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• Major escalation in church-state fight | Jewish groups split on new proposal to fund building projects for religious institutions (The Jewish Week)

Politics and law:

• Why the U.S.'s International Religious Freedom Commission is harming its status in the world community | We need to learn when to speak, when not to speak, and when to speak only softly and subtly on that most delicate of issues: religious liberty (Marci Hamilton, FindLaw.com)
  
  
• Lake Elsinore a no-prayer zone | Church leaders beg off on invocations after the City Council bars religious references (The Press-Enterprise, Inland California)
  
  
• Request for religious reference in planned Euro constitutional treaty | European Church representatives have asked the Greek European Union presidency to include a religious reference in the future European constitutional treaty (The Times of Malta)
  
  
• Justice Scalia's lament | In contemporary America, governmental neutrality on religious matters should be true neutrality (Editorial, The Washington Post)
  
  
• Bush's moral rectitude is a tough sell in old Europe | President Bush's State of the Union address was shot through with a quality that has come to mark his presidency: an unblinking brand of public moralism that most politicians would shrink from in a largely secular age (The New York Times)
  
  
• Moluccan Christian leaders sentenced | Alex Manuputty, 55, and Samuel Waileruny, 45, were on trial in absentia in Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, for campaigning for an independent state in the Moluccans. (BBC)
  
  
• The President rides out | George Bush's foes see him as an inarticulate bully. Friends say that evangelical faith underpins his every action (The Observer, London)

Religious freedom and discrimination:

• Religious freedom debate in Samoa | Village chiefs have used traditional custom to exile people who professed belief in new denominations (Radio Australia)
  
  
• Wiccan teacher says religious beliefs led to loss of job at Osceola school | Aaron Perry said that shortly after he was hired, students at Neptune Middle School peppered him with questions about the black clothes he wears and about a small Wiccan tattoo of eight arrows on his temple (The Orlando Sentinel)
  
  
• Woman sues ex-employer over religious hostility | Rozanne Sonneborn, a nonreligious Jew, says she lost her job after asking that WJMK Television Productions of Boca Raton stop putting the Bible verses in her pay envelope (Palm Beach Post)

State orders fired worker be rehired:

• State orders cemetery to rehire honor guardsman  | Man fired after saying 'God bless you' (Associated Press)
  
  
• Jersey's on God's side (Associated Press)
  
  
• Job offer for honor guardsman | Patrick Cubbage, fired after blessing bereaved families, is not satisfied by the latest proposal (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

Evolution and creationism:

• Many in state support teaching creationism | Despite split, poll shows room for religious thought (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)
  
  
• Justice Department probes Texas Tech professor's policy | He refuses to write letters of recommendation to students who don't believe in the theory of human evolution (Houston Chronicle)

Education:

• Tolerance and hypocrisy on gay-straight clubs | Clubs that bring gay and straight students together can teach tolerance, but they can also let loose a flood of double-talk from reluctant school officials (The New York Times)
  
  

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January (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47