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Status report: Faith-based initiative breaks ten-figure mark
Despite Congress's refusal to guarantee faith-based organizations can compete for federal funds, President Bush's faith-based initiative has shows results through executive branch efforts, according to a Washington Post article today.

"The administration has stuck at it, and the dollars going to faith-based organizations are clearly going up. But in the overall scheme of things, we're not talking about huge amounts of money here," Alan J. Abramson, director of the Nonprofit Sector and Philanthropy Program at the Aspen Institute, told the paper.

But in Washington terms, "not huge amounts of money" are still pretty big. The Post reports that in fiscal year 2003, faith-based charities received more than $1.1 billion in competitive grants—a figure that doesn't cover "all agencies or the full gamut of government grants," says Post religion writer Alan Cooperman.

There's no figure for last year, but individual comparisons suggest significant change: The Department of Health and Human Services had a 41 percent jump in the number of grants given to faith-based recipients from fiscal year 2002, and a 19 percent rise in dollars to these kinds of organizations.

"I think that we're seeing that when the playing field is leveled, faith-based organizations can compete with other nonprofits, but by no means are they getting all the money," said Jim Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

WSJ: Beware of secular absolutism, "the most potent religious force in America"
Then again, perhaps we're entering a time when the "faith-based initiative" won't matter. After all, in the eyes of the California Supreme Court, none of the organizations that received the federal funding could be considered "religious," given that they aren't solely focused on "proselytizing," and don't "discriminate" in who they serve.

That's pretty loopy, says a Wall Street Journal editorial today (which you probably won't be able to read without a subscription):

When Catholic Charities insisted that as an avowedly Catholic organization it fit the religious exemption provided by the law in question, the court simply said it was not a religious organization. Catholic Charities? Leave aside the irony that of all America's Catholic institutions, Catholic Charities is arguably the most liberal and sympathetic to secular crusades. Even that didn't protect them. Nor did its practice of employing people outside the Catholic faith—which was used here as reason for denying its religious claims. If the state can order a Catholic organization to include contraceptive coverage as part of its health benefits or drop all drug coverage, it's not hard to see where that's leading. This is what passes for civil liberties now.

The editorial compares the court's decision to the Boy Scouts' legal woes, and says that both cases represent "an effort by liberal activists and their judiciary enablers to turn one set of personal mores into a public orthodoxy from which there can be no dissent, even if that means trampling the First Amendment. Any voluntary association that doesn't comply—the same little platoons once considered the bedrock of American freedom—will be driven from the public square."

Israeli scientists: Retest the Joash tablet
The debate over the authenticity of the James ossuary may have cooled, but another archaeological debate that many observers thought settled has reignited.

When Israel's Antiquities Authority called the James Ossuary inscription a forgery, it also called the Jehoash Tablet a fake. The tablet, which contains wording very similar to 2 Kings 12, is reportedly owned by Oded Golan, who also owns the James Ossuary.

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48