Related articles and links |  1 of 3

• Related articles and links

Weblog is still officially on vacation, but we're still reading religion news online (albeit on a very slow dialup connection). Fortunately, it's a very slow religion news week. But there are a few stories worth noting:

Jews for Jesus sues Google over blog  (Reuters)
jewsforjesus.blogspot.com has few posts since its launch in January 2005, but one imagines it's getting a lot of traffic this week. Jews for Jesus says the critical site is guilty of trademark infringement.

Texas church plans to give away a house (The Daily News, Galveston, Tex.)
In past years, Abundant Life Christian Center in La Marque, Texas, has given away a car, a motorcycle, and furniture. It draws about 2,000 each year to its New Year's Eve service. One wonders if the potential of leaving church with a $120,000 three-bedroom house might boost that attendance a bit this year. Any out-of-staters planning on making the trip?

KKLA-FM's evangelical voice has grown louder (Los Angeles Times)
This profile of the country's largest Christian talk radio station (with more than 250,000 listeners each week) isn't terribly exciting. The interesting factor is how poverty issues, which generally aren't considered a conservative Christian radio staple, keep coming up. KKLA general manager Terry Fahy tells the Times, "We believe [the station] inspires people to live better lives. We are constantly exhorting people to reach out more to their fellow men, be more giving to the poor."

Later, Clay Schmit, professor of preaching at Fuller Theological Seminary, says, "They're obviously targeting a particular kind of Christian audience. That audience may not include all Christians. But there is a spirit of care that you get in these programs—to help children through World Vision, to help homeless people in Los Angeles, to meet various needs here and internationally—and that's the kind thing all of us as Christians can embrace."

New cultural approach for conservative Christians: Reviews, not protests (The New York Times)
The New York Times discovers Christian movie review web sites.  "New," for the Times, means "we haven't heard of this before," even if it has been going on for years and years.  (Christianity Today's Film Forum feature, now on Christianity Today Movies, has been rounding up the Christian film critics every week since 1999.)

Homecoming for a congregation in New Orleans (Associated Press)
A heartwarming Christmas story.

Easing the way when the spirit is willing (The New York Times)
Making churches accessible to those in wheelchairs, the elderly, and other disabled churchgoers, is a perennial issue that no church can avoid. Looks like it might be a particularly important issue in New England, where the churches tend to be older than elsewhere (and, though the article doesn't say it, so do the churchgoers).

Bearing the cross | (The Guardian, London)
Robert Tait considers the plight of Christians in Iran.

Survivor tells of girls' beheadings (The Australian)
The lone survivor of the Sulawesi attacks, in which three Christian girls were beheaded, speaks to the press for the first time.

Proselytizing creates friction in Indonesia (The Post and Courier, Charleston, S.C.)
In the wake of the beheadings, Muslims think that the real problem in Indonesia is those darn relief workers.

Hostage takers' silence likely a good sign for Canadians (National Post, Canada)
One month after the Christian Peacemaker Teams workers were taken hostage, there's still no word on what happened to them.

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December (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49