TODAY IN GOD:
RELIGION NEWS BITES FOR YOUR SNACKING PLEASURE
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Anti-Gay Church Parodies “We Are the World” Video

A church known nationally for picketing soldiers’ funerals is being accused by a music company of violating copyright laws with an Internet video parody of the 1980s song, “We Are the World.”

An attorney for Topeka, Kan.-based Westboro Baptist Church said Thursday the parody, “God Hates the World,” is protected under First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and religious expression. She said the church would continue to post the video on its Web site.

Westboro Baptist pastor, the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr., has garnered national attention in a campaign against homosexuality.

The church contends that soldiers’ deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan are God’s punishment for a tolerance of homosexuality in the United States.

“It’s all our effort to deliver a faithful message to this generation,” said Shirley Phelps-Roper, church attorney and daughter of the pastor.

But Warner/Chappel Music Inc. of Los Angeles said the video infringes on its copyright to “We Are the World.” The song raised money for famine relief the video featured some of American music’s biggest stars, including Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen.
FOR THE FULL STORY (AP VIA FORBES.COM) CLICK HERE

THE GOOD SHEPHERD: A Chicago priest tends his flock in war-torn Iraq
RAMADI, Iraq — The Marines called it a chapel, but it really was a conference room in a war zone, with high sandbagged windows, dirty walls behind camouflage netting and sunburned Marines watching a war movie under a blast of air conditioning.

The movie stopped for church, a Catholic mass said by Army Capt. John Barkemeyer. The chaplain had arrived by Humvee, traveling through streets where members of his flock had died, past the place where he had narrowly escaped injury from a roadside bombing himself.

A lanky former pastor on Chicago’s South Side who serves despite his moral misgivings about this war, Barkemeyer paused to trade the body armor and helmet of an Army officer for the white and yellow robe of a Roman Catholic priest. When he raised his arms, the hem of his robe hung incongruously over tan desert boots, and the kindness in his voice competed with grunts from a weight room across the hall.

For Barkemeyer, 43, it was the fifth and final mass he would lead on a day that had taken him through most of Ramadi, the war-torn capital of Anbar province. The trip was shadowed by oppressive heat, the possibility of mortal peril — and an unusual calm.

“I’m supposed to be here,” he said later. “This might not be the place on the face of the Earth that I would choose to be if I could be anywhere, but knowing what I can do, what I can offer soldiers, I believed it then and more strongly believe it now.

“That doesn’t mean life is any easier.”
FOR THE FULL STORY (JAMES JANEGA IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE) CLICK HERE

Rabbi’s Campaign for Kosher Standards Expands to Include Call for Social Justice
MENDOTA HEIGHTS, MINN. — A dozen years ago, Rabbi Morris Allen stood before his congregation in this Twin Cities suburb to announce a program called Chew by Choice. As Conservative Jews, the members of his synagogue were bound by religious law to eat only kosher food, but as typical Americans, relatively few did so. So the rabbi asked them just to stop eating flagrantly impermissible foods like pork and shellfish as the first step toward fuller observance of the dietary strictures.

The campaign at his synagogue, Beth Jacob Congregation, ultimately won Rabbi Allen an invitation to lecture at an Orthodox yeshiva in New York. Closer to home, he served alongside Orthodox rabbis on a kosher-certification panel for the Twin Cities area and collaborated with a local Hasidic rabbi in encouraging supermarkets to stock kosher meat after the last kosher butcher in St. Paul went out of business.

In the last year, however, Rabbi Allen has extended his concern with kosher standards from adherence to religious ritual to commitment to social justice. His drive to create a “hechsher tzedek,” a justice certification, on the basis of how kosher food companies treat their workers, has brought him into intense conflict with the Orthodox authorities who traditionally have dominated the certification process.

Last month, the hechsher tzedek received formal endorsement from the Rabbinical Assembly, the national association of Conservative rabbis. In voting to support Rabbi Allen’s initiative with an unspecified amount of “volunteer and financial support,” the assembly invoked a verse from Deuteronomy declaring, “You shall not abuse a needy and destitute laborer, whether a fellow countryman or a stranger.”
FOR THE FULL STORY (SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN IN THE NY TIMES) CLICK HERE

Gingrich attacks ‘radical secularism’
LYNCHBURG, Va. – Republican Newt Gingrich challenged Liberty University’s graduating class Saturday to honor the spirit of school founder Jerry Falwell by confronting “the growing culture of radical secularism” with Christian ideals.

Gingrich, a former House speaker considering a 2008 presidential run, repeatedly quoted Bible passages to a mournful crowd of about 17,000 packed into the university’s football stadium four days after Falwell’s death.

“A growing culture of radical secularism declares that the nation can not profess the truths on which it was founded,” Gingrich said. “We are told that our public schools can no longer invoke the creator, nor proclaim the natural law nor profess the God-given quality of human rights.

“In hostility to American history, the radical secularists insist that religious belief is inherently divisive and that public debate can only proceed on secular terms,” he said.
FOR THE FULL STORY (AP VIA DALLAS MORNING NEWS) CLICK HERE

Blue light aids ill Mennonite children
EAST EARL, Pa. (AP) — Across the moonless dark of Lancaster County, where horse-drawn buggies clatter along dusty country roads and many families shun electricity, a strange blue light cuts harshly through the night.

Over the cornfields it beckons, like some otherworldly force, beaming from the bedroom window of a 100-year-old Mennonite farmhouse.

Downstairs, flaxen-haired girls with braids read to younger children … a mother in a traditional long print dress and white organdy cap rocks a slumbering child … a father returning from the fields pulls up a chair to the coal-fired stove.

The scene is bathed in the glow of a single gas lamp.

Upstairs, a baby sleeps in another kind of light, in a very different world.

High-intensity blue electric rays burn down upon his crib, creating an iridescent haze that envelops the room. The lights are suspended from a heavy stainless steel canopy just inches above the child.

The baby wears only a diaper and has no blankets, just starched white sheets. Mirrors are built into one side of the crib. Fans hum loudly to keep him cool.

With his chubby cheeks and bleached blonde hair, 15-month old Bryan Martin looks like an angel in his luminous cocoon.

But Bryan is a very sick child.

The whites of his eyes are yellow and his skin is an unnatural gold.

The blue lights are saving his life.
FOR THE FULL STORY (AP VIA NEW YORK TIMES) CLICK HERE

WANTED: MORE BLACK WORSHIPERS
RICHMOND, VA. — A woman of quiet faith on most days, Lucille Mills transforms each Sunday into the Rev. CeCee — a foot-stompin’ minister who can match hallelujahs with the best Southern preachers.

Like black ministers across Virginia, she aims to tap the energy of her church and direct it toward worship. But she’s an Evangelical Lutheran, and her tiny Chesapeake church is part of an effort to diversify the overwhelmingly white denomination, so closely identified with its German and Scandinavian roots.

Faced with shrinking membership, the denomination is changing the culture of some of its congregations to attract other ethnicities. In the case of Rejoice Lutheran Church, that means soul revivals and free carwashes, urban mentoring programs and vibrant, gospel-infused services.

The denomination’s goals are ambitious, and there are many obstacles to overcome. Mills says most African Americans tell her they’re puzzled by the Lutheran tradition and often mistake it for Roman Catholicism. Others imagine stuffy services where freewheeling praise is discouraged.

Often, she said, “they think it’s inauthentic — they think it’s for white people.”

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America estimates that just 1.1 percent of its 4 million members were African American as of 2005 — dismal, leaders say, considering African Americans make up more than 12 percent of the U.S. population.
FOR THE FULL STORY (WASHINGTON POST) CLICK HERE

At a University in India, New Attacks on an Old Style: Erotic Art
NEW DELHI — It’s a heady time for Indian contemporary art. Never before has it fetched such extravagant prices and acclaim abroad. Never before have Indians at home been so prosperous as to support a proliferation of galleries, exhibitions and even investment funds devoted to art.

But art and its inevitable transgressions continue to provoke fury in Hindu nationalist quarters, leading stalwarts to shut down an exhibition, drive an artist out of the country or, in the latest case, send a young art student to jail for a final-exam project deemed offensive. The student’s arrest has prompted protests from prominent artists across the country and dominated newspaper headlines in recent days.

The tempest began on May 9 when a lawyer accompanied by police officers and television news crews marched into the art department at the respected Maharaja Sayajirao University, a state-run institution in Vadodara, in western Gujarat state. (Gujarat’s elected government is led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.)

The lawyer, Niraj Jain, based locally and affiliated with the party, said he was aggrieved by several works exhibited on a wall in the department library, including a painting — or rather a digital enlargement of a painted work — depicting a female form wielding weapons in her many arms, evoking a goddess from the Hindu pantheon, and giving birth. It was the final-year art project by Chandramohan, a graduate student who goes by one name.

The university, at the urging of Mr. Jain, persuaded the police to arrest the student and put him in jail. His crime, the city police commissioner, P. C. Thakur, said, was “deliberately offending religious sentiments.”
FOR THE FULL STORY (NY TIMES) CLICK HERE