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."

WND: "'We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think that religion stops people from thinking. I think it justifies crazies. I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder. If you look at it logically, it's something that was drilled into your head when you were a small child. It certainly was drilled into mine at that age....' The former host of 'Politically Incor-rect' said the lack of enlightenment of so many Ameri-cans means the nation actually has more in common with its enemies than one might think. ...'When you look at beliefs in such things as, do you go to heaven, is there a devil, we have more in common with Turkey and Iran and Syria than we do with...nations that, yes, I would consider more enlightened than us.'"

Why, o why, oh why-o | The Conservative Voice: "Last December, school officials in Rossford rescinded their invitation to have a local rock band called "Pawn" play at the school-sponsored assembly. School offic-ials argued the performance might violate the so-called separation of church and state since members of Pawn are Christians and perform songs with Christian lyrics. Now The Rutherford Institute has filed suit on behalf of Pawn. According to Institute president John Whitehead, who is representing the band, the mem-bers of the group are very concerned about their cons-titutional rights. Along with his clients, he believes the constitution plainly forbids censorship of U.S. citizens' religious expressions; and he adds, 'I don't think that Christians should allow this to happen.'"

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?'"  

Noel Holston in Newsday: "If your notion of religious broadcasting is PBS' 'Religion & Ethics Newsweekly,' where correspondents take a '60 Minutes'-like approach to stories, or ABC Family's 'The 700 Club,' where every-body testifies and fellowships, 'Faith Under Fire' may be a revelation. If you love to argue about God and religion, it may be TV heaven. The host-anchor is Lee Strobel, a Yale-educated journalist who once covered legal issues for the Chicago Tribune. Since he found Jesus in 1981, he's become a pastor at Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago and is the author of a string of bestsellers, among them The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity.'"

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.'"  

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 

David D. Kirkpatrick: "Gordon Wood, a professor at Brown and historian of early America, agreed that the founders never imagined a culture as secular as ours. After all, many states had tax-supported churches well into the 19th century. 'They definitely did not contem-plate this kind of what we might call "extreme," where a minister or a rabbi at a public school graduation is considered to be a violation of separation of church and state,' Professor Wood said. 'We have built that wall much higher than any of them, even Jefferson, would have anticipated.' But he said educated colonials like the founders also took a dim view of religious fervor. 'They just were not in favor of religious "enthusiasms" - that is the word they would have used for what we would call evangelical'...."

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."

Reuters: "'Homosexual marriages are part of 'a new ideology of evil' that is insidiously threatening society, Pope John Paul says in a new book published Tuesday. In Memory and Identity, the Pope also calls abortion a 'legal extermination' comparable to attempts to wipe out Jews and other groups in the 20th century....The 84-year-old Pontiff's book, a highly philosophical and intri-cate work on the nature of good and evil, is based on conversations with philosopher friends in 1993 and later with some of his aides. In one section about the role of lawmakers, the Pope takes another swipe at gay mar-riages when he refers to 'pressures' on the European Parliament to allow them. ...In Germany, a leader of the country's Central Council of Jews called the comparison [between the Holocaust and abortion] unacceptable."

Press release: "The Ten Commandments are 'imper-fect precepts' and should be discarded, according to [the Rev.] Jisei Nagasaka of the Nichiren Shoshu Budd-hist sect. Nagasaka further links them to the horrific disasters and confusion rampant in the nation today. Nagasaka has informed his congregants that they must 'discard the imperfect precepts of imperfect religions and ideas such as the Judeo-Christian Ten Command-ments.'...Nagasaka’s comments go much further than recent attacks on public displays of the Ten Command-ments. Whereas the ACLU and similar groups refrain from commenting on the moral importance of the Ten Commandments, Nagasaka points to the 'absolute nonsense of the beliefs and practices' of people who are members of heretical religions....”

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.'"

A Christmas gift from Xnmp—The "gift" is a tip. Add the Google toolbar to your computer's Internet Explorer browser. It zaps popup ads on news websites, which is great, but even better, its search option to "search this site" is awesome. It's virtually an index of any site, including this one. Try it—go to the web address below, click "download," and it automatically installs itself if your computer is WIndows XP. And Merry Christmas!
(This endorsement was not paid or solicited.) — webmaster

http://toolbar.google.com/