Ed Vitagliano in Agape Press News: "Recently Mich-elle Cottle, senior editor for the liberal magazine New Republic, said on CNN's Reliable Sources that there is a strong bias among journalists when it comes to issues like evolution, the public display of the Ten Command-ments, and same-sex marriage. These journalists 'do behave as though the people who believe these things are on the fringe, when actually the vast majority of the American public describes itself as Christian.' Others, like New York Times' veterans Steve Roberts and R.W. Apple, and William McGowan, who has written for News-week, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, have said the same thing. However, in the months...fol-lowing, the 2004 presidential election, the liberal media bias against Christians seems to have gone off the charts."

Breakpoint: "The contrast between the [Baptist and Islamic] schools left [author Irshad] Manji convinced that the problem with Islam is not that the religion has been 'hijacked' by extremists, as many said following Sept-ember 11. Rather, it’s that the extremists, the Koranic literalists, comprise what she calls 'the intellectually atrophied and morally impaired mainstream' of Islam. Which brings me back to Saudi Arabia. In her book, Manji asks a question that infuriates mainstream Mus-lim groups: 'Who is the real colonizer of Muslims— America or Arabia?' According to Manji, many of main-stream Islam’s worst features, like its treatment of wo-men and its 'deep-seated anti-Semitism,' are the pro-duct of 'Arab Imperialism. Within the Islamic world, be-ing a 'real' or 'good' Muslim means being more Arab.'”

Terry Mattingly: "'The purpose of our lives is to reveal God to men,' [the Pope] said....'And only where God is seen does life truly begin....We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God...' That sounded innocent. But a direct statement about evolution later inspired outrage when it appeared in the sacred pages of the NY Times. Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, a member of the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education, said he was trying to stop...media attempts to plant Rome firm-ly in the Darwinist camp. 'The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the hu-man intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world,' he wrote.'"

Associated Press via CTV: Pope Benedict "was re-cently visited by bishops from Africa and Sri Lanka, where the number of priests is skyrocketing. In Europe and elsewhere, the number of priests has fallen sharp-ly. Benedict said the 'joy' at the growing numbers of churchmen in the developing world is accompanied by 'a certain bitterness' because some would-be priests were only looking for a better life. 'Becoming a priest, they become almost like a head of a tribe, they are naturally privileged and have another type of life,' he said. 'So the wheat and the chaff go together in this beautiful growth of vocations. 'Bishops have to be very attentive to discern (among the candidates) and not just be happy to have many future priests, but to see which ones really are the true vocations—discern between the wheat and the chaff,' he said."

Richard A. Oppel Jr.: "One major turning point... came when a person embittered by [Al Queda]...murders of family members disclosed the identities of several dozen insurgents....After that, and the bust-up of a cell of Syr-ian fighters, the villagers became convinced the Ameri-cans were gaining the upper hand.... Villagers, fed up with constant raids, began providing information. 'They began to divorce themselves from [insurgents]'....An-other crucial event came...when a man showed up say-ing he was the town police chief and could organize dozens of officers. The Americans were skeptical, but that afternoon they went to the police station...and were shocked to find themselves heavily outnumbered by policemen, some of them in uniform. 'I thought I had walked into an ambush,' Captain Burke recalled."

SiliconValley.com: "Both sides of [the stem cell] quar-rel have something vital to defend, for not only themselves but all of us. No decent society can afford to be callous to human suffering or indifferent to the need to seek cures. No decent society can afford to treat human life, at whatever stage of development, as a mere natural re-source to be mined for the benefit of others. Neither side is going to go away, nor should it....Yet it would be a pity if our only options were either a political victory for one side that would seriously alienate the losers, or a contin-uing political stalemate. Fortunately, there is a third way. A growing number of reports...suggest that science may find a way around the impasse: a method of producing the same kind of cells, but without destroying embryos."  

In Town Hall: "the notion that a murderer must give up his life is one of the central values in the Old Testament. Indeed, taking the life of a murderer is the only law that is found in all Five Books of Moses (the Torah). That is particularly remarkable considering how few laws there are at all in the first Book, Genesis. When God creates the world, He declares a fundamental value and law to maintain civilization: 'Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God He created him.' And the law is repeated in Exodus, Le-viticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. When all murderers are allowed to keep their lives, murder is rendered less serious and human life is therefore cheapened. That is
not only the Judeo-Christian biblical view. It is common sense. The punishment for a crime is what informs society how bad that crime is.”

USAToday: "In a letter sent two years before becoming pope, Benedict XVI expressed concern that the Harry Potter books 'erode Christianity in the soul' of young people, a German writer says. The comments came in an exchange of letters between then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Gabriele Kuby, a Bavarian-based Roman Catholic sociologist who penned a book criticizing J.K. Rowling's blockbusters. In a letter dated March 7, 2003, the text of which could be seen Thursday on Kuby's Web site, Ratzinger thanked her for sending him a copy of 'your informative book. It is good that you are throwing light on Harry Potter, because these are subtle seductions that work imperceptibly, and because of that deeply, and erode Christianity in the soul before it can even grow properly,' the letter added."

Hollywood Reporter: "'The Bible Game' is a trivia game with 1,500 Old Testament questions on the PS2 and an action-adventure game that blends questions from the Old and New Testament into the gameplay on GBA. Another major factor is the unveiling of the first PC release from Left Behind Games, which will trans-late content from a 13-volume book series by Tim La-Haye and Jerry B. Jenkins that has sold more than 63 million copies. 'Left Behind: Eternal Forces' is a real-time strategy game set in New York during the End of Days, which will allow gamers to choose between the angelic Tribulation Forces and the demonic Global Community Peacekeepers in a multiplayer online mode. ...Left Behind CEO Troy Lyndon said the books have a diverse loyal reader base of more than 10 million parents, single adults, teens and kids."  

Variety: "Disney had to commit to stringent distribution terms. Stepping up to finance his second straight direc-torial effort puts Gibson is league with George Lucas, who bankrolled his 'Star Wars' prequels and made a deal with Fox to distribute them. Gibson will not star in 'Apocalypto'...which is set in an ancient civilization some 3,000 years ago. The title is a Greek term which means 'an unveiling' or 'new beginning.' Consistent with such Gibson films as 'Braveheart' and 'Passion,' the script depicts abundant action and violence. Gibson has already begun pre-production; he is setting locations and has already begun casting..... Gibson had some cash laying around: 'The Passion of the Christ,' which cost Gibson $25 million to make, grossed just north of $600 million worldwide to become the most successful indie ever."

Terry Mattingly via Scripps Howard: "So what's the bottom line? Faith is not a niche-market trend. It's true that the look and feel of 'mainstream' American religion is changing, in part due to people searching on the World Wide Web. 'Organized religion' may be in a re-cession, but the rest of the "spirituality" numbers con-tinue to add up, up, up. 'Wall Street considers a trend that lasts 10 years to be significant. This one has last-ed 10 millennia,' argues Waldman, in a research paper he calls 'The Faithful Consumer & The Spiritual Market-place.' He recently cranked out a 13th draft, trying to keep up with the latest data. 'While philosophers have studied the faithful soul and politicians have courted the faithful voter, the marketing and business communities have so far ignored The Faithful Consumer. This is a big mistake.'"

Michael Crowley: "around Jan. 17, 1986, Hubbard suf-fered a catastrophic stroke. A week later he was dead. Scientology attorneys...sought to have [his body] cre-mated immediately. They were blocked by a county cor-oner, who, according to Scientology critics, did an au-topsy that revealed high levels of a psychiatric drug (Vis-taril). That would seem an embarrassment given the church's hostility to such medications (witness Tom Cruise's recent feud with Brooke Shields), but it didn't stop the church from summoning thousands to [memor-ial services]. There they were told that Hubbard 'willingly discarded the body after it was no longer useful to him' .... Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Hubbard's ultimate success lay in convincing millions of people he was something other than a nut."

David Brody reports: "It’s all a fine juggling act for Academy chaplains like Phillip Guin, a Methodist chap-lain. He recognizes that when you wear the uniform, witnessing becomes a little tricky. 'We have to be care-ful when we go out and share our faith with others. However, that doesn't mean we can't share our faith with others....I think that's what's getting lost in all of this.' But he stated that while any incidents of religious insensitivity need to be dealt with, he admitted it is a fine line. 'I feel very comfortable right now with the steps that are being taken....[But] if it becomes much more restrictive religiously, I don't know how comfortable I'll feel as a chaplain.'¶ 'Nobody is suggesting that we cleanse the Air Force Academy of all references, cad-et-to-cadet conversations about religion,'" Barry Lynn, a spokesman for leftist causes said.

To the LA Times via Pgh Post-Gazette and South Bend Tribune: "'Cannon's Web site makes use of etymology and history to cast doubt on the prevailing anti-gay interpretations of several Bible verses. It is only one front in a robust theological counterattack against Christian conservatives who insist—as a 1998 state-ment from Anglican bishops puts it—that same-sex re-lationships of any kind are incompatible with Scripture. Revisionists such as Cannon are ingenious and often persuasive in arguing that strictures in both the Old and New Testaments that have been read to broadly con-demn homosexuality were actually directed at particular offenses—male prostitution, a breach of hospitality (the real 'sin of Sodom')...In seeking to have anti-gay Chris-tians re-examine their prejudices, the revisionists are doing the Lord's work..."

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