TODAY IN GOD:
RELIGION NEWS BITES FOR YOUR SNACKING PLEASURE
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Yeah, we know we’re a little behind in the posting this week. Sorry. It’s just that now that we’re semi-retred-ish-esque, things tend to get away from us. And plus, our shuffleboard team is going to the league finals and training’s been pretty hard-core.

Forgive us our bloggy deliquency. Here ya go …

Mystery nun ID’d in Pope John Paul II sainthood case
PARIS – Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre is the French nun whose testimony of a mystery cure from Parkinson’s disease could prompt the Roman Catholic Church to beatify Pope John Paul II, an official at the Paris maternity hospital where she works said Wednesday.

The identity of the nun has been one of the Catholic Church’s most closely guarded secrets. The nun says that she was cured of Parkinson’s after she and her community of nuns prayed to John Paul.

The nun, a member of the “Congregation of Little Sisters of Catholic Motherhood” in Aix-en-Provence in southeast France, works at the Sainte-Felicite hospital in Paris, said the official, who declined to be identified because an official announcement is expected Sunday.

The bishop in the woman’s diocese will announce details about her case during his Palm Sunday Mass this weekend, said Monsignor Slawomir Oder, the Polish cleric spearheading the pontiff’s beatification cause.

French newspaper Le Figaro, in an unsourced report late Wednesday on its Web site, first identified the nun, saying she was 45.

The nun is traveling to Rome for ceremonies Monday marking the second anniversary of the pontiff’s death and the closure of a church investigation into his life which began after chants of “Santo Subito!” or “Sainthood Now!” erupted during John Paul’s 2005 funeral.
FOR FULL STORY (AP via BELIEFNET) CLICK HERE

$27 million ‘anti-evolution’ museum to open soon in Ketucky
PETERSBURG, KY. — Tyrannosaurus rex was a strict vegetarian, and lived with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

There were dinosaurs of every kind aboard Noah’s ark. Some dinosaurs managed to hang around until just a few hundred years ago. The legend of St. George slaying the dragon? That probably was a dinosaur.

Exhibits showing all this and more will be at the Creation Museum, a $27 million religious showcase nearing completion in Northern Kentucky.

The museum, in Boone County near the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, is being built by a non-profit group called Answers in Genesis. It is scheduled to open on Memorial Day. Museum and Northern Kentucky tourism officials are expecting it to be a boon to the region, bringing in at least 250,000 visitors in its first year.
FOR THE FULL STORY CLICK (LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER)HERE

Young Sikhs abandon turban in favour of Bollywood haircuts
NEW DELHI — For centuries one of Sikhism’s most distinguishing symbols, the turban is in danger of falling out of favour.

Young Sikhs are abandoning the traditional headwear, wearying of the elaborate ceremony of maintaining long hair and knotting it under six yards of starched cotton.

“Across Punjab a large number of Sikh youth have cut their hair and, sadly, the turban-tying ceremony for teenage boys has also become rare, even in villages” lamented Avtar Singh Makkar, a senior clergyman.

The majority of the world’s 20 million Sikhs are concentrated in rural Punjab, where barbers – who historically had to supplement their incomes due to a lack of customers – are now doing brisk business.

Cutting the hair renders a Sikh apostate, or “pati”, but many boys are now copying the hairstyles of Bollywood stars.
FOR THE FULL STORY (TELEGRAPH UK) CLICK HERE

No hash matzos?
JERUSALEM – Marijuana is not kosher for Passover, a pro-cannabis advocacy group says, advising Jews who observe the week-long holiday’s special dietary laws to take a break from smoking the weed.

The Green Leaf Party announced on Wednesday that products of the cannibis plant have been grouped by rabbis within a family of foods such as peas, beans and lentils that is off-limits to Jews of European descent during Passover.

The Green Leaf Party, which has made several unsuccessful attempts to win election to parliament on a platform urging marijuana’s legalisation, said it was issuing its advisory as a service to Jews who don’t want to break ritual law.

But it said the rabbinical ban for the holiday beginning at sunset on Monday, during which many Jews eat matzos, or unleavened bread, could be a blessing in disguise.

“Logic dictates that if the rabbis say cannabis is non-kosher for Passover, it is apparently kosher during the rest of the year,” Michelle Levin, a spokeswoman for the party, told the YNet news web site.
FOR THE FULL STORY (REUTERS VIA YAHOO NEWS) CLICK HERE

‘Da Vinci Code’ author wins U.K. copyright case
LONDON – Britain’s Court of Appeal rejected a lawsuit Wednesday from two authors who claimed novelist Dan Brown stole their ideas for his blockbuster novel “The Da Vinci Code.”

Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh had sued Brown’s publisher, Random House Inc., claiming he had copied from their 1982 nonfiction book, “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.”

Both books deal with the theory that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a child, and that the bloodline continues.

One of the judges said copyright protects an author’s labor in researching and writing a book, but doesn’t extend to facts, theories and themes.

Brown wasn’t a defendant. He testified last year that he studied the plaintiffs’ book when writing his best-seller but didn’t copy from it.

The “case should never have come to court in the first place” and was a waste of “time and money,” Random House Group Chief Executive Gail Rebuck said Wednesday in a statement.

“Misguided claims like the one that we have faced, and the appeal, are not good for authors, and not good for publishers,” she said. “But we are glad that the Court of Appeal has upheld the original judgment and that, once again, common sense and justice have prevailed, helping to ensure the future of creative writing in the UK.”

The authors now face legal bills of about $6 million.
TO READ THE FULL STORY (AP VIA MSNBC.COM) CLICK HERE

For Some Black Pastors, Accepting Gay Members Means Losing Others
ATLANTA — When the Rev. Dennis Meredith of Tabernacle Baptist Church here began preaching acceptance of gay men and lesbians a few years ago, he attracted some gay people who were on the brink of suicide and some who had left the Baptist faith of their childhoods but wanted badly to return.

At the same time, Tabernacle Baptist, an African-American congregation, lost many of its most loyal, generous parishioners, who could not accept a message that contradicted what they saw as the Bible’s condemnation of same-sex relations. Over the last three years, Tabernacle’s Sunday attendance shrank to 800, from 1,100.

The debate about homosexuality that has roiled predominantly white mainline churches for years has gradually seeped into African-American congregations, threatening their unity, finances and, in some cases, their existence.

In St. Paul, the Rev. Oliver White, senior minister of Grace Community Church, lost nearly all his 70 congregants after he voted in 2005 to support the blessing of same-sex unions in his denomination, the United Church of Christ.

In the Atlanta area, a hub of African-American life, only a few black churches have preached acceptance of gay men and lesbians, Mr. Meredith said. At one of those congregations, Victory Church in Stone Mountain, attendance on Sundays has fallen to 3,000 people, from about 6,000 four or five years ago, said the Rev. Kenneth L. Samuel, the senior pastor.

Some black ministers, like their white counterparts, said they had been moved to reconsider biblical passages about same-sex relations by personal events, like finding out that a friend or relative is gay. Some members of the clergy contend that because of the antipathy to gay men and lesbians, black churches have done little to address the high rate of H.I.V. infection among African-Americans.

“The church has to come to a point when it has to embrace all the people Jesus embraced, and that means the people in the margins,” Dr. Samuel said. “It really bothered my congregation when I said that as people of color who have been ostracized, marginalized, how can we turn around now and oppress other people?”
FOR THE FULL STORY (NEW YORK TIMES) CLICK HERE

NY bus refitted as supersized oven for Passover matzos
SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. – It wasn’t your typical fire.

When police responded to a report that something smelled of smoke in the middle of the night, they found an old school bus that had been converted into a supersized oven for Passover matzos – complete with a smokestack, exhaust fans and working fire.

A building inspector said that while the bakery bus wasn’t nearly up to code, it was “very creative.”

The derelict red-and-white bus, connected by a plywood passageway to a single-family house, was out of sight of casual passers-by in a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood and had apparently escaped the notice of authorities.

Its owner, Rabbi Aaron Winternitz, said Monday he had been making the unleavened bread there for three Passovers and was eager to do the same this year, with Passover coming up in a week.
FOR THE FULL STORY (AP VIA SIGNONSANDIEGO.COM) CLICK HERE