WASHINGTON
Holocaust Memorial Opens

An atypical museum has opened in the nation’s capital. “Most museums deal in the beautiful,” says Michael Berenbaum, project director for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “We are dealing with the anti-beautiful.”

The museum, established by Congress, will tell the story of the millions of Jews and others—Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and political and religious dissidents—killed by the Nazis during World War II.

Set on land adjoining the National Mall, the museum will include the Hall of Remembrance, a national memorial to the victims of the Holocaust; the Holocaust Research Institute, featuring a 17,000-volume library and extensive archives; and the Children’s Wall.

Among the museum’s artifacts: Railcar #31599G, a freight car used to transport Jews from Warsaw to the death camp at Treblinka; a Danish rescue boat that ferried Danish Jews and resistance fighters to safety in Sweden; and canisters of the poison gas Zyklon B.

COURTS
Judge Upholds Rent Restriction

A landlord has won the first legal round of a free-exercise challenge with the ruling from a Massachusetts court that it is okay to refuse on religious grounds to rent to an unmarried couple.

Paul and Louise Desilets are devout Catholics who adhere to the church’s teaching that premarital sexual relations are sinful. An unmarried couple had sought to rent an apartment the Desilets own in Turners Falls. The prospective tenants, after a five-minute phone conversation with Louise Desilets, filed suit. The state attorney general’s office charged the Desilets with violating a statute that prohibits landlords from refusing to rent on the basis of marital status.

But Nikolas T. Nikas, American Family Association Law Center attorney for the Desilets, argued that fornication still is a crime in Massachusetts and that his clients objected to the couple’s behavior, not status. The court ruled that the Desilets were entitled to a constitutionally based exemption from housing discrimination laws because of their deep religious convictions.

HOLLYWOOD
Church Turns Down Shirley MacLaine

A church in Hagerstown, Maryland, has refused to allow a Hollywood studio to shoot exterior scenes of its building because the film stars Shirley MacLaine.

“Given the fact that Shirley MacLaine is a guru for the New Age religion, which is contrary to Christian truth, we certainly would not want to give her our endorsement,” says Robert Ridenour, pastor of Faith Chapel, an independent, charismatic congregation.

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TriStar Pictures is filming Guarding Tess, to be rated PG, in Maryland. One opera scene in the movie is being filmed at Maryland Theater, across the street from Faith Chapel. But the outside of the theater has been renovated and producers wanted an exterior that looked like an opera house from the early 1900s. They noticed Faith Chapel, which purchased its building from a theater in 1976. The structure, on the National Register of Historic Places, has changed little on the outside since being built in 1914.

Ridenhour says Faith Chapel might jeopardize its nonprofit tax-exempt status in allowing TriStar to use its facilities.

“Regardless of the rating of a movie, our ministry is not to promote movies,” Ridenour says. The 59-year-old MacLaine, author of Out on a Limb, claims to have lived previously and to have talked to extraterrestrials. She recently moved to a ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico, saying, “I feel the high desert calling me.”

PRESBYTERIANS
Budget Cuts to Result in Layoffs

The General Assembly Council task force of the Presbyterian Church (USA) (PCUSA) has slashed $7.6 million from its original 1994 budget of $52 million. In addition, the church’s 12 existing ministry units will be condensed into three overlapping divisions for congregational, national, and worldwide ministries.

Specifics of the cuts will not be announced until final approval is given at the general assembly’s June 2–9 meeting in Orlando, Florida. However, James D. Brown, the council’s executive director, says, “There will be dozens of people who will lose their jobs.” The PCUSA has 1,000 national staff workers, 650 of them at denomination headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky.

“There seems to be a lot of redundancy that won’t be necessary in a simplified structure,” says Cam Murchison, task force chair.

In addition, the PCUSA is bracing for $1 million budget shortfalls in each of the following three budget years. “We have no real hope of changing in the next few years,” says Marj Carpenter, PCUSA news services manager. Carpenter says the escalating cost of sponsoring missionaries, lower than expected returns on investments, and the high administrative price of reuniting the southern and northern branches of the church a decade ago after a 122-year division are key factors in the budget crunch.

PEOPLE AND EVENTS
Briefly Noted

David G. Schmiel, director of theological education of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in St. Louis, has been chosen to succeed Robert D. Preus as president of the synod’s Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The selection ends strife dating back to 1989 when the seminary’s regents retired Preus against his will. Preus filed two lawsuits and a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and ultimately he was reinstated by the synod’s chief court.

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• Under pressure from several college recruiters, Westminster Schools in Atlanta (CT, March 8, p. 50) has abandoned its policy of requiring faculty members to be professing Christians. The preparatory school, founded in 1951, now allows the president to appoint faculty members “of other faiths who have a deep respect for Christian principles.”

James Wayte Fulton, Jr., a board member of Christianity Today, Inc., for 30 years, died February 28 in Montgomery, Alabama. He was 81. Fulton had been a U.S. Navy chaplain, minister of several Presbyterian churches in the Southeastern United States, and a board member at King College and Davidson College. Fulton was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

Christianity and Crisis, a 52-year-old journal of opinion, folded March 29 because of financial difficulties. The magazine had sought an infusion of $250,000 for each of the next three years or sponsorship by an institution to keep on publishing. The magazine, which had a $490,000 annual budget, was started by Reinhold Niebuhr and had a circulation of 13,000.

Donn Moomaw has resigned as pastor of Bel Air Presbyterian Church overlooking California’s San Fernando Valley, saying he had “stepped over the line of acceptable behavior” with some members of the congregation. The 61-year-old pastor to former President Ronald Reagan offered prayers at both of Reagan’s inaugurations.

Matthew Fox, a 52-Does Faith year-old Roman Catholic theologian who has been involved in feuds with church authorities since 1985, has been expelled by the Vatican from the religious order he joined 34 years ago. The Vatican cited “illegitimate absence from his religious community” in removing Fox from the Dominicans in Chicago. As a proponent of “creation spirituality,” Fox has blended historical Christianity with Eastern religion, feminism, and environmentalism.

• The United Church of Canada has suspended Christopher Bowen for six months with pay after the Roxboro minister posed nude for an underground Ottawa-based homosexual magazine, Malebox. Bowen, 31, is suing for reinstatement, saying church regulations were not followed in his suspension.

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Jack Iker has been consecrated Episcopal bishop in Fort Worth. Iker, formerly of Sarasota, Florida, has been an outspoken critic of the ordination of women and is expected to continue the tradition of his predecessor, Bishop Clarence Pope.

Roy Stephen Nicholson, general president of the Wesleyan Methodist Church (1947–59), died March 2 at age 89. He was chairman of the Department of Religion at Central Wesleyan College from 1959 to 1968.

SURVEY
Dose Faith Influence Spending?

Most Americans believe God cares what they do with their money, says Princeton professor Robert Wuthnow. But that has little effect on how they actually spend their money.

Wuthnow bases that indictment on the results of a three-year study of religion and economic values that included a survey of over 2,000 people in the U.S. labor force.

Faith provided earlier generations “with a moral language that helped curb the pursuit of money,” and it continues to do so to some extent now, Wuthnow explains in a recent discussion of his findings in the Christian Century. “Nevertheless, faith makes little difference to the ways in which people actually conduct their financial affairs.”

Here is why he says that:

While 71 percent of those surveyed agreed that “being greedy is a sin against God,” only 12 percent said they had been taught that it is wrong to want a lot of money. Among those who attend church every week, the proportion was only 16 percent.

Wuthnow’s survey finds that many want a lot of money; 84 percent said they wish they had more money than they do. And statistical analysis of the survey results reveals that there is no conflict for religious people between valuing one’s relationship with God and valuing making a lot of money. “Taking other differences into account, people who highly valued their relationship with God were no less likely to value making a lot of money.”

Other findings include:

• 92 percent believe that the condition of the poor is a serious social problem;

• 74 percent reject the view that “it is morally wrong to have a lot of nice things when others are starving”;

• 53 percent believe “people who work hard are more pleasing to God than people who are lazy.”

His findings also provide some signs of hope. Three out of four surveyed say they would like churches and synagogues to “encourage people to be less materialistic.”

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