Canadian Politician's Talking to Evangelicals Gets Him in Trouble

No commentary today, just oodles of article links. The full version of Weblog will return Monday.

Canadian politics:

Harper, Day battle on religion | ‘Quite hypocritical’: Vitriol spews over place of evangelicals (National Post)
Day slips into Bible college for rally | Stop absent from his itinerary (National Post)
Pro-life lobby repeals call for Canadian Alliance membership donations | Jim Hughes, national president of the Campaign Life Coalition, said his group had no idea the party’s rules governing memberships had changed. (Canadian Press)
Day accused of courting evangelicals | Harper camp concerned: Recruitment of former pastor raises suspicions (National Post)
Day accuses Harper, Hill of building firewalls against religious minorities | Day supporters say opponents are just up to same old tricks (Canadian Press)
Abortion issue reappears in fight for Canadian Alliance leadership | Harper said the Canadian Alliance does not have a particular policy on the abortion issue, but Stockwell Day is trying to make it appear that there is one. (Canadian Press)

Church and state:

Lawmakers, don’t stifle religious freedom | New York bill maintains that government shall decide what constitutes religion and what does not, what is Catholic and what is not (William Murphy, Newsday)
Religious signs lose to deed restrictions | Homeowners ordered to pay fees (Houston Chronicle)

Faith-based initiative:

How new faith-based bill would affect local churches | Senate bill allows charitable deductions for religious groups but no direct federal aid. (The Christian Science Monitor)
New point man for charities | Politics-savvy Towey picked by Bush to lead faith-based initiatives (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Bush and funding of faith | The Senate bill is a useful first step toward Congress fine-tuning the constitutional boundary between church and state. (Editorial, The Christian Science Monitor)
Bush’s conversion: He welcomes a scaled-down ‘faith-based’ bill | President Bush has implicitly recognized that his original proposal presented practical and constitutional problems (Editorial, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
Keeping the faith pays off | Senate faith-based initative compromise moves cautiously and does not go as far as some would like, but given the issues at stake, that’s for the best. (Editorial, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

Religion and schools:

Va. Senate panel kills proposal to let schools post Commandments | Religious content deemed patently unconstitutional (The Washington Post)
Student’s rights suit is rejected | He tried to give out items with religious messages in Egg Harbor Twp. A U.S. judge backed the schools. (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
Scholar says God being purged from history | A scholar who spent 18 years studying original manuscripts of the founding fathers says the federal government is actively revising American history, erasing the impact religion had on them and history. (The Clay Center Dispatch, Kansas)
GOP renews push on school choice | Many proposals floating around, Congressman urges proponents to rally around one (The Washington Times)

Science:

Unintelligible redesign | This is the way creationism ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. (William Saletan, Slate.com)
Bush panel mulls therapeutic cloning | The President’s Council on Bioethics has abandoned any hope of consensus on the ethics of human cloning for the purpose of medical research and treatments, as members remain deeply divided over the moral status of a human embryo (Associated Press)
US facing exodus of stem cell experts | Bush restrictions may lead scientists to move to Britain (The Times, London)

War and peace:

Ethiopian, Eritrean religious leaders talk peace | Christians try to defuse tensions lingering between the neighboring countries following a 1998-2000 border war. (Reuters)
Nazareth mosque decision could ignite fuse, warns expert | Hebrew University professor urges Israel to stop construction, but warns that it will cause violence (The Jerusalem Post)
Also: Vatican: Mosque will be `cancer’ in ties between Jews, Christians (Ha’aretz, Tel Aviv)

Abuse:

It’s time to name Satan | There is no way to understand the horror of priestly pedophilia in the Archdiocese of Boston and elsewhere unless one accepts the existence of the Evil One as a powerful reality. (Uwe Siemon-Netto, UPI)
Bishop asks for prayers as season of Lent begins | Abuse overshadows season of penitence (Arizona Daily Star)
Pedophile issue shakes the authority of Boston’s cardinal | Bernard F. Law has become the focal point of the anger and betrayal boiling up from a scandal over pedophile priests in Boston (The New York Times)
‘We have been enlightened’ | Responding to abuse in the church (Wilton D. Gregory, USA Today)
Archdiocese adds up as big business | The Catholic Church, by many definitions, is one of the biggest businesses going, not to mention one of the most political. (Derrick Z. Jackson, The Boston Globe)

Catholic-Orthodox rift in Russia:

Catholic, Orthodox ties reach new low | By setting up a full-fledged Catholic Church in Russia, the pope has shed all but a few of the ecumenical niceties in the Vatican’s approach to the Russian Orthodox Church and has raised new questions about a papal visit. (The Moscow Times)
Rift grows as Russian Orthodox Church rebukes Vatican | Orthodox leaders abruptly cancel a top Catholic cardinal’s visit to Moscow (The Washington Post)

Christian higher education:

Bob Jones University seeks minorities | More than 40 minority students have applied for aid through two new funds that are sponsored by private donations, and nine have won scholarships so far (Associated Press)
This game rivals anything around | Annual matchups between Azusa Pacific and Biola generate unique passion. (Los Angeles Times)

Money:

Fulfilling responsibilities before God | What money means to Christians (Thomas Kostigen, CBS.MarketWatch.com)
Law firm, church reach out-of-court settlement | Company accidentally gave $20,000 of a dead woman’s money to the wrong church. (The Daily News, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada)

Sex and marriage:

Lutheran bishops want to avert disputes over same-sex partnerships | Blessings of same-sex households accepted only if event does not resemble a wedding (Helsingin Sanomat, Helsinki, Finland)
Marriage gets boost from social report | Marriage is more than a private emotional relationship, it’s a social good (The Washington Times)
Pro-marriage activist urges policy | Robert Matheson plans to bring together several dozen southwest Florida clergy to pledge not to marry couples who haven’t gone through premarital counseling and at least a yearlong courtship. (Associated Press)

Missions & ministry:

British Army recruits a woman chaplain | Juliette Hulme became disillusioned with parish life because “there were too many committees involved” (The Daily Telegraph)
‘Prescription for Hope’ | A Christian conference aims to draw attention to the under-funded efforts to combat AIDS (U.S. News & World Report)
Ministry going for God, not gold | Akron drama group will head to Olympics to preach Christianity, abstinence (The Akron Beacon Journal)

Lent:

A tradition revived | Many Protestants, too, celebrated Ash Wednesday (The Cincinnati Post)
Giving it up for Lent: The cuisine of denial | Lent never fails to remind me that ordinary life is a luxury. (Mary Rourke, Los Angeles Times)
Lenten fast a diminishing tradition | Still, it remains ingrained in the Orthodox tradition. (Montreal Gazette)

Christians and Jews:

Christians who hate the Jews | The Archbishop of Wales is among Churchmen worried that opposition to Israel is motivated by anti-Semitism rooted deep in Christian theology (Melanie Phillips, The Spectator, London)
French bishops attack film poster linking cross and swastika | Amen film says Vatican silence allowed holocaust (AFP)
Film takes tough look at Vatican Holocaust silence | Amen centers on real-life SS officer Kurt Gerstein, a chemist who provided death camps with Zyklon B to gas inmates. (Reuters)

Islam:

Ban the Koran | And while you’re at it, better nix the Talmud and the Bible too (Alexander Cockburn, WorkingforChange.com)
Magazine banned over Prophet image | Several Muslim countries have banned the latest issue of the Newsweek magazine, warning that depiction of the Prophet Mohammad in it could spark a widespread anger among Muslims (BBC)

Pop culture:

Tesh is keepin’ the faith | Performer to show secular side at concert (The Denver Post)
Good Heavens! What’s a famous Baptist preacher doing touring with a renegade country star? | Waylon Jennings pals with Will Campbell (The Dallas Morning News)
Sarah Jane is too sexy for Salvation Army | Australian pin-up angered that church called her non-nude photos pornography (Herald Sun, Melbourne, Australia)
Internet pin-up told to stop using Salvation Army name | (Ananova)
Visiting Lake Wobegon | An interview with Garrison Keillor about that mythical Minnesota town and its Lutherans (The Lutheran)

Chicago parishes lose, then keep pastors:

Cardinal: No `pastors for life’ | No pastor is indispensable to his parishioners, says Francis George (Chicago Tribune)
Old St. Pat’s pastor given a reprieve | Extension granted so he can finish parish projects (Chicago Tribune)
Earlier: Old St. Pat’s will lose popular pastor Jack Wall (Chicago Sun-Times)
Rebel priest gets a deal | Cardinal Francis George agreed Tuesday to extend the Rev. Michael Pfleger’s term as pastor of St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church. (Chicago Sun-Times)
Cardinal lets Pfleger remain at St. Sabina | Activist pastor gets extension (Chicago Tribune)
Chicago priest given reprieve | Michael Pfleger, the white leader of a largely black parish, has been arrested some 40 times, generating national headlines and irritating some of his superiors in the Catholic hierarchy (Associated Press)
Earlier: St. Sabina losing its leader (Chicago Sun-Times)
Also: Priest may rub whites wrong way, but he’s gold to blacks | Even when you think Pfleger’s in the right, he finds a way to push a little too far (Mark Brown, Chicago Sun-Times)

St. Paul’s Cathedral:

St Paul’s reveals a fresh new look | Three hundred years of grime have been removed from the intricate stonework friezes and swags of Sir Christopher Wren’s creation using vacuum cleaning, sponging, brushing and the application of latex “face packs” that lift away dirt. (The Daily Telegraph)
Earlier: Christian History Corner: Thrills, Chills, Architecture? | The most exciting adventure at St. Paul’s Cathedral would be a time-traveling jaunt through its history. (Elesha Coffman, Christianity Today)

Other stories of interest:

Praying the American way | Let the cynics aver that in other parts of the globe faith is in decline, the National Prayer Breakfast proved them wrong (Uwe Siemon-Netto, UPI)
Key voices left out of debate on women in church | Lisa Bertagnoli ignores evangelicals on both sides of discussion (Agnieszka Tennant, Chicago Tribune; Note: Agnieszka Tennant is associate editor of Christianity Today)
Fees for Boy Scouts challenged in court | Activist calls them discriminatory (The Washington Post)
Dear God, let Sam’s Club see the light | Interfaith Council for Worker Justice fights Wal-Mart (Las Vegas CityLife)
Clergyman charged after handgun found at vicarage | British vicar is originally from U.S. (Ananova)
Priest to marry pregnant girlfriend | Ugo Moretto used to run the Vatican’s television channel (BBC)