News
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s proposed 2010 federal budget contains a 7% cut in charitable tax deductions for the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers. Some religious groups are asking how that will affect their bottom line.The answer: it depends who you ask.Read more of this story.
CHICAGO, IL (March 20, 2009) – “It’s a genocide in slow motion,” says Sara Symons in describing the plight of an estimated 27 million victims of human trafficking worldwide.Symons, who is co-founder and CEO of The Emancipation Network (TEN), addressed a gathering of North Park University students and faculty on Wednesday. The network is a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting worldwide slavery.Read more of this story.
A Sheboygan Falls pastor and parishioner were issued municipal citations Thursday for firing an arrow during Sunday’s service as part of a sermon illustration.About 120 people were attending the evening service at Pentecostals of Sheboygan County, 621 Broadway, when the Rev. John Putnam had Jason Wilke, 26, draw and fire a steel-tipped practice arrow across the front of the church.Putnam called it a "teaching tool."Police call it illegal.Read more of this story.
While most patients, religious or not, avoid aggressive end-of-life therapy to prolong their time on Earth, a new study shows that religious patients may seek it out at three times the rate of non-religious patients, a finding that leads some to question why doctors don’t address the issue of religion with their patients more often, when it informs so many medical decisions, particularly in end-of-life care. Read more of this story. Religious Patients More Likely to Seek End-of-Life Cancer Care – Bloomberg News
When Joe Christian started planning church services 35 years ago, it meant spending hours flipping through hymnals and copying sheet music.Today, it’s point, click, worship.Christian, the music minister at Una Baptist Church in Nashville, is one of more than 12,000 people who have signed up for a new iTunes-like website called LifeWayworship.com. Read more of this story.
CANTON, Ohio — It sounds like the beginning of a comedy routine. An Amish miracle heater? Really? "It’s a joke because the Amish couldn’t use the heater itself," said Donald Kraybill, an Amish expert at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. "It’s kind of like Quakers selling Quaker guns. It’s sort of an oxymoron." Even so, Canton company Heat Surge has sold thousands of Roll-n-Glow electric fireplaces. Read more of this story.
COMMENTARYLast year I visited the Hall of Presidents in Disney World, home of the walking, talking animatronic presidents. In the anteroom where they hold you before the show starts, they had paintings of all the important early presidents.There was Washington. Then John Adams, the second president. Then Thomas Jefferson, the third president. Then the fourth president, James Monroe.Wait. James Monroe? He was the fifth president. They’d skipped the fourth president, a short fellow named James Madison.Read more of this story.
WASHINGTON – As Congress jostles and wrestles with one another over how to best spend billions of tax dollars to resuscitate the economy, a prison ministry approached the government with ideas on how to not spend and instead save billions. Pat Nolan, vice president of Prison Fellowship, moderated a panel discussion hosted by the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security on Tuesday that examined how community-based re-entry programs are significantly more cost-effective and successful in keeping ex-inmates out of prison.Read more of this story.
President Obama has been without a pastor or a home church ever since he cut his ties to the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. in the heat of the presidential campaign. But he has quietly cultivated a handful of evangelical pastors for private prayer sessions on the telephone and for discussions on the role of religion in politics.Read more of this story.
The amount of economic pain caused by the recession has varied among area churches as the attendance and spiritual needs of members go up while donations fluctuate and budgets are cut.A majority of churches have experienced an attendance increase that the recession hasn’t slowed. Craig Heilman, executive pastor of Door Creek Church in Madison, attributes the increase to a greater need for spiritual comfort in a time of uncertainty.Read more of this story. Pastor Asks Where’s My Bailout? – Christian PostIn Recession, Church Multiplies Money For Needy – National Public RadioBorrowing hurts churches – Associated Press