News
Madison Bishop Robert Morlino defended his opposition to gay marriage, the death penalty and embryonic stem-cell research Monday, saying his views should not be surprising since the Catholic Church "is intensely pro-life, pro-marriage and pro-family."Morlino said these public positions are not simply "Catholic" issues. "These are not tenets of our ‘faith’ which we are defending," Morlino said in a statement. "They are universal truths, based on reason alone." Read more.
STOUGHTON – Sunday was a bittersweet day for members of Christ Lutheran Church, who stood in a cornfield for the groundbreaking of their new $5.5 million church. Their old church on Main Street, which dated to 1874, burned down Aug. 17, 2005, after teenagers sneaked onto the roof and started a fire. A second calamity hit the following day, when a tornado ripped through Stoughton. Among those who lost their homes or saw them badly damaged were nine members of the church. Read more.
Jim Wallis was standing in front of about 200 people at a Harry Schwartz bookstore in Milwaukee this week snapping his fingers.He had just mentioned that every day in the world, about 30,000 children under the age of 5 die from preventable diseases. That’s one every 3 seconds.He snapped his fingers. Waited 3 seconds. Snapped them again. Waited 3 seconds. Snapped them again.The buzz in the bookstore stopped. Then Wallis continued. Read more.
(UNDATED) The nation’s Catholic bishops will consider new pastoral guidelines in November for ministering to gays and lesbians that affirm traditional church teachings on sexuality in the face of a quickly changing culture. Read More.
It’s been estimated that a quarter of today’s young adults are children of divorce — people who grew up in broken homes. And for many of them, the breakup of their parents’ marriage had a profound — and negative — impact on their religious lives as they grew into adulthood. Read more.
(AgapePress) – A spokesman for an organization that has launched a new website to provide Christian volunteers says it will tap into the largest pool of volunteers available in the country.TechMission executive director Andrew Sears says its new site — ChristianVolunteering.org — can be the missing link in bringing together people with specialized skills and interests, with opportunities for them to serve. Until now, he says many of those with special skills — from professionals like lawyers and accountants, to web designers and computer programmers — have been looking for a way to volunteer.Read more.
Church historian Vinson Synan has made 20 trips to Latin America while studying the explosive growth of Pentecostal Christianity and he believes that it’s time to state the obvious."We’ve reached the point where you’re not going to be able to get along very well with many believers in the Third World unless you embrace the gifts of the Holy Spirit," said Synan, who teaches at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va.
He walked to the microphone during the question & answer session and raised his head up so that his mouth could project into the speaker. “Did you ever hear your father speak?” he asked. Yolanda flashed a comforting smile and said, “Of course honey, I was there! But I didn’t really remember anything. I had to learn about the things he said after I grew up! I was only 12 when he was killed.” She paused ever so slightly and then asked, “How old are you?” The boy at the microphone said, “Twelve.”
WASHINGTON (BP)–Southern Baptist ethicist Richard Land, joining a diverse group of evangelicals in a teleconference on the bloodshed in Darfur, noted that “would-be perpetrators of genocide in other capitals around the world are watching closely to see if we are going to allow the gangsters in Khartoum [Sudan’s capital] to get away with it.”The Evangelicals for Darfur coalition (EvangelicalsforDarfur.org) ran full-page advertisements Oct. 18 in The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today, among other papers, calling on President Bush to jumpstart the process of dispatching United Nations peacekeepers to the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan.Read more.
Listen to many critics of higher education, and you would think that faith had been long ago banished from the quad — or at least all those quads not at places like Notre Dame or Liberty or Yeshiva.It turns out though, that there are plenty of believers on college faculties. Professors may be more skeptical of God and religion than Americans on average, but academic views and practices on religion are diverse, believers outnumber atheists and agnostics, and plenty of professors can be found regularly attending religious services. Read more.