RELIGION

Baptist Press has published a feature on military chaplains, with a focus on those trained at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.

Dr. Evans, of Oak Cliff Community Bible Fellowship, will begin the election year sermon series this Sunday. Here's a press release:

Here's the Associated Press story.

The satirist who took on the US in the movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is wandering the Middle East. He's an Israeli, mind you. The foreign language he used in "Borat" was Hebrew. The Forward has a column by someone who got spoofed in a phony interview. Mostly not amused. A nugget:

Our rock-star host concluded with a mind-boggling song about the epic Middle East conflict between Jews and Hindus. At the crescendo, he grabbed our hands and joined them with his. Unlike Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert (or President Bush and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah), my Palestinian fellow interviewee and I are not hand-holders, but we suffered through it. As we started to hurry away, the interviewer followed us, cameras still rolling, peppering us with nonsense questions about being taken hostage and having his throat slit on camera.

The link.

From Beliefnet, here's an Independence Day feature. Editor-in-chief Steven Waldman has assembled a gallery of "important moments or themes in the history of religious freedom in America."

Waldman is the author of "Founding Faith," a history of the five Founding Fathers who had the most influence on religion's role in the state: Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Adams and Madison.

(Pictured, from the Beliefnet gallery: Evangelist George Whitefield, whose passionate sermons helped bring about the First Great Awakening, a period of heighened religious fervor in colonial America in the 1730s and 1740s.)

"By a coincidence marvelous and enviable, Thomas Jefferson in like manner with his compeer, John Adams, breathed his last on the 4th of July. Emphatically may we say, with a Boston paper, had the horses and the chariot of fire descended to take up the patriarchs, it might have been more wonderful, but not more glorious. We remember nothing in the annals of man so striking, so beautiful, as the death of these two `time-honoured' patriots, on the jubilee of that freedom, which they devoted themselves and all that was dear to them, to proclaim and establish. It cannot all be chance."
- the New-York American, in 1826, quoted in the recent book "The Dead Beat"

Holly Hacker and I had the following story in today's paper, about the accreditation status of Paul Quinn College and Criswell College - two Dallas schools that are religiously affiliated:

Carl and Raylene Worthington face manslaughter charges in Oregon over the death of their 14-month-old daughter. The little girl died of pneumonia and a blood infection. The Worthingtons belong to a religious group, the Followers of Christ Church, that shuns medical treatment.

From Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service, here's a Q&A with Shawn Francis Peters of the University of Wisconsin, who has studied the Followers. He's the author of "When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children and the Law."

The Village Church will once again be doing repair/restoration work at Dallas area schools. Here's a press release:

During the Cultural Revolution, the Communist leaders of China confiscated Bibles -- and they've never been fans of the Good Book.

But during the Summer Olympics, China will permit the British-based Bible Society to hand out Bibles and booklets with the Gospels in Chinese and English.

Here's a story from The Times of London.

What did anybody expect? They were going to endorse Nader? Anyway, here's how Eric Gorski of the AP starts his account:

Conservative evangelical leaders met privately this week to discuss putting aside their misgivings about John McCain and coalescing around the Republican's presidential bid while urging him to consider social conservative favorite Mike Huckabee as a running mate.

About 90 of the movement's leading activists gathered Tuesday night in Denver for a meeting convened by Mathew Staver, who heads the Florida-based legal advocacy group Liberty Counsel.

And the link.

Christina Comer was fired last year. In a federal lawsuit, she says that's because she forwarded an e-mail about a lecture critical of so-called intelligent design. That, in the eyes of the Texas Education Agency, violated a policy requiring employees to remain neutral on the subject of creationism.

That policy, her suit claims, is unconstitutional, since it "has the purpose or effect of endorsing religion, and thus violates the Establishment Clause" of the First Amendment.

Here's the story from Terrence Stutz of our Austin bureau..

"But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant."

-- Ralph Ellison, "Invisible Man"

The Presbyterian News Service sends along this feature obituary on Jorge Lara-Braud, who died recently in Austin:

The conservative Action Institute (Motto: Integrating Judeo-Christian truths with Free Market principles) has posted a column by Anthony B. Bradley, a research fellow at the institute, and assistant professor of apologetics and systematic theology at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis. Professor Bradley takes exception to hip hop artists who invoke God at awards ceremonies as they collect accolades for sexually explicit songs. A pungent nugget:

Lil' Wayne's thanking God is equivalent to a strip club patron thanking God for providing women to objectify and dehumanize, or a prostitute thanking God that she has the ability to destroy her dignity to pay bills. There are some "successes" that are rightly attributed to social moral decay and the unchecked spread of evil, and cannot be purified by a passing mention of "God." With its culture-rotting messages, much of hip hop is exemplary of the kind of enterprise that does no credit to the market that gave it birth.

And the link.

This roundup of briefs from Catholic News Service includes one about a seafaring priest from Beaumont.

Since its founding in 1845, the U.S. Naval Academy has asked midshipmen to stand for a prayer at noon meals.

The American Civil Liberties Union wants the practice discontinued, saying it makes some people uncomfortable.

Here's a short story by Adelle M. Banks of Religion News Service.

Christianity Today has a story on Shaun Casey, who is helping Barack Obama reach out to evangelicals. The story says Casey attended Abilene Christian before going on to Harvard.

Dr. Albert Moeler, one of the more interesting of Southern Baptist theologians, has a new book upcoming that looks to waste his power on a less-than-robust foe. According to my e-box:

"In his new book, Atheism Remix, Dr. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary examines atheism's surge in popularity."

And yes, there's statistical evidence for a "surge" in people saying they're atheists, in the same way that those "ocean in a bottle" desk doo-dads might contain a tsunami. According to last year's Pew Forum survey, the percentage of Americans who say they're atheists has soared all the way to -- wait for it -- 1.6 percent! And a fifth of those say they believe in some kind of god.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! (Image above is a publicity still from the Chicken Little movie.)

Top movie in the US this week is the animated WALL-E. And while one might think an animated SF romantic comedy doesn't lend itself to faith-style analysis, one would be wrong.

Here's a link to Christianity Today's friendly interview with Pixar's Andrew Stanton in which parallels to the Noah's Ark story are explored.