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Maundy Tuesday?
Unless you have a subscription to The Wall Street Journal, you won't be able to read its fascinating piece on changing Holy Week schedules. "Call it flexible praying," writes Nancy Ann Jeffrey.

With spring's main religious celebrations coming up, a small but growing number of churches and synagogues are taking the unusual tack of rejiggering worship schedules for busy congregants. They're moving the pre-Easter "Maundy" service from the traditional Thursday to Tuesday (for less-hectic Easter weekends), holding Passover seders on the obscure third and fourth nights of the holiday week, and in some cases closing their doors on Sunday. The United Methodist Church alone says 30% of its 35,000 U.S. congregations now celebrate some part of the Easter service at an untraditional time, double the number in 1997.

Traditionalists—actually, lots of folks—think it's crazy. "This is just playing fast and loose with the Christian calendar," says Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) spokesman Jerry Van Marter, who has never exactly been known as Mr. Traditional Values. "Maundy Thursday is the Thursday before Easter. Why … would you have it on Tuesday?"

Not St. Patrick
Sure, make the interesting religion article unavailable, but run an incorrect one for free. The Wall Street Journal does offer "The real St. Patrick" by Julia Vitullo-Martin on its free OpinionJournal.com site, but don't bother. In an effort to reclaim St. Patrick's Day from the drunken revelers, Vitullo-Martin writes that the former slave "borrowed the Druid shamrock to explain the Trinity and approved of bonfires, lit by the Irish in homage to their gods, in Easter celebrations. He created the Celtic cross by centering a pagan sun on a Christian cross." Uh, no, no, no, and no.

Life ethics:

• Ohio gets federal ally in anti-abortion case | U.S. Justice Department lawyers are defending an Ohio law that outlaws partial-birth abortions (Fox News)
  
  
• Questions raised on stem cells | Adult cells found less useful than embryonic ones (The Washington Post)
  
  
• Also: Pro-life groups suffer setback over results of stem cell studies (The Daily Telegraph)
  
  
• Also: Expert doubts stem cell findings (The Scotsman)
  
  
• Two Jewish groups back therapeutic cloning | Orthodox leaders break with right (The Washington Post)
  
  
• Pataki vows to sign controversial women's health-care bill | Edward Cardinal Egan called it an "outrageous violation of religious liberty." (New York Post)
  
  
• Also: Egan Rips Coverage For Birth Control (New York Daily News)
  
  
• Earlier: Cardinal lobbies in Albany against bill for contraception coverage (The New York Times)
  
  
• Prolife victory over BBC 'censorship' | The BBC and other broadcasters unlawfully censored a party election broadcast containing graphic images of aborted fetuses, the Court of Appeal decided yesterday (The Daily Telegraph)
  
  
• Also: TV firms were wrong to block 'shocking' images of abortion, says Court of Appeal (The London Independent)
  
  
• Also:Judges say BBC wrong to censor anti-abortionists (The Times, London)
  
  
• Also: BBC found guilty of abortion censorship (The Guardian)
  
  

Politics:

• Bad faith | In his NRB speech, Ashcroft encapsulated everything that is admirable, and everything that is awful, about the Bush administration's understanding of religion in the United States (Peter Beinart, The New Republic)
  
  
• Helms pow wows with celebrity set over Africa's AIDS epidemic | Senator buddies with Chris Tucker, Bono (Fox News)
  
  

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March (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46