AP's Jennifer Dobner via Daily Breeze: "'Of course we're Christian. The very name of the church declares that,' said Gordon B. Hinckley...."No one believes more strongly in the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. No one believes more strongly in the power of his redeeming sacrifice,' he said. 'The Book of Mormon is another wit-ness for the divinity and reality of Jesus Christ. The more people see us and come to know us, the more I believe they will come to realize that we are trying to exemplify in our lives and in our living the great ideals which he taught.' [Joseph] Smith founded the Mormon church in April 1830, 10 years after he claimed to exper-ience a vision of God and Jesus in a grove of trees near his family home....He said an angel...later led him to a buried set of gold plates inscribed with the story of a lost tribe of Israel that had settled North America....”

The Guardian: "Comedian Rowan Atkinson [has] urged the [British] government to back down over its religious hatred bill and accept changes made by peers to stren-gthen the right of performers to criticise religion. Here is the full text of his speech [Excerpt:] 'Those who think that, as they lie on their deathbed, they will be able to judge the success of their lives by how big a BMW they could afford at the end of it, are in for a big surprise. However, it's their...nature that leaves religious beliefs wide open to interpretation, allowing occasionally prac-tices to be established that are wholly contrary to the mores of a civilised, liberal society...Those practices must remain open to...critique, including what could be perceived as insult or abuse. Now you may say...insult and abuse that doesn't sound very nice, we should have a law against that....we do... the Public Order Act."

USAToday: "Conservative Christian groups increasingly have targeted corporate campaigns that reach out to Americans who represent alternative lifestyles. In May, the American Family Association ended a nine-year boycott of Walt Disney (DIS) over Disney's decision to extend benefits to same-sex couples and promote gay-related events at its theme parks. That boycott appear-ed to have little effect since Disney reported higher earnings and increased theme park attendance.... How-ever, the rapprochement with Ford raised concerns by gay rights supporters. Ford spokesman Mike Moran confirmed that the Jaguar and Land Rover brands no longer will advertise in gay publications while there will be no change at Volvo. He said the decision was not linked to the boycott. 'The decision with regard to adver-tising was a business decision,' Moran said."

WIlliam S. Lind:"What took 3000 years to achieve has been lost in 30 years. The consequences for our culture range wide, probably beyond anything we can perceive at present. Some of those consequences are, in my view: A people cut off from its past. The West’s traditions are mostly written, contained in its great literature, beginning with the Old and New Testaments and the works of classical Greeks and Romans. When those written works go unread, the content of Western culture runs out into history’s sands. If Western culture loses its content, then the West loses its culture, and becomes . . . what? Probably extinct, something the West’s birthrates point to in any case. A post-literate culture will have little ability to think logically. Reason and logic demand words; images, in contrast, feed emotions."

Tim Weber, BBC: "The rock star Bono has launched a new global brand, Product Red, with a share of profits to go to the fight against Aids in Africa. Launch partners American Express, Gap, Converse and Giorgio Armani announced a range of 'red' branded products. These will include T-shirts, footwear, sunglasses and a credit card. The hope is that profits from the venture will generate a 'sustainable' flow of money to support the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria. Bono warned the world was losing the fight against HIV/Aids, with 6,500 Africans dying of the disease every day. He stressed that this was a commercial venture and not philanthropy. 'Philan-thropy is like hippy music, holding hands. Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard com-merce,' Bono said."

Christian Post: "Advertisers were rightly worried about the Christian backlash to this show. A few companies did advertise, but several quickly backed out of sponsorship. The show ran with an unusually large number of NBC promos. Moreover, several local NBC affiliates around the U.S. refused to air the program. They were wise to dis-tance themselves from this shameless attack on Chris-tianity. Advertisers and NBC affiliates saw the danger of promoting anti-Christian bigotry to their bottom lines. Maybe after this latest disaster Hollywood and the net-works may finally learn it doesn’t pay to bash Christians or Christianity. All the characters in this drama were clearly dysfunctional. Jack Kenny, the writer/producer and open homosexual, was the brains behind this disas-ter. ...he went to great lengths to discredit Christianity but ended up just looking foolish."  

Michael Browning, Cox News Service: "The idea of Limbo goes back to the Middle Ages and was a reaction on the part of Peter Abelard to the severe doctrine...by St. Augustine in the fifth century A.D., that every unbaptized soul must go to hell where, however, they would be subjec-ted only to...a very mild pain, if they had led good lives. Abelard argued that even this light pain was too harsh a punishment for innocent unbaptized children whose only sin was that of being born with Original Sin...which can be washed away only by...baptism. Abelard said such babies should not suffer the torments of hell but only the loss of the Beatific Vision, the glorious sight of God Himself, which only the blessed may enjoy in Paradise. Therefore they should dwell in a rather foggy but painless place call-ed Limbo, derived from the Latin word limbus, meaning 'edge.' To be 'in limbo' was to be on the edge of happiness, suspended between delight and pain, feeling neither."

Frank Furedi in Spiked: "The intense and venomous attacks on the Disney-produced Narnia film are truly puzzling. The novelist Phillip Pullman has described CS Lewis' original book as 'one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read'. With the zeal of a veteran cul-tural crusader Polly Toynbee of the UK Guardian cut straight to the chase: 'Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion.' What Toynbee seems to find most hateful about religion is that it is able to ex-press a powerful sense of faith. 'US born-agains are us-ing the movie', she warned. Many critics seem espec-ially outraged by this prospect of religious organisations 'using' the film to promote their faith. 'US born-agains are using the movie', she warned. Many critics seem espec-ially outraged by this prospect of religious organisations 'using' the film to promote their faith.'"

Nicole Winfield, AP: "Lawyers for a small-town parish priest have been ordered to appear in court next week after the Roman Catholic cleric was accused of unlaw-fully asserting what many people take for granted: that Jesus Christ existed. The Rev. Enrico Righi was named in a 2002 complaint filed by Luigi Cascioli after Righi wrote in a parish bulletin that Jesus did indeed exist, and that he was born of a couple named Mary and Jos-eph in Bethlehem and lived in Nazareth. Cascioli, a life-long atheist, claims that Righi violated two Italian laws by making the assertion: so-called 'abuse of popular be-lief' in which someone fraudulently deceives people; and 'impersonation' in which someone gains by attributing a false name to someone. Cascioli says that for 2,000 years the Roman Catholic Church has been deceiving people by furthering the fable that Christ existed...." 

VOA News: "Demographers say the Christian popula-tion has declined noticeably in most Middle Eastern countries since the beginning of the 20th century. Fred Strickert, professor of religion at Wartburg College in Iowa, says Christians became a minority in the Middle East after the spread of Islam during the 7th Century, but they continued to play an important role, until the decline of the Ottoman Empire. 'In 1908, there was an internal revolution. They called it the Young Turks' re-volt....There was a mass migration from all places in the Middle East - Lebanon, Syria, and Jerusalem - and, by then, many of the Christians, partly because of Christian missionaries, had benefited from schools and hospitals, and sought better conditions in the West for economics. And so, there was a large migration at the very beginning of the 20th Century.'"

IHT: "'The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians,' argues [Rodney Stark in The Victory of Reason, a] pro-vocative, exasperating and occasionally baffling exer-cise in revisionism. Capitalism, and the scientific revol-ution that powered it, did not emerge in spite of religion but because of it. If this sounds paradoxical, it should-n't, Stark argues. Despite the prejudiced arguments of anticlerical Enlightenment thinkers, free inquiry and faith in human reason were intrinsic to Christian thought. Christianity, alone among the world's religions, conceived of God as a supremely rational being who created a coherent world whose inner workings could be discovered through the application of reason and logic."

Denver Post via Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "This Valentine's Day, your chocolate-giving can be trendy and spiritual with Chocolate Deities, including Buddha, the Sacred Heart and Kokopelli—sweet icons crafted by family chocolatiers from fair-trade chocolate. They're just one facet of metrospirituality, an evolution of American spirituality. Provocative and controversial, this is hipster-style worship, a fusion of status, money, luxury and spirituality. Hippie values for yuppie pocketbooks. The holy trinity of metrospiritual is simple: honoring the planet, healing yourself through optimal well-being and exploring other cultures.Lifestyle choices reflect metro-spiritual values: organic and artisan foods, ecotourism, hybrid cars, fair-trade artisan crafts and alternative medicine."

AP's Richard N. Ostling: "That nightmare moment 50 years ago this month evolved into a remarkable exam-ple of reconciliation, and one of the most influential in-cidents in 20th century Protestant mission lore. Now the saga is being retold in End of the Spear, a moving feature film about redemption in the jungle with a bigger budget ($17 million) and broader release (in 1,200 com-mercial cinemas this weekend) than many films of this genre. In January 1956, Bush pilot Nate Saint and Am-erican colleagues Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCul-ly and Roger Youderian had teamed up in a high-risk attempt to contact, befriend and evangelize the violent Waodani people (also called Waorani or Auca). ...Their martyrdom became world-famous through...subsequent books by Elliot's widow, Elisabeth, who quickly match-ed her husband's heroism. "

The Australian: "The criticism was made after Broke-back Mountain, a film about the forbidden love between gay Wyoming cowboys that stars Australian Heath Led-ger, won four awards on Tuesday. Other winners includ-ed Philip Seymour Hoffman, named Best Actor for his portrayal of the homosexual writer Truman Capote; and Felicity Huffman, the Desperate Housewives star who played a transsexual with a gay prostitute son in Trans-america. 'Once again, the media elites are proving that their pet projects are more important than profit,' Janice Crouse, of Concerned Women for America, said. 'None of the three movies - Capote, Transamerica or Broke-back Mountain - is a box office hit. Brokeback Mountain has barely topped $US25million ($33million) in ticket sales. 'If America isn't watching these films, why are they winning the awards?'"

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