten Commandments on her office wall.

“They’re teaching children that there is separation of church and state, and I am here to tell you that’s a myth — that’s not true,” she told an evangelical Christian audience while running for Congress in 2006. She went on: “The only reason we’ve been a great nation — guess why? Because at our founding we established everything we did on the lordship of Christ.”

In 1986, Mrs. Bachmann graduated from law school and passed the Minnesota bar. That spring, Oral Roberts University turned its law school over to Christian Broadcasting University, now Regent University, founded by another televangelist, Pat Robertson. The law library was packed up and shipped off to the Regent campus in Virginia Beach. Mr. Titus became Regent’s founding dean.

Mrs. Bachmann went on to get her tax law certificate and join the I.R.S., for five years, handling run-of-the-mill tax cases, which mostly settled out of court. She tried just two cases, including one involving an American Indian who argued that treaties exempted him from paying taxes. (He lost.)

Mr. Titus says he can find a Christian perspective to tax law — “Go back to Romans: 13,” he said. “You only pay the government what the government is due” — although it appears that Mrs. Bachmann took the job mostly to help support her family.

She did not practice law after that; today, the congresswoman’s law license is no longer active. In Tulsa legal circles, O. W. Coburn graduates speak with “with a little tinge of pride” about her, Mr. Gradel said, and perhaps a hint of wistfulness that she does not do more to advertise her time here.

“She doesn’t tout our school, obviously — she touts William and Mary, and you and I can understand why she does that,” he said. “If you run for public office, people say, ‘Where did you go to school?’ They’d like to see that your alma mater is still around.”

    For Bachmann, God and Justice Were Intertwined, NYT, 13.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/us/politics/bachmanns-years-at-oral-roberts-university.html

The Political Pulpit

September 30, 2011
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE STROM

This weekend, hundreds of pastors, including some of the nation’s evangelical leaders, will climb into their pulpits to preach about American politics, flouting a decades-old law that prohibits tax-exempt churches and other charities from campaigning on election issues.

The sermons, on what is called Pulpit Freedom Sunday, essentially represent a form of biblical bait, an effort by some churches to goad the Internal Revenue Service into court battles over the divide between religion and politics.

The Alliance Defense Fund, a nonprofit legal defense group whose founders include James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, sponsors the annual event, which started with 33 pastors in 2008. This year, Glenn Beck has been promoting it, calling for 1,000 religious leaders to sign on and generating additional interest at the beginning of a presidential election cycle.

“There should be no government intrusion in the pulpit,” said the Rev. James Garlow, senior pastor at Skyline Church in La Mesa, Calif., who led preachers in the battle to pass California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage. “The freedom of speech and the freedom of religion promised under the First Amendment means pastors have full authority to say what they want to say.”

Mr. Garlow said he planned to inveigh against same-sex marriage, abortion and other touchstone issues that social conservatives oppose, and some ministers may be ready to encourage parishioners to vote only for those candidates who adhere to the same views or values.

“I tell them that as followers of Christ, you wouldn’t vote for someone who was against what God said in his word,” Mr. Garlow said. “I will, in effect, oppose several candidates and — de facto — endorse others.”

Two Republican candidates in particular, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, would presumably benefit from some pulpit politics on Sunday, since they have been courting Christian conservatives this year.

Participating ministers plan to send tapes of their sermons to the I.R.S., effectively providing the agency with evidence it could use to take them to court.

But if history is any indication, the I.R.S. may continue to steer clear of the taunts.

“It’s frustrating,” said Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel at Alliance Defense. “The law is on the books but they don’t enforce it, leaving churches in limbo.”

Supporters of the law are equally vexed by the tax agency’s perceived inaction. “We have grave concerns over the current inability of the I.R.S. to enforce the federal tax laws applicable to churches,” a group of 13 ministers in Ohio wrote in a letter to the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, in July.

Marcus Owens, the lawyer representing the Ohio ministers, warned that the I.R.S.’s failure to pursue churches for politicking violations would encourage more donations to support their efforts, taking further advantage of the new leeway given to advocacy groups under the Supreme Court’s decision last year in the Citizens United case.

Lois G. Lerner, director of the agency’s Exempt Organizations Division, said in an e-mail that “education has been and remains the first goal of the I.R.S.’s program on political activity by tax-exempt organizations.” The agency has posted “guidance” on what churches can and cannot do on its Web site.

The agency says it has continued to do audits of some churches, but those are not disclosed. Mr. Stanley, Mr. Owens and other lawyers say they are virtually certain it has no continuing audits of church political activity, an issue that has been a source of contention in recent elections.

The alliance and many other advocates regard a 1954 law prohibiting churches and their leaders from engaging in political campaigning as a violation of the First Amendment and wish to see the issue played out in court. The organization points to the rich tradition of political activism by churches in some of the nation’s most controversial battles, including the pre-Revolutionary war opposition to taxation by the British, slavery and child labor.

The legislation, sponsored by Lyndon Baines Johnson, then a senator, muzzled all charities in regards to partisan politics, and its impact on churches may have been an unintended consequence. At the time, he was locked in a battle with two nonprofit groups that were loudly calling him a closet communist.

Thirty years later, a group of senators led by Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, passed legislation to try to rein in the agency a bit in doing some audits. While audits of churches continued over the years, they appeared to have slowed down considerably after a judge rebuffed the agency’s actions in a case involving the Living Word Christian Center and a supposed endorsement of Ms. Bachmann in 2007. The I.R.S. had eliminated positions through a reorganization, and therefore, according to the judge, had not followed the law when determining who could authorize such audits.

Sarah Hall Ingram, the I.R.S. commissioner responsible for the division that oversees nonprofit groups, said the agency was still investigating such cases. “We have churches under audit,” Ms. Hall Ingram said. “Maybe they just aren’t the clients of the people you’re talking to.”

None of the churches involved in previous pulpit Sunday events have received anything beyond a form letter from the I.R.S. thanking them for the tapes, Mr. Stanley said. “They haven’t done anything to clarify what the law is and what pastors can and can’t say,“ he said.

Mr. Owens, the lawyer representing the Ohio churches, said that Ms. Lerner had told a meeting of state charity regulators in late 2009 that the agency was no longer doing such audits. “I have not heard of a single church audit since then,” Mr. Owens said.

He said the agency could have churches under audit for civil fraud or criminal investigation. “I know of at least one of those,” he said.

Ms. Lerner said she could not recall what she had said at the meeting. Grant Williams, an I.R.S. spokesman, declined to describe the type of church audits the agency was doing or their number.

Last year, the I.R.S. also quietly ceased its Political Activities Compliance Initiative, under which it issued reports in 2004 and 2006 detailing its findings of illegal political campaigning by charities, including churches.

Paul Streckfus, a former I.R.S. official who publishes a newsletter about legal and tax developments in the tax-exempt world, said the reports had served as an alert. “They also gave us some idea of how big the problem of noncompliance actually was, and that the I.R.S. was actually doing something about it,” Mr. Streckfus said.

Mr. Garlow said he planned to outline where the candidates stood on various issues and then discuss what the Bible said about those issues, calling on church members to stand by their religious principles.

“The Bible says render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” he said. “But Caesar is demanding more and more of what was once considered God’s matter, and pastors have been bullied and intimidated enough.”

    The Political Pulpit, NYT, 30.9.2011
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/business/flouting-the-law-pastors-will-take-on-politics.html

Philip Hannan, 98, Dies; New Orleans Archbishop

September 30, 2011
The New York Times
By DENNIS HEVESI

Retired Archbishop Philip M. Hannan, a confidant to President John F. Kennedy and the leader of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans for more than 20 years, died on Thursday at a hospice in New Orleans. The archbishop, who delivered the eulogy for President Kennedy in 1963, was 98.

The archdiocese confirmed his death, saying he had been in declining health for several years.

It was in the late 1940s when the archbishop, Father Hannan at the time, met Kennedy, then a young Democratic congressman from Massachusetts. A priest had come to Kennedy’s office, unannounced, insisting that as a Catholic the congressman had to defend the church in Mexico against opponents in the Mexican government.

Kennedy was irate — until a colleague put him in touch with Father Hannan, who was then an assistant chancellor in the Archdiocese of Washington. Father Hannan assured Kennedy that the priest had violated protocol by directly approaching a member of Congress, and he promised to speak to the priest. That was the start of a long friendship.

“When Kennedy had a question about how politics and church teaching intersected, he would give Father Hannan a call,” said Peter Finney Jr., editor of The Clarion Herald, the New Orleans archdiocese’s newspaper. The issues they touched on included race relations and tensions between tenets faith and Constitutional mandates.

A degree of secrecy was a must. “For it to be known that Kennedy was consulting at all with a Catholic bishop would have been politically harmful,” Mr. Finney said.

On Nov. 25, 1963, three days after Kennedy’s assassination, at the request of Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady, Bishop Hannan delivered the eulogy at the president’s funeral Mass in St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington. St. Matthew’s had been the bishop’s boyhood church.

The eulogy was essentially a reprise of the president’s favorite verses from scripture and excerpts from his inaugural speech.

“He decided to do that because he thought Kennedy’s words were so uplifting that there was little that he could improve upon,” Mr. Finney said.

On June 8, 1968, three days after the assassination of the president’s brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Archbishop Hannan presided over his burial at Arlington National Cemetery. And 26 years later he returned to Arlington to lead prayers for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had died of cancer. In 1964, he officiated at the reburial of two Kennedy infants at Arlington so that their remains could be near those of their father. It was with a blend of social activism and conservatism that he presided over the Archdiocese of New Orleans from 1965 to 1988.

In 1965, as the Second Vatican Council was modernizing the church, he unsuccessfully pushed for a change in church policy in support of nuclear armament by Western powers because, as the petition he wrote said, it “has preserved freedom for a very large portion of the world.”

In New Orleans, where public swimming pools were not open to African-Americans, he integrated the pool at the archdiocese’s Notre Dame Seminary. He also established after-school programs for children of all faiths at neighborhood centers throughout the archdiocese. He secured federal support to build nearly 3,000 affordable housing units for seniors and poor people. He created one of the largest food banks for poor people in the country. And he set up a hospice for AIDS patients.

Philip Matthew Hannan was born in Washington on May 20, 1913, one of eight children of Patrick and Lillian Hannan. His father was a plumber. The future archbishop earned a licentiate in theology from the Gregorian University in Rome and a doctorate in canon law from Catholic University of America before being ordained in 1939.

In 1942, he enlisted to become an Army chaplain and was assigned to the 505th Parachute Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division. In 1945, he helped liberate a concentration camp at Wöbbelin, Germany.

Archbishop Hannan is survived by his brother, Jerry.

On Saturday, he received absolution for whatever sins he had committed in life from the current archbishop, Gregory M. Aymond.

“Sounds good to me,” he told Archbishop Aymond.

    Philip Hannan, 98, Dies; New Orleans Archbishop, NYT, 30.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/us/archbishop-philip-m-hannan-dies-at-98.html

Up From the Ashes, a Symbol That Hate Does Not Win

September 25, 2011
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY

SPRINGFIELD, Mass.

In the hours after the 2008 election of the country’s first African-American president, three white men crept up to a predominantly African-American church being built here in Springfield, blessed it corruptly with gasoline — and faded into the fresh November night.

Soon the church’s pastor, Bishop Bryant Robinson Jr., was at the crime scene’s flickering edge, weary, saddened. Moments before, he had been anticipating a new chapter in American history, and now here was one page, stuck. He didn’t need an investigation to tell him this was a racist act of arson. He is a black man with snow in his hair; he knew.

As he watched the new home for the Macedonia Church of God in Christ burn to the ground, Bishop Robinson imagined only one response: Rebuild.

Now, nearly three years later, that election night’s crisp air of possibility has all but faded in Washington, where the first African-American president, Barack Obama, struggles with grinding wars, a broken economy and spirit-killing partisanship. But here in Springfield, the smoke has lifted to reveal a new, 20,000-square-foot church standing on top of an old crime scene, its sanctuary walls painted the color of a clear blue sky.

Resting in one of its pews the other day, a silver cane by his side, Bishop Robinson, 74, said that this building on Tinkham Road reflects the ever-unfolding American story of race, in Washington, Springfield, everywhere. “The hatred in our country,” he said. “And the goodness in our country.”

The election night burning of a New England church became national news. A “This Land” column shared how the pastor’s father had left segregated Alabama, gathered together a congregation in Springfield, and bought an old downtown church to use as a house of worship; how his eldest son and successor, Bryant, worked for years to raise the money to build a new church on the city’s outskirts; and how, when it burned down, he just knew that racism had fueled the fire.

Now, sitting in a pew, Bishop Robinson referred to another part of family history. How, in Emelle, Ala., on July 4, 1930, his grandfather and uncles found themselves in an argument with a white store owner over a car battery. How that dispute escalated into a violent, hate-filled mob scene that left several dead, white and black, including a pregnant black woman and the bishop’s Uncle Esau — who was lynched.

So, you see, Bishop Robinson just knew.

Two months after the fire, three white men in their 20s were charged with burning down the church to express their rage at the thought of a black president. Two pleaded guilty, and the third was convicted after trial, in a case that The Republican newspaper of Springfield described as a “blot on the whole city.”

“Unfortunately, it was a confirmation of my experiences as an African-American,” Bishop Robinson said, adding: “My faith teaches me to forgive, and I forgive them. But I cannot be accepting of their behavior. I cannot be victimized by hatred. So I have to move forward.”

In moving forward, he and his congregation of a few hundred found outstretched hands. Donations arrived from around the country, while volunteers cleared the debris and carted away the ruined foundation. But the journey had its peaks and valleys.

For example, its leaders applied for federal assistance under the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996, which was enacted after a spate of house-of-worship burnings. They filled out a checklist that asked, with bureaucratic bluntness, what the arson had destroyed:

Sanctuary (yes). Choir seating (yes). Fellowship hall (yes). Pastor’s office (yes).

The Macedonia church eventually won the very last government loan guarantee available under the law, which was good. But it had trouble securing a loan for the government to back, which was bad.

That is, until Gov. Deval Patrick addressed the Urban League of Springfield in February 2010. He explained that the church had just learned that day that its bank was not inclined to provide a vital construction loan, even though the church had already paid off the loan related to its first attempt at a new home.

“I know that in this audience tonight are people who care about Macedonia,” Mr. Patrick had said. “Are people who understand we need this church to rise as a symbol that hate doesn’t win. And I know that there are people here who are in the finance field or know people who are, who can rally to help this very, very worthy cause.”

Soon the church had the $1.8 million bank loan it needed. And construction began in earnest.

Along the way, a group called the National Coalition for Burned Churches offered rotating teams of volunteers. Here came some Catholics from suburban Chicago. Here came some Methodists and Jews from Northern California. Here came some students from Harvard, and some Congregationalists from the town of Millbury.

A few of these volunteers left behind handwritten messages on the walls concealed by the church hallway’s dropped ceiling — a form of spiritual graffiti, you might say. “His love endures forever.” “May God dwell in this house forever.”

There is still work to do; the landscaping, for example, will have to wait until spring. And the need to pay for everything remains; the church, Bishop Robinson admits, is in perpetual fund-raising mode. No matter: what has risen is a large, simple structure of wonder.

A sanctuary — yes — with 60 wooden pews purchased from a North Carolina business called Affordable Church Furniture. Choir seating — yes — with many of the chairs donated by a Lutheran church. A fellowship hall — yes — with more than enough room for wedding receptions and funeral repasts.

And — yes— a pastor’s office, on the very spot where gasoline was poured on that hopeful, horrible November night. “The guys came from those woods,” Bradford Martin Jr., the church’s indefatigable lawyer, said as he led a tour through the building. “They busted in here. They splashed it on the outside and they splashed it on the inside.”

On Saturday’s misty morning, members of the Macedonia congregation gathered in their new home for a rousing dedication. Dressed in their finest, they prayed and sang and swayed.

Here was the governor of Massachusetts, and the mayor of Springfield, and a police officer who worked on the arson investigation, and, all the way from California, Charles E. Blake Sr., the presiding bishop and chief apostle of the Church of God in Christ.

And here, of course, was Bishop Robinson, steadied by his cane and giving thanks for this celebration that would not, could not, be denied.

    Up From the Ashes, a Symbol That Hate Does Not Win, NYT, 25.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/us/church-rebuilds-after-2008-election-night-arson.html

Bishop Walter C. Righter, 87, Dies; Faced Heresy Trial

September 17, 2011
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

Walter C. Righter, an Episcopal bishop who in 1996 was brought to trial and absolved of a charge of heresy for having ordained an actively gay man as a deacon, died on Sept. 11 at his home outside Pittsburgh. He was 87.

The cause was chronic lung disease, his wife, Nancy, said.

Bishop Righter’s trial was a major public skirmish in a battle over homosexuality that has roiled the Episcopal Church for decades and continues to be a source of conflict, both internally and between the church and its worldwide parent body, the Anglican Communion.

The heresy charge was brought against Bishop Righter by a group of conservative bishops alarmed that increasing numbers of gay men and lesbians were receiving ordination, despite a resolution adopted by church leaders in 1979 declaring it “not appropriate for this church to ordain a practicing homosexual.”

Barry L. Stopfel, the openly gay man ordained by Bishop Righter in 1990 as a deacon, the office just below priesthood, was said to be one of dozens of gay and lesbian priests and deacons ordained since the resolution had passed. Since 2003, the church has elected two openly gay bishops.

At the time of the ordination of Deacon Stopfel, Bishop Righter, the former bishop of Iowa, was working in semiretirement as an assistant to the bishop of Newark, an outspoken supporter of ordaining gay men and lesbians. His accusers brought their charges against him five years later, just before the statute of limitations for violating church rules was set to expire.

Bishop Righter reacted with a mix of indignation and insouciant humor to the charge of heresy. It was only the second time in the history of the Episcopal Church that a bishop had faced such a charge.

“Basically, my response is, it’s absurd,” he told The New York Times. “I’m not guilty of heresy. There isn’t anything in the church’s canons or traditions that says you can’t ordain gay people.”

Then 71 and living in retirement in New Hampshire, he scolded his accusers, saying: “I’m retired. I don’t have a secretary. I don’t have a budget. I don’t have a travel allowance. So theoretically, I’m an easy mark.”

To indicate that he would not be such an easy mark, Bishop Righter soon obtained a set of vanity license plates that said “HRETIC.” They remained affixed to his Subaru Legacy throughout the church trial that led to his being absolved of violating “core doctrine,” and for years afterward.

Walter Cameron Righter was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 23, 1923, the elder of two sons of Richard and Dorothy Righter. His father and his grandfather were executives for U.S. Steel. After serving in the infantry during World War II, he studied at Yale Divinity School and was ordained in 1951 as a priest in the Diocese of Pittsburgh.

Shortly after being elected bishop of the Diocese of Iowa in 1972, Bishop Righter cast the deciding vote at a diocesan convention in favor of the ordination of women.

In a statement issued Monday, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the chief ecumenical officer of the church, called Bishop Righter “a faithful and prophetic servant.” She praised his “steadfast willingness to help the church move beyond prejudices into new possibilities.”

Besides his wife, he is survived by a son, Richard, of Keene, N.H., and a daughter, Becky Richardson of Urbandale, Iowa; and two stepchildren, David DeGroot and Katherine Gallogly, both of Oceanside, N.Y. Four grandchildren and his brother, Richard, also survive.

In interviews and in a 1998 memoir, “A Pilgrim’s Way,” Bishop Righter said that while he was pleased to have become something of a hero to gay men and lesbians in his church, he hoped he would not be remembered for what he considered to be an essentially political episode in his life, the heresy charge.

He was most proud of his pastoral work. “I always got a real charge from helping someone with a personal discovery,” he said. “I really enjoyed working one on one.”

    Bishop Walter C. Righter, 87, Dies; Faced Heresy Trial, NYT, 17.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/us/bishop-walter-c-righter-87-dies-faced-heresy-trial.html

Small Leaps of Faith

September 3, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

When Betsy Wiggins opened her front door and saw the woman in a full black face veil coming up her flower-lined walkway, she wondered if she had done the right thing.

It was 11 days after 9/11, and Mrs. Wiggins, a speech pathologist and the wife of a Methodist minister in Syracuse, had called the local mosque and invited a Muslim woman she did not know over for coffee.

She and the Muslim woman, Danya Wellmon, a medical lab technician, sat in the Wigginses’ breakfast nook for hours and talked about their faith, their careers, their children — and their mutual despair over the terrorist attacks. They bonded that day, and decided that they should start a broader discussion. As a next step, Ms. Wellmon invited nine Muslim women, and Ms. Wiggins invited nine others (Christians, Jews, one Buddhist and an Ismaili Muslim) to join them for a potluck dinner by the big stone fireplace in the living room.

In Syracuse, as in countless other communities, 9/11 set off a phenomenon that may seem counterintuitive in an era of increasingly vocal Islamophobia. A terrorist attack that provoked widespread distrust and hostility toward Muslims also brought Muslims in from the margins of American religious life — into living rooms, churches, synagogues and offices where they had never set foot before.

American Christians and Jews reached out to better understand Islam and — they will admit — to find out firsthand whether the Muslims in their midst were friends or foes. Muslims also reached out, newly conscious of their insularity, aware of the suspicions of their neighbors, determined that the ambassadors of Islam should not be the terrorists.

“Before 9/11 we were somewhat timid,” said Saad Sahraoui, president of the Islamic Society of Central New York, the largest mosque in Syracuse, when the attacks occurred in 2001. “We just kept to ourselves, just concerned with our families and our children.

“Sept. 11 changed the whole thing,” he said, and hesitated before adding, worried it could be misconstrued, “but the change was in some ways positive.”

In the months and years after 9/11, in communities large and small, mosques opened their doors for Friday prayers and iftar dinners to break the Ramadan fast. Churches and synagogues deluged imams with speaking requests. Muslim, Jewish and Christian performers hit the clubs on comedy tours.

“There are so many interfaith councils and projects now, we can’t even keep track,” said Bettina Gray, chairwoman of the North American Interfaith Network. “From the Muslim side, there’s more incentive to work with the broader community, and there’s more receptiveness from the Christian and Jewish side.”

In Syracuse, like most other places, the road to interfaith understanding was full of bumps. When Ms. Wellmon tried finding nine Muslim women to join her, she said she had to “browbeat” some of them into it. As a white convert, Ms. Wellmon did not find it a stretch to have coffee with Mrs. Wiggins. But the other women in the mosque were immigrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and were not accustomed to speaking with outsiders about their religion.

Also, they were scared. After 9/11, Muslims in head scarves were harassed on the streets. The Islamic Society in Syracuse received threatening telephone messages. Thirty miles to the north, an eclectic Sikh temple called Gobind Sadan was burned down by four teenagers who thought that the turbaned worshippers were Muslims and that the temple’s sign said “Go Bin Laden.”

“There was this fear, all this backlash was coming at us,” Ms. Wellmon said. “But I had built a relationship with the women in the mosque early on, and they knew I was not going to put them into a situation that was hostile.”

They began by talking about the Koran and Islamic rituals, but they soon found themselves in intimate discussions about how they pray, what they believe about birth and death, why they do or don’t wear head scarves. It was hard for the group’s feminists to reconcile their assumptions about Islamic oppression of women with the room full of dynamic, assertive, educated Muslim women.

“I think we had seven meetings about the veil,” Mrs. Wiggins said. “We finally got over the veil.”

The group outgrew Mrs. Wiggins’s living room and took on the name Women Transcending Boundaries. Soon, the group was organizing international dinners to raise money for girls’ schools in Pakistan. Members volunteered to teach English and sewing skills at a center for immigrants and refugees. They organized a community walk that they called Journey to the Tent of Abraham, with stops along the way at churches, a synagogue and a mosque. They turned a vacant lot into a garden where immigrants from Myanmar, Vietnam and Burundi grow vegetables.

“We didn’t want to just have tea and crumpets,” Mrs. Wiggins said. “We wanted to do something positive.”

When Ms. Wellmon’s 21-year-old daughter, Sara, drove off a decrepit bridge and drowned in the icy Erie Canal in February 2003, women of many faiths filled the funeral at the mosque.

But their relationships were soon tested when state and federal agents descended on Muslim homes and businesses in the Syracuse area and questioned 150 people. The raid resulted in the indictments of Dr. Rafil A. Dhafir, a Muslim oncologist who employed Ms. Wellmon, and three others on charges of sending funds to Iraq in violation of the embargo.

At the trial, women from the interfaith group joined the doctor’s supporters in the courtroom. When he was convicted, on charges of Medicare fraud and misappropriating funds from a charity he ran, the community was divided.

Some Muslim members of Women Transcending Boundaries say they felt betrayed when the group decided not to co-sponsor Muslim Solidarity Day a few years later on the anniversary of the raid. The women who objected to sponsoring the event said it had become too political and even anti-F.B.I., and by then the group had decided to avoid taking political stands.

“I was optimistic after 9/11 that we can educate people, but now I feel we are giving our rights away in the name of security,” said Magda Bayoumi, a Muslim founder of the women’s group who has shifted her energies to other endeavors.

This weekend, on the anniversary of the attacks, Women Transcending Boundaries is conducting the second annual A-OK! Weekend, a mobilization of volunteers in hundreds of projects all over the city. Women’s interfaith groups have also organized A-OK! weekends in Detroit and Orange County, Calif.

The undertaking required hours of meetings, thousands of e-mails and plenty of arguing. In the middle of an interminable debate over the logo design, Joy Pople, the Syracuse group’s vice president, had an epiphany.

“I didn’t even look around the room and say to myself, you’re Muslim and you’re Christian,” she said. “I just forgot.”

    Small Leaps of Faith, NYT, 3.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/us/sept-11-reckoning/interfaith.html

Don’t Fear Islamic Law in America

September 2, 2011
The New York Times
By ELIYAHU STERN

New Haven

MORE than a dozen American states are considering outlawing aspects of Shariah law. Some of these efforts would curtail Muslims from settling disputes over dietary laws and marriage through religious arbitration, while others would go even further in stigmatizing Islamic life: a bill recently passed by the Tennessee General Assembly equates Shariah with a set of rules that promote “the destruction of the national existence of the United States.”

Supporters of these bills contend that such measures are needed to protect the country against homegrown terrorism and safeguard its Judeo-Christian values. The Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has said that “Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.”

This is exactly wrong. The crusade against Shariah undermines American democracy, ignores our country’s successful history of religious tolerance and assimilation, and creates a dangerous divide between America and its fastest-growing religious minority.

The suggestion that Shariah threatens American security is disturbingly reminiscent of the accusation, in 19th-century Europe, that Jewish religious law was seditious. In 1807, Napoleon convened an assembly of rabbinic authorities to address the question of whether Jewish law prevented Jews from being loyal citizens of the republic. (They said that it did not.)

Fear that Jewish law bred disloyalty was not limited to political elites; leading European philosophers also entertained the idea. Kant argued that the particularistic nature of “Jewish legislation” made Jews “hostile to all other peoples.” And Hegel contended that Jewish dietary rules and other Mosaic laws barred Jews from identifying with their fellow Prussians and called into question their ability to be civil servants.

The German philosopher Bruno Bauer offered Jews a bargain: renounce Jewish law and be granted full legal rights. He insisted that, otherwise, laws prohibiting work on the Sabbath made it impossible for Jews to be true citizens. (Bauer conveniently ignored the fact that many fully observant Jews violated the Sabbath to fight in the Prussian wars against Napoleon.)

During that era, Christianity was seen as either a universally valid basis of the state or a faith that harmoniously coexisted with the secular law of the land. Conversely, Judaism was seen as a competing legal system — making Jews at best an unassimilable minority, at worst a fifth column. It was not until the late 19th century that all Jews were granted full citizenship in Western Europe (and even then it was short lived).

Most Americans today would be appalled if Muslims suffered from legally sanctioned discrimination as Jews once did in Europe. Still, there are signs that many Americans view Muslims in this country as disloyal. A recent Gallup poll found that only 56 percent of Protestants think that Muslims are loyal Americans.

This suspicion and mistrust is no doubt fueled by the notion that American Muslims are akin to certain extreme Muslim groups in the Middle East and in Europe. But American Muslims are a different story. They are natural candidates for assimilation. They are demographically the youngest religious group in America, and most of their parents don’t even come from the Middle East (the majority have roots in Southeast Asia). A recent Pew Research Center poll found that Muslim Americans exhibit the highest level of integration among major American religious groups, expressing greater degrees of tolerance toward people of other faiths than do Protestants, Catholics or Jews.

Given time, American Muslims, like all other religious minorities before them, will adjust their legal and theological traditions, if necessary, to accord with American values.

America’s exceptionalism has always been its ability to transform itself — economically, culturally and religiously. In the 20th century, we thrived by promoting a Judeo-Christian ethic, respecting differences and accentuating commonalities among Jews, Catholics and Protestants. Today, we need an Abrahamic ethic that welcomes Islam into the religious tapestry of American life.

Anti-Shariah legislation fosters a hostile environment that will stymie the growth of America’s tolerant strand of Islam. The continuation of America’s pluralistic religious tradition depends on the ability to distinguish between punishing groups that support terror and blaming terrorist activities on a faith that represents roughly a quarter of the world’s population.

Eliyahu Stern, an assistant professor of religious studies and history at Yale, is the author of the forthcoming “The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism.”

    Don’t Fear Islamic Law in America, NYT, 2.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/opinion/dont-fear-islamic-law-in-america.html