AP's Richard Ostling: "Right now...three highly techni-cal disputes have erupted over materials linked to Scrip-ture: - In the most important development, scholars... say tests on remains from a dig in Jordan indicate the biblical country of Edom existed during the era of kings David and Solomon, if not earlier. The find could under-cut skeptics of biblical history. - Prosecutors in Israel filed fraud charges Dec. 29 involving a purported first-century inscription of Jesus Christ's name. But a prom-inent archeology magazine plans to assail the govern-ment's scientific evidence. - New testing indicates the Shroud of Turin, a celebrated relic said to be Christ's burial cloth, could actually date from his time. That op-poses scientists' earlier conclusion that the artifact is a fraud from the medieval era."

AP via CBS News: "'I don't believe I owe an apology,' Ward Churchill said Friday on CNN's 'Paula Zahn Now' program. He defended the essay which compared those killed in the Sept. 11 attack to 'little Eichmanns,' a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who organized Nazi plans to exterminate European Jews. He said the victims were akin to U.S. military operations' collateral damage—or innocent civilians mistakenly killed by soldiers....The furor over Churchill's essay erupted... after he was invited to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. Campus officials discovered that an essay and follow-up book by Churchill characterized the Sept. 11 attacks as a response to a long history of U.S. abuses abroad... Churchill who...remains a tenured professor, said he would sue if he were dismissed."

Powerline: "I read [Bill] Moyers' piece after several readers pointed out how over-the-top it was. I knew Moyers' claims about Watt couldn't possibly be true, for two reasons. First, the concept of stewardship is so fundamental to Christian theology that the claim is laughable on its face. Second, I remember the Reagan administration. James Watt was a controversial figure; but one thing he was not controversial for was advoca-ting environmental pillaging, on the theory that Jesus would be back any day now. That would have been quite a news story in the early 1980s, had it been true. ...I put the matter aside, not having time to pursue it further. Friday morning, I was sitting in my office when my telephone rang. On the phone was a soft-spoken man who said...'My name is James Watt.'"

AP via Yahoo News: "The Bush administration said Wednesday it would seek to reinstate an indictment against a California pornography company that was charged with violating federal obscenity laws. It was Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' first public decision on a legal matter. ...'The Department of Justice remains strongly committed to the investigation and prosecution of adult obscenity cases,' said Gonzales, who pledged during his confirmation hearing to pursue obscenity cases. If allowed to stand, [the court's] ruling would undermine obscenity laws as well as other statutes based on shared views of public morality, including laws against prostitution, bestiality and bigamy, the department said in a statement."

Variety: "the studios have been cleaning up their act. R-rated films, once the studios' mainstay, are on the de-cline, both in numbers and in lure. In the last five years, R-rated pics have dwindled from 212 in 1999 to just 147 last year. Perhaps even more startling is the fact that in 2004, PG films outgrossed R pics for the first time in two decades: $2.3 billion to $2.1 billion....While PG films have been making more money—'Shrek 2,' 'The In-credibles' and 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azka-ban' were all rated PG—the box office generated by R-rated films has been falling.... (At the same time, there is evidence that today's PG-13 is more like yesterday's R. ...a Harvard study found that current films with PG-13 ratings and below had more violence, sex and pro-fanity than films of the same ratings 10 years prior.)"

"The conversations Mr. Wead played offer insights into Mr. Bush's thinking from the time he was weighing a run for president in 1998.... Preparing to meet Christian leaders in September 1998, Mr. Bush told Mr. Wead: 'As you said, there are some code words. There are some proper ways to say things, and some improper ways.' He added, 'I am going to say that I've accepted Christ into my life. And that's a true statement.' But Mr. Bush also repeatedly worried that prominent evangelical Christians would not like his refusal 'to kick gays.' At the same time, he was wary of unnerving secular voters by meeting publicly with evangelical leaders. When he thought his aides had agreed to such a meeting, Mr. Bush complain-ed to Karl Rove, his political strategist, 'What the hell is this about?'"  

Town Hall: "Judeo-Christian religions hold that human beings are created in the image of God. If we are not, we are created in the image of carbon dioxide. Which has a higher value is not difficult to determine....[I]f man was not created by God, the human being is mere stellar dust -- and will come to be regarded as such. Moreover, people are merely the products of random chance, no more designed than a sand grain formed by water erosion. That is what the creationism-evolution battle is ultimately about—human worth. One does not have to agree with creationists or deny all evolutionary evidence to understand that the way evolution is taught, man is rendered a pointless product of random forces—un-worthy of being saved before one's hamster."

Western Catholic Reporter: 'many evangelical Chris-tians in mainline churches find that they have more in common with the Catholic Church than with their own brothers and sisters in their own church,' Dr. George Vandervelde said Feb. 14 at The King's University Col-lege. 'The evangelicals see in the Catholics a commit-ment to the core of the Gospels.' Vandervelde, a mem-ber of the Christian Reformed Church and professor emeritus at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, spoke to about 150 people on the prospect for common mission between Catholics and evangelicals....'What unites us is far greater than what divides us,' he said. 'Many people consider ecumenism and dialogue an exercise in the lowest common denominator but ecu-menism involves a passion for the truth.'"  

The Southern: "'One of the agents opened a file and told me that the FBI wanted to question me about a sermon I preached on Memorial Day nearly six months before,' [the Rev. Randy] Steele said. 'At first I just laughed and said, "you're kidding, right?" and then I could tell by the look on their faces that they weren't. 'They were in no way abrasive, but the things they started asking me about were specific quotes that I had made during that sermon. I was certainly taken aback by the fact that they had exact quotes and I would say that whoever contacted the FBI had to be at the ser-vice.' Steele said he quickly recalled the sermon was about abortion and was one of a series of eight sermons on controversial cultural issues, such as sep-aration of church and state, homosexuality, gambling, etc."

Sun-Times - The big local publishing houses (Tyndale), institutions (Wheaton): "'Because of the publications, the educational institutions, I think the case can be made that there's a different kind of, longer-term, cultur-al-rather-than-political influence [here]'...'This is one of the hotbeds of evangelical Christian publishing," Lynn Garrett, religion editor for Publisher's Weekly, said of the Chicago area, which is home to Tyndale House, Intervarsity Press and several other evangelical Christian publishing houses. 'The most culturally influential one at the moment, and for the last several years, is Tyndale House because of 'Left Behind.' That has been a phenomenal success story.'" Second story: Chicago- area Evangelical political power 

AFP/Australian Broadcasting: "Gibson noted that many people had avoided the film because of its grisly portrayal of Jesus Christ being tortured by Roman troops. 'There has been quite a demand by the religious community to bring [the film] back for Easter,' Bruce Davey, Gibson's partner at Icon Productions, told Variety. 'And there has been a lot of discussion about the violence. Mel wanted to try and accommodate those people by making a version that is softer and gentler. The film, The Passion Recut, will be beamed onto 500 to 750 screens by distributor Newmarket Films, Variety said, adding that the new versions would not be lumbered with an audience age restriction. The new less violent version of the film goes easier on the brutal details of the last days of Christ."

David Limbaugh in Human Events: "The Democratic leadership should understand that it won't endear itself to many Christian voters by rewriting scripture, embra-cing relativism, facilitating a culture of death, endorsing homosexuality as a civil right, portraying government-coerced redistributions of other people's money as acts of compassion toward the poor and preaching class warfare notwithstanding the Commandment against 'coveting.' Far be it from me to assert, on behalf of pol-itical conservatives, a monopoly on Christianity. But I would humbly suggest that if Democrats want to avoid digging themselves into a deeper values quagmire, they would be well advised to pursue a different approach, one that doesn't involve recasting Christian values and rewriting scripture."

Julia Tier on beliefnet: "Considering the fact that Catholicism has been an overwhelmingly positive part of my life, it’s unfortunate that something as important as sexuality should be the one area of my life with no Catholic influence. It seems that, like me, the people I recognize at church on Sunday found a way to have a positive relationship with an institution that views our lifestyle as sinful. Some might consider us 'cafeteria Catholics' who simply pick and choose the teachings they are comfortable with. I disagree. Those of us in the pews for the Sunday night campus liturgy struggle to reconcile our faith with the reality we encounter everyday. We consider ourselves Catholics, but I sometimes wonder if the institutional church would agree."

NRO: "God on the Quad appears to be a prim study of religious institutions of higher learning. In fact, it's a fas-cinating account of how the problem of sex gets resol-ved at colleges where 'anything goes' doesn't go. Take the contrast between a small conservative Catholic col-lege, like Thomas Aquinas, and that Mormon giant, Brigham Young University. At Thomas Aquinas, public displays of affection are strictly forbidden. Yet ubiquit-ous pairs of Brigham Young lovers stroke and caress, even during Sunday religious lectures. Radical as this difference may seem, each school is channeling its students' desire for sex into the quest for marriage. ... Riley shows the sexual pressures experienced by stu-dents at secular schools are transformed at religious colleges into the pressure to find a spouse."

Peter Steinfels: "Mark Noll, an outstanding historian of American religion, has done something further. In Ame-rica's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lin-coln (Oxford University Press, 2002) he compares Lincoln with the acknowledged theological minds of that era. 'None of America's respected religious leaders,' Professor Noll wrote, 'mustered the theological power so economically expressed in Lincoln's Second Inaugural. None probed so profoundly the ways of God or the response of humans to the divine constitution of the world. None penetrated as deeply into the nature of providence. And none described the fate of humanity before God with the humility or the sagacity of the president.'"

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