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."

Albert Mohler in Crosswalk: "For at least half a cen-tury, researchers have been observing massive shifts in Western cultures. The increasingly secular shape of European civilization has been evident for some time.... When Brian Kenny reported, 'I don't go to church, and I don't know one person who does,' he understood that something had changed. 'Fifteen years ago, I didn't know one person who didn't,' he reflected. The statistics documenting European secularization are now impossi-ble to ignore. Ireland, still one of the least secular na-tions in Western Europe, has seen church attendance fall by at least 25 percent over the last three decades. Ireland is predominantly Roman Catholic...but...'Not one priest will be ordained this year in Dublin.' On the Prot-estant side, the picture is not much better....Throughout the...continent, Islam is the only religion growing....."

Nicholas J. Xenakis in NRO: "if read closely, Tocque-ville doesn't deny the possibility of an Islamic democra-tic society, he just raises questions about its longevity and believes that Christianity is better suited to demo-cracy. One has to wonder whether Tocqueville could have dreamed of the current state of affairs in the Middle East. And the question lingers of whether his theories still apply in a framework of democracy promotion — something that many recent scholars have argued has a tenuous connection with the Founder's original intentions. Whether an Islamic democratic society is possible and what it might look like depends on what is occurring in Iraq at this very moment. One doesn't have to take Tocqueville's word as gospel. It is quite possible that 'Democracy in Iraq' is just waiting to be written."

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."

Washington Times: “Nuclear-family households—two married parents and a child—were the most common as recently as 1990, when there were 25 million such households. But by 2000, nuclear-family households fell to second place, both because there were almost a half-million fewer of these type of homes and because the number of single-adult households surged past 27 mil-lion. Married households without children remained the third most common, with 20 million in 1990 and 22 mil-lion in 2000. Mr. Francese, who has studied U.S. demo-graphic trends for 35 years, said single-adult households are continuing to grow and might even hit 34 million by the 2010 census. This is because people are most likely to live alone 'at either end of the life cycle'—in youth or as senior citizens—he said, and baby boomers are just starting to move into their 60s.”

Mark Braham in Newsweekly: "Alexander the Great recognised that the Jews were not like other nations...; their religion was not a culture but the essence of their lives. Ptolemy of Egypt recognised the greatness of Tor-ah and had it translated into Greek (the Septuagint). Jud-aism teaches that Gentile nations that observe the seven laws given to Noah will be blessed, hence the dominance of European civilisation based on Judeo-Christian values and the threats posed to their survival by the challenge to such values, hence AIDS and the breakdown of healthy family. The Seven Noahide Laws prohibit: (1) idolatry, (2) blasphemy and cursing the name of G-d, (3) murder, (4) robbery and theft, (5) immorality and forbidden sexual re-lations, (6) removing and eating the limb of a live animal, and require: (7) the establishment of a justice system and courts of law to enforce the other six laws."  

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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