Interfaith Religious News Service

Tue, Apr. 29, 2008 Posted: 14:53:49 PM EST

Reaching the lost has taken on new meaning for the 16 million Southern Baptists who may be on the brink of decline. [Read more →]

The liberal end of the Society of Friends has long had members who denied God’s existence or Jesus’ divinity. Now hundreds of pagans call Quakerism home. Matthew Streib, Religion News Service
When his partner died in 2004, Kevin-Douglas Olive reached a crossroads in his faith. Even though he had been a Quaker for almost two decades and put his trust in Jesus, he began to explore other ways of tapping into the divine.

“I had this experience of (my partner) after death, and he spoke to me and woke me up out of my sleep,” Olive says. “It freaked me out, because I really didn’t believe in that stuff; … my faith in God had disappeared when my partner died.” [Read more →]

JERUSALEM (AP) - Leaders of Ireland’s main Christian churches were barred from praying at Jerusalem’s Western Wall Thursday because they refused to remove the crosses they were wearing. [Read more →]

April 25, 2008
Hundreds of Chileans announced that they will leave the Catholic Church on April 29, in protest of the Vatican involvement with a court’s anti-contraception ruling. Chile’s Constitutional Court outlawed President Michelle Bachelet’s free emergency contraception distribution program on April 18. The court ruled that free distribution of emergency contraception was unconstitutional. According to Women’s eNews the court ruled that emergency contraception could “endanger a recently fertilized egg.” [Read more →]

 
5/2/08 
Recently, as we were returning from a church in Ohio, we were reminded that God is always watching over us. We had stopped in Bowling Green, KY, to get something to eat. As we were trying to make it back to I-65, we were repeatedly delayed. Once we finally got onto the interstate, we encountered the most horrific accident I have ever witnessed. Apparently, a large truck hit a motorcycle. Without going into graphic detail, it was a horrible scene. The accident had just happened, and neither the police nor the ambulance had arrived at the scene. Almost immediately we knew God was the one who delayed us. Otherwise we would have likely been right there.  [Read more →]

May 3, 2008
(CBS) There have always been “haves” and “have-nots” in the United States, but over the past three decades, the gap between them has gotten a lot wider, statistics from congressional numbers crunchers show. 
 
According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, income for the bottom half of American households rose six percent since 1979 but, through 2005, the income of the top one percent skyrocketed - by 228 percent.  [Read more →]

HOUMA, La.—
Up the bayou. Down the bayou. Across the bayou.

For a visitor to this stretch of Louisiana, those are the directions you quickly learn while traveling the waterways and roadways of this southeastern region of this Southern state.

For those at home in the bayou, no weathervane is needed to guide you. No compass readings are required. There is the water’s landmark, the signpost of the bayou to tell you which way to drive, which way to travel.

Louisiana may be best known as the home of Mardi Gras and the football Saints, as a stirring pot of jazz and blues and zesty cuisine. Thanks to hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it may forever be the memory stick for disaster, for images of broken levees and a stifling Superdome, and for tales of heroism and despair in now-familiar places like the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

But it is also Indian Country, land of the mostly forgotten. It is home to the United Houma Nation, nearly half of whose members were displaced up and down the bayou, their homes battered by hurricane winds or flooded by avalanches of water. [Read more →]

4/17/08 
Would you visit a church called The Holy Assembly of the Fire-Baptized Brethren? Probably not, because it sounds elitist, self-righteous and really old-fashioned. Your unchurched neighbors would most likely drive a few extra miles to avoid passing the place. 
Yet many church names today sound almost as strange and unwelcoming. We insist on using religious vocabulary from previous centuries to define ourselves, and then we wonder why people consider us out of touch.  [Read more →]

By Cary McMullen  THE LEDGER 
FORT WORTH, Texas

Advocates of gay rights wonder whether this might be the year when the United Methodist Church drops its sanction against homosexuality. A proposal that may be voted on today at the church’s General Conference would make the 7.9 million-member church the largest to withhold moral judgment about gay sexual activity. [Read more →]

by Justin Marville

Under the theme Building The Community Through Caring, Sharing, the Shorey Village New Testament Church of God has been stressing to its members the importance of supporting the community through farming.

Now the residents of the district are literally reaping the benefits. [Read more →]

How The Religious Right Uses The ‘Prosperity Gospel’ To Win Foot Soldiers And Continue Its ‘Culture War’
Researcher Sarah Posner has been following the Religious Right for several years and writes a blog called The FundamentaList for The American Prospect. Her new book, God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters (PoliPointPress, 2008) examines the role advocates of the “prosperity gospel” play in the Religious Right.

16/04/08 “ICH” — - Posner talked recently with Church & State about her research and the status of the Religious Right today. [Read more →]

By Darrell Ehrlick | Lee Newspapers
WINONA, Minn. — Kathy Redig’s most profound act of faith might be the one that gets her condemned, if not excommunicated from the church she’s been a part of her whole life.
She claims the Roman Catholic Church, after May 4, may not claim her.
That’s when Redig plans to be ordained in Winona by the Roman Catholic Womenpriests, a worldwide organization that has publicly ordained 23 priests and four bishops since 2002.
But Redig isn’t going ahead with ordination to put herself at odds with church leaders and church law. She says she wants to bring more people to the church she loves. [Read more →]

By Martin King  Apr 9, 2008 
 
CARLINVILLE, Ill. (BP)–Carlinville Southern Baptist Church “can do everything we want in the new facility except use it for worship,” the church’s First Amendment attorney, Daniel Dalton, said.
 
Dalton made the statement following a federal court ruling allowing the Illinois church to remodel a former Wal-Mart to accommodate the growing congregation. [Read more →]

April 14, 2008 
 

 
By Andrew Wolfson

Fourteen-year-old Michael Ryan may attend St. Xavier High School, despite the objections of his atheist father, an Oldham County family court judge has ruled.
 
In a decision made public today, Judge Tim Feeley said he was persuaded that it is in Michael’s best interest to attend St. X, in part because that’s where he wants to go.  [Read more →]

by Jim Lobe 
WASHINGTON, Apr 15 (IPS) - A new group of prominent U.S. Jews who believe that the so-called “Israel Lobby” has been dominated for too long by neo-conservatives and other Likud-oriented hawks has launched a new organisation to help fund political candidates who favour a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a stronger U.S. role in achieving it.
Almost two years in the making, the “J Street” project plans to spend some 1.5 million dollars — about half of which has been pledged to date — in its first year of operation, a portion of which will go to supporting half a dozen Congressional campaigns for candidates who share its pro-peace and pro-Israel views.  [Read more →]

The participation of emergent church leaders in an interfaith dialogue raised flags for some conservative Christians who have been concerned over a growing cooperation of emergent church leaders with New Spirituality/New Age leaders. [Read more →]

Analysis by Bill Berkowitz* 
OAKLAND, California, Apr 15 (IPS) - During a recent appearance at the National Religious Broadcasters conference, Dr. James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, expressed deep concern about the future of the conservative Christian movement he helped build and define.
“The question is, will the younger generation heed the call?” he asked. “Who will defend the unborn child in the years to come?… Who’s going to fight for the institution of marriage, which is on the ropes today?”  [Read more →]

By RAY HENRY, Associated Press Writer Tue Apr 15, 7:02 PM ET 
Gay couples had to struggle mightily to win the right to marry or form civil unions. Now, some are finding that breaking up is hard to do, too. [Read more →]

By Agencies
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/6998
14 Apr 2008
In advance of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the US, three prominent gay Catholics have urged the pontiff to enter into a dialogue with lesbian and gay Catholics.

They addressed the pontiff through open statements about their lives, loves, and hopes for the church at a press conference at the end of last week. [Read more →]

From the Los Angeles Times

The exiled Tibetan leader says dialogue can make enemies into friends. He hopes for an end to nuclear weapons. [Read more →]