Daily Breeze, Los Angeles: "After a three-hour disci-plinary council meeting on Sunday in Canberra, Austra-lia, Simon Southerton, author of Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA and the Book of Mormon, was informed his relationship with his religion of 30 years would be officially severed, Southerton said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. Southerton was charged by church authorities with adultery but finally excommuni-cated for 'having an inappropriate relationship with a wo-man,' he said....The Southertons have since reconciled, and Jane Southerton testified on behalf of her husband. Southerton said he refused to discuss his personal life with church leaders...instead asking them why he was not answering to charges of apostasy for having widely published on the Internet and in his book his doubts about the church and his beliefs about DNA science."

RNS via Beliefnet: "Back when Jack Kenny was a good Catholic boy, he was taught to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. So when he wrote a TV show about a troubled Episcopal priest, he made Jesus his main character's best friend. In Kenny's 'The Book of Daniel,' which NBC just picked up for midseason, Aidan Quinn plays Connecticut-bred Daniel Webster. Daniel is a good minister and a good man, but that's not always enough to deal with his life. He's addicted to Vicodin. His wife, Judith, has frozen inside since one of their sons died of leukemia. His son, Peter, is gay. His daughter, Grace, is dealing marijuana to raise extra cash. And in moments of great stress, Jesus (played by "Deadwood" alum Garret Dillahunt) turns up ...to offer his counsel.”

Salt Lake City Tribune: "In the lawsuit, Summum al-leges the denial of its request to put up the Seven Aph-orisms in the park at 100 North and 100 East counters previous rulings. In two of them, handed down in 1997 and 2002, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver agreed that Salt Lake County and Ogden City had created a forum for free expression by allowing the erection of a Ten Commandments monument on govern-ment property. The same standard applies to Pleasant Grove, Summum contends in its suit....'The rights of plaintiff Summum are violated when the defendants give preference and endorsement to one particular set of reli-gious beliefs by allowing the Ten Commandments mon-ument to remain in a public park...and disallow a similar display of the religious tenets of Summum,' the suit says."

AP's Richard Ostling: "The new one-volume, 628-page encyclopedia (Facts on File, $75) is an invaluable re-source for small libraries and history buffs. Protestant-ism is the sort of dizzyingly complex phenomenon that most needs an encyclopedia to make sense of things, yet for years there was none, despite such works cov-ering Catholicism, Judaism and world religions. Amaz-ingly, the new Protestant encyclopedia was written by only one author, the Rev. J. Gordon Melton, America's premier fact-finder and trivia-monger on religions large and small. Melton's California-based Institute for the Study of American Religion continually collects data on new religions that crop up. He profiles them in his En-cyclopedia of American Religions, a...volume with am-ple sects appeal. The latest (Thomson Gale, $305) depicts 2,630 U.S. and Canadian faith groups."

Alan Wolfe in Slate: “Feldman proposes that...[r]eligion has always played a symbolic role in our public life. It did, for example, in the generic Christianity that once uni-ted Catholics and Protestants and then again in the in-vented Judeo-Christian tradition that brought in those who followed the Hebrew Bible. Let it do so once more, Feld-man concludes. No one is really harmed when Ameri-cans wish each other 'Merry Christmas' instead of ‘Hap-py Holidays.’ At the same time...we ought to revitalize separation of church and state as the Framers under-stood it. To guarantee freedom of conscience, no one should be compelled to pay for a quasi-establishment of religion, such as public funding for a faith-based charity or subsidies to religious schools. Legal secularists win on questions of money, while values evangelicals win on questions of symbols.”

By Rob Moll: "Feminists for Life sees itself as an exten-sion of the first wave of American feminists who sought voting rights for women to, among other things, protect their children and pass anti-abortion legislation. 'Without known exception, the early American feminists condemn-ed abortion in the strongest possible terms,' Foster says in her anthologized speech, 'The Feminist Case Against Abortion.' 'The early feminists understood that, much like today, women resorted to abortion because they were abandoned or pressured by boyfriends, husbands, and parents and lacked financial resources to have a baby on their own. 'Ironically, the anti-abortion laws that early fem-inists worked so hard to enact to protect women and chil-dren were the very ones destroyed by the Roe v. Wade decision 100 years later...hailed by the National Organi-zation for Women as [emancipating] women.'"  

In Town Hall: "a transgendered individual is a person of one sex who dresses (or otherwise behaves) as a mem-ber of the other sex—actions that directly conflict with core Judeo-Christian values. It is remarkable that activists on behalf of gay and lesbian acceptance always include the transgendered. What, after all, do the transgendered, who are usually heterosexual men, have to do with gays and lesbians? The answer is that activists understand that their primary goal—equating same-sex sexual beha-vior with man-woman sex—can only be accomplished if other Judeo-Christian and Western sexual norms are also rejected. That is why the very word 'sex,' when referring to male or female, has been changed to 'gender.'...society... has accepted this linguistic change as if it were insignifi-cant. The change on application forms, for example, from 'Sex: M or F' to 'Gender: M or F' has gone unnoticed.”

BP News: "Consider this: 40 million women, children, and men worldwide have HIV/AIDS—with more than 1 million in America! That means, statistically, someone in your church has HIV/AIDS right now. They may not even know it. And more than 50 percent of people with HIV/ AIDS are women and children. ...The Gospels repeated-ly show that Jesus loved, touched and cared for lepers— the diseased outcasts of his day. Today’s 'lepers' are those who have HIV/AIDS. They often hide their condi-tion—even from family—out of fear or shame. I’m convin-ced the HIV/AIDS pandemic is the church’s greatest opportunity to visibly demonstrate God’s love to skep-tics. It is also an incredible opportunity to grow in Christ-like character, to share the Good News with the hurting, and to extend your church’s witness into your community and around the world."

Catholic World News: "A Christian employee of the American Red Cross was fired last month after express-ing his concerns to senior staff about an e-mail from the diversity office notifying him that June was 'Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.' Michael Hartman, who had work-ed at the Red Cross for eight months...reported to Con-cerned Women for America (CWFA) that his immediate supervisor did not care that, as a Christian, Hartman was concerned; thereafter he voiced his consternation to senior officials. Hartman's e-mail to senior manage-ment stated, '...I am a Christian not willing to compro-mise my beliefs to promote the agenda of the homosex-ual community. I would also like to say that I think it's disgraceful that while most of us [at the Red Cross] are trying to save lives, a few are using this organization to promote their own lifestyles....'"  

SFGate: "The top legislative body of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is set to take key votes this week on ordaining gays and blessing same-sex unions. Conflicts over what the Bible says about homo-sexuality have been tearing at Protestant denominations for years. Here is a description of how the debate is playing out in major American churches: UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST: The liberal, 1.3 million-member denomination passed a resolution July 4 endorsing same-sex marriage, making it the largest Christian de-nomination to do so. The church has been ordaining gays for decades. EPISCOPAL CHURCH: This U.S. branch of Anglicanism sparked a crisis in the global Anglican Communion by confirming its first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.... "

David Limbaugh: "The Left's fears over Roberts' Cath-olic faith...proceed not from their reverence for the Con-stitution, but chiefly from their violent objection to a par-ticular article of the Catholic faith: that abortion is an egregious sin. If they believed Roberts were a pro-abor-tionist, they wouldn't demand his allegiance to the Con-stitution, as written, because Roe v. Wade's judicial sanctioning of abortion would not have been possible by a Court remotely deferential to the Constitution. Indeed, the Left's loyalty isn't to the Constitution, but to certain policies that have been grafted into it by liberal activist judges who, in the process, have exhibited an abiding disrespect for the document. If everyone shared the strict constructionists'...philosophy, concerns over how a judge's faith might influence his decisions would be moot...strict constructionists don't make policy."

Kevin Little in the Toronto Star: "while I may support same-sex marriage and the cause of feminism in the church, I think those who share my views but still insist on a strict separation of Church and state make no sense at all. Surely one thing that post-modernism has taught us is that the world can handle a variety of world-views at one time, religious and secular. I think the prob-lem we religious people have isn't that we are mixing our politics with our faith, it is that we have so selectively done so as to discredit our witness entirely. Perhaps if Christians and Muslims focused more energy on fighting the economic, environmental and social narcissism of our age we'd have more credibility with the... public. And until we do correct the way we use our prophetic voice, we...silence the very voice inside us that makes our world real."

Via Scripps-Howard Syndicate: "Last week's 47th convention of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Arch-diocese of North America adopted a resolution that ad-dressed both sexuality and the Iraqi war. But this time the lofty words led to an historic change....the dele-gates cheered as Metropolitan Philip Saliba announced his decision to withdraw from the National Council of Churches USA. ...The archdiocese joined the old Fed-erated Council of Churches in the 1940s and had been active in the ecumenical movement ever since.... But recent decades have been tough. The Orthodox believe 'we're getting further and further away from the primary goal of looking to bring Christianity back into a unified fold,' he told AncientFaithRadio.com. Now the 'church-es of the mainline Protestant world really don't want to hear our message.'"

Drudge Report: "'Workers...in the old city of Jerusalem have discovered the biblical Pool of Siloam, a freshwater reservoir that was ...the reputed site where Jesus cured a man blind from birth....Scholars have said that there wasn't a Pool of Siloam and that John was using a reli-gious conceit' to illustrate a point, said New Testament scholar James H. Charlesworth of the Princeton Theol-ogical Seminary. 'Now we have found the Pool of Siloam ... exactly where John said it was.' A gospel that was thought to be 'pure theology is now shown to be ground-ed in history,' he said. The discovery puts a new spot-light on what is called the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a trip that religious law required ancient Jews to make at least once a year, said archeologist Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa, who excavated the pool. 'Jesus was just another pilgrim coming to Jerusalem,' he said.'"

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