April 2007 Archives

Massive protests in Turkey yesterday highlighted the growing tension between religious Turks and their secular sisters in the predominantly Muslim country.

Two weeks after three Bible sellers were murdered by Turkish zeoloats, the at least 700,000 secular protesters were concerned about what Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul's campaign for presidency would mean for non-religious Turks living in Istanbul and other major cities.

“People here are the real Turkey," one protester told the New York Times:

There's now one week remaining until I head over to the Jewish Journal. To ensure a smooth transition for those who enjoy reading The God Blog, I have registered a web domain -- thegodblog.org -- and have begun cross-posting some items there and adding originals.

When I pack my desk next Thursday, thegodblog.org will be my Internet home until I get set up on the JJ's website. Please join me.

The gun control discussion was inevitable in the wake of the Va Tech massacre. But here's a weighty voice on an unlikely side. Ben Witherington is a professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky, and he recently posted this headline on his blog: "CHRISTIANS AND GUN CONTROL: AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME?"

I wrote in January about Jack Hayford, the low-key and quietly influential president of the Echo Park-based International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. This week, continuing the tradition of, ehem, notable writers chronicalling the lives of Foursquare leaders, Pulitzer-winning author John Updike takes a look in the New Yorker at Foursquare's controversial founder, Aimee Semple McPherson.

From Catholic Online:

KOTRI, Pakistan (UCAN) – Sattar Masih was having breakfast attired in his wedding suit as his cousins sang and danced, but their merriment was drowned out by a mob shouting against Christians and demanding his arrest.

Police handcuffed and dragged the Catholic bridegroom from the wedding house, decorated with colorful lights, in the Christian colony in Kotri, Sindh province. The handcuffs contrasted starkly with the mehndi , a colored paste applied to the groom's hands, and gaana, a bracelet of strings on his wrist.

That is what the Vatican's head of interfaith dialogue, French Cardinal Paul Poupard, said Wednesday, via Catholic News Service:

In predominantly Christian countries, it is important that Christian chapels "maintain their character as a place for Christian worship," he told Catholic airport chaplains meeting in Rome April 23-27.

Cardinal Poupard said that working in the world's airports, places where the fear of terrorism is high, the chaplains have an important role to play, "to encourage dialogue and prevent fear and pessimism from damaging relations with persons of other faiths."

Dialogue, he said, is the only nonviolent weapon available for fighting terrorism, "one of the most absurd and painful evils of our age."

I've become a big fan of Jerome Groopman, the Harvard professor of medicine who writes about health care for the New Yorker. A excerpt of his new book, How Doctors Think, that ran in the New Yorker recently offered elegantly written insight into what leads doctors to the wrong medical conclusion. Included in that piece was an introspective reflection that took the reader to Groopman's time as a fellow at UCLA, which means he must be cool.

In tomorrow's Forward, Zachary Sholem Berger has a Q & A with the good doctor that asks not how doctors think, but how Groopman does.

The blogosphere is going nuts over accusations yesterday that Israel's most outspoken Arab leader, who fled the country last month and resigned from parliament Sunday, aided enemies of the state during last summer's war with Hezbollah.

Azmi Bishara claimed on Al Jazeera TV that Israeli leaders were trying to muzzle an oppositional voice:

Israel wants to use this as a tool in order to get rid of this position in Israel which calls for Israel to be the state of its citizens and accepting the national character of the Arabs in the country.

Whether or not Bishara did anything wrong, the accusations stand to stress the tenuous relationships of Arabs and Jews living together in Israel.

"In this difficult time me must increase Jewish-Arab cooperation and not be swept up by incitement against the Arab public," Labor MK Nadia Hilou told Haaretz.

Swiss scientist Michel Mayor, who was credited with co-finding the first planet outside our solar system, is now sleuthing for signs of alien life. What if he finds it? What would that mean for the religious faithful on planet Earth?

This one's a no-brainer, via the NY Times.

I wrote a lot of stupid things when I was at UCLA, so I am not without sin. But this gaffe from today's Daily Bruin ranks up there with Tommy Thompson's Jews-love-money comment:

Bruin Plaza was taken over on Tuesday by hundreds of students draped in the blue and white Israeli flags celebrating the country’s 59th independence day.

I assume the reporter didn't intend to imply that UCLA's Jewish students were marching in like a caravan of Israeli settlers. But it's difficult to not read it that way.

It doesn't matter what rhetorical polishing President Bush's team has done to market the "War on Terror." Outside the United States, it's perceived as an effort to undermine -- even attack -- Islam, according to a report by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a research group affiliated with the University of Maryland.

"While US leaders may frame the conflict as a war on terrorism, people in the Islamic world clearly perceive the US as being at war with Islam,” said Steven Kull, editor of WorldPublicOpinion.org.

Jawaad Faizi, a journalist for the Mississauga, Ont.-based newspaper The Pakistan Post, was beaten last Tuesday by two men, one armed with a cricket bat, for an opinion column criticizing the leader of their Muslim organization, Idara Minhaj-ul-Quran. From the National Post:

In a column published two weeks ago, Mr. Faizi was critical of Minhajul- Quran, an Islamic group based in Pakistan with offices here in Canada. The group's leader, Allama Tahir-Ul-Qadri, has been quoted as saying he can "write the name of Mohammed on the moon with his finger." The Pakistan Post writer has argued that Qadri "is always trying to fool the people."

Following the appearance of Mr. Faizi's column, the paper was subjected to threatening phone calls. On Tuesday, that point was made again, this time by two men who beat Mr. Faizi with a cricket bat and advised him in Punjabi and Urdu to heed their warnings and back off.

Hat-tip: Bible Belt Blogger

"Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?"

Hitler reportedly asked that question of his commanding generals in 1939, as he prepared to rid the world of Jews. Holocaust historians site this quotation when trying to explain Hitler's rational for how his acts would escape world condemnation. And yet, Jews -- who have so much in common with Armenians -- have struggled to embrace Armenians as true kindred spirits, diaspora people like Jews, who, though they did not suffer the Holocaust, suffered a holocaust.

Today marks the 92nd anniversary of the beginning of what most historians call the Armenian Genocide. And though most Western countries have recognized the acts as genocide, the United States and Israel have not. The U.S. has not wanted to offend an important military ally, and Israel has been hard pressed to condemn the founding fathers of the best friend in the Muslim world.

But the tide has shifted.

Limbo -- the place created by Catholic theology, not the dance pictured here -- never made sense to me. How could there be eternal happiness apart from God? The non-literal understanding of hell is that it is a spiritual place made miserable by one's separation from God. But in the Catholic Church, where baptism is believed essential for entry into heaven, Christians struggled to understand what happened to babies who died before they were baptized. So Catholics created a place called limbo.

Shortly after Pope John Paul II died and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became pope, the Church began reconsidering limbo. On Friday, Benedict reversed the centuries-old teaching. From the AP:

Theologians said the move was highly significant -- both for what it says about Benedict's willingness to buck a long-standing tenet of Catholic belief and for what it means theologically about the Church's views on heaven, hell and original sin -- the sin that the faithful believe all children are born with.

Although Catholics have long believed that children who die without being baptized are with original sin and thus excluded from heaven, the Church has no formal doctrine on the matter. Theologians, however, have long taught that such children enjoy an eternal state of perfect natural happiness, a state commonly called limbo, but without being in communion with God.

''If there's no limbo and we're not going to revert to St. Augustine's teaching that unbaptized infants go to hell, we're left with only one option, namely, that everyone is born in the state of grace,'' said the Rev. Richard McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. ''Baptism does not exist to wipe away the ''stain'' of original sin, but to initiate one into the Church."

The LA Times today joined the inevitable chorus of newspapers asking "Why?" in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings. (Christianity Today, for which I regularly freelance, has a great round-up.) These stories are both knee-jerk and necessary because seemingly senseless bloodshed is one of the most difficult circumstances to reconcile with a benevolent Creator.

Well, Donald Trump didn't want me, but the Jewish Journal does.

So today, I accepted a writing job at the largest Jewish paper outside New York. I know what you're thinking. You're not Jewish. Not religiously. No matter how bushy a beard you can grow. Correct, but I'll be reporting about a lot more than just Judaism -- Jewish life, politics, history and most everything else.

The job will be satisfying both professionally and personally. The weekly format and larger newshole will help me develop my narrative voice and become an expert in a specific field. The subject matter will allow me to learn more about my ancestors while getting a paycheck.

My new digs will be in Koreatown. From the 15th floor suite, I can see Kate's office and for the first time since we got married, we'll be able to meet up for lunch. (My first job put us 80 miles apart; the Daily News separates us by 20 miles.)

I'm grateful for the time I've had in Woodland Hills, for the opportunities Ron and Melissa have given me to grow, for the shepherding editing of Aron Miller, who brought me here. This unexpected offer brought a tough decision; I'll miss a lot of people. Brent Hopkins, my good buddy and role model here at the Daily News, had this nice farewell on the paper's union blog.

During the next two weeks, if you have a good religion story, let me know. And after that, I'll be taking the religion blog with me. Loyal God Blogites (Mom, I know you're reading), please come and see what I'm doing for the Jewish Journal.

Who knew that presidential candidate Mitt Romney's great-great grandpappy was a venerated martyr of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Or that the man, Parley P. Pratt, was murdered by the jilted ex-husband of one of his 12 wives?

Frank Lockwood, Arkansas' Bible-Belt Blogger, looks in.

* Though the Mormon Church officially denounced polygamy a century ago, the fundamental branch led by the incarcerated Warren Jeffs still favors the old-fashioned life.

Where the religious meets the ridiculous (via tomorrow's Forward):

Rabbi Yonassan Gershom’s continuing mission: to find a publisher for “Jewish Themes in ‘Star Trek’ (Where No Rabbi Has Gone Before!)” His goal: to use the mother of all sci-fi franchises to teach people about Judaism.

“As an intellectual, I related with a person like Spock,” Gershom told The Shmooze. “I was what they called an egghead. So I was a Trekkie from very early on.”

I'm actually surprised Gershom's struggling to sell this book. The concept is unique and the title catchy (both clever and cliche). At least in the Christian marketplace, books like this abound. From the Star Wars series alone: Christian Wisdom of the Jedi Masters, The Gospel According to Star Wars: Faith, Hope and the Force and Star Wars Jesus.

Following Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Turkey last November -- the homeland of the man who tried to assassinate his papal predecessor -- there was optimism that Turkey would begin to treat its religious minorities better. (I wrote about it here.) Benedict was such a believer that he backed Turkey's bid to join the European Union. But the predominantly Muslim nation keeps finding ways to stand out as a bastion of intolerance.

Wednesday, three Bible publishers in Istanbul had their hands and feet bound and their throats slit. Police arrested five Turkish zealots, each was carrying a letter that read: "We five are brothers. We are going to our deaths."

Clearly, things are not getting better for non-Muslims in Turkey.

Last February, a Catholic priest was executed gangland-style. Two Protestants Turks went on trial shortly before the pope arrived for "insulting Turkishness" and Islam. And in January, crusading Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was assassinated by an ultra-nationalist teen.

Next week the world will remember the Armenian Genocide -- beginning in 1915, Ottoman Turks slaughtered an estimated 1.5 million ethnic Armenians. Turkey refuses to recognize the butcherings as genocide. (So does the United States.)

The LA Times has a story today about an entrepreneur's latest venture -- producing a dramatic reading of the Bible that will fill 70 CDs. Audio recordings of the Good Book have been done before, but pop music reporter Geoff Boucher adds a bit of celebrity intrigue with a clever lede:

Finding the perfect Jesus was no problem for Carl Amari — he just called up Jim Caviezel, who starred in "The Passion of the Christ" — but making a deal with just the right devil has turned out to be harder than hell.

"And you need a good Satan," Amari said with a bit of exasperation, "because Satan has some of the best lines in the Bible."

The best part of the online article, though, is this box that succeeds the third paragraph:

FOR THE RECORD: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the Bible edition being used in a new audio-book project as the St. James version. The Bible being used is the King James version.

It's not often I read an editorial that begins like this:

IN THE BIBLICAL Book of Job, the anguished hero is visited by three friends who attempt to comfort him by drawing airy and sententious lessons from his agonies. Of course, they end up adding to his troubles; Job endures not only the real pains of grief and sickness but the indignity of having his suffering milked for rhetorical effect.

Thanks to the LA Times for this thoughtful reflection on everything politicians and activists can do wrong in the immediate wake of tragedy. Pushing for gun control; insisting a broader right to bear arms. Blaming the university for not reacting quick enough. Dismissing the attack to a shunned lover's rage.

"I have heard many such things," Job says. "Miserable comforters are ye all." No newspaper is in a position to criticize anybody for capitalizing on tragedy or taking convenient positions. There will be time for both in the days to come. But now is a time to respect, quietly, the tears and the pain of this terrible event.

Liviu Librescu survived the Holocaust. But while millions worldwide observed Yom HaShoah Monday, Librescu sacrificed his life for his Virginia Tech students. From the Jerusalem Post, via my favorite blog:

Professor Liviu Librescu, 76, threw himself in front of the shooter when the man attempted to enter his classroom. The Israeli mechanics and engineering lecturer was shot to death, "but all the students lived - because of him," Virginia Tech student Asael Arad - also an Israeli - told Army Radio.

Several of Librescu's other students sent e-mails to his wife, Marlena, telling of how he blocked the gunman's way and saved their lives, said Librescu's son, Joe.

"My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee," Joe Librescu said in a telephone interview from his home outside of Tel Aviv. "Students started opening windows and jumping out."

Coincidentally on Sunday, while the Dallas Morning News was calling for the end to the death penalty -- in Texas, no less -- the Cincinnati Enquirer had this excellent story explaining the politics behind who gets death and who gets life.

"If you ever forget you are a Jew, a Gentile will remind you."

So the saying goes. And for me, it was true: I grew up in a Christian home and, aside from my last name, knew nothing about what it was to be Jewish. Except of course, for the jokes, which usually involved terms like "money grubbing."

It seems today that presidential hopeful Tommy Thompson wasn't aware of the stereotype that says Jews are stingy money hoarders, a slander that has been used to incite violence and foment malevolence. Here is what he told a group of Jewish activists, courtesy of Haaretz:

"I'm in the private sector and for the first time in my life I'm earning money. You know that's sort of part of the Jewish tradition and I do not find anything wrong with that."

Thompson later apologized for the comments that had caused a stir in the audience, saying that he had meant it as a compliment, and had only wanted to highlight the "accomplishments" of the Jewish religion.

"I just want to clarify something because I didn't [by] any means want to infer or imply anything about Jews and finances and things," he said.

It's difficult to imagine someone being so oblivious, but he is running for president. That should be worth something. The headline from the Dallas Morning News' religion blog says it all: "Next he'll tell the NAACP that he loves that great fried chicken and watermelon they serve..."

Sammy Davis Jr. and Rod Carew were Jews. Jordan Farmar can thank his mother and Lenny Kravitz his father. For Whoopi Goldberg, the Jewish blood is a little farther back on the genealogical tree. But other than this list of recognizable black Jews, many of whom are converts to Judaism, African-American Jews are largely an "invisible" group, says Lewis Ricardo Gordon, director of Temple University's Center for Afro-Jewish Studies.

Gordon, according to this article from the Philly Inquiror, is trying to change that by researching the roots of black Jews (not to be confused with Beta Israel, the ancient Jews of Ethiopa).

"Most American Jews identify as descended from ancient Jews," without acknowledging that the ancients were dark-skinned, Gordon says.

Judaism's biblical fathers (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) and mothers (Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca and Leah) lived at a time and place when most everybody was brown-skinned, Gordon says.

"Moses was probably a dark-skinned man, too," he says. "He probably did not look like Charleton Heston."

Time, trade routes and politics each had a role in creating the "wandering Jew," says Gordon, who previously chaired the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University. "But Jews have always been an amalgam."

As anticipated, NYTer Andrea Elliott earned a Pulitzer Prize today, what the board called, "for her intimate, richly textured portrait of an immigrant imam striving to find his way and serve his faithful in America."

Click here for links to the "Imam in America" stories.

That was the question I asked just now when I saw this post on LA Observed:

Assemblyman Lloyd Levine's office helpfully sends along the news that the boss just finished the Boston Marathon. His time was 3:10:03, good for a pace of 7:15 per mile. Levine represents the Valley.

What struck me about this is that on Saturday, I wrote this story for the Daily News, which focused on a Yom HaShoah commemoration in Sacramento today. The observence, for which Holocaust survivors from each Assembly district were invited to share their stories of survival, was organized by Levine's office. Levine is Jewish and, according to the itinerary, was to host a reception with Assemblyman Ira Ruskin after a ceremony on the Assembly floor.

"The Holocaust was a terrible tragedy that occurred 60-plus years ago. But when you look around the world today, you still see tragedies of the same proportion," I quoted Levine saying. "Kosovo and Darfur and Rwanda. The list goes on. We are not learning, and we need to learn from the past and stop these things before they rise to the level of the Holocaust."

So what was he doing in Boston?

"He qualified for that in December -- at that point we were already months into the planning," his press secretary, Alex Traverso, told me. "Only a couple weeks ago he decided that he was going to (go)."

Texas is synonymous with capital punishment. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Texas has executed 391 people. This year, 12 Texans have been executed; the other 49 states have killed a sole convicted murderer.

That's what makes this so surprising: The Dallas Morning News' editorial board has called for an end to the death penalty. Here's the explanation:

The Vatican threw a launch party yesterday for the pope formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger's first book as the heir to St. Peter. Jesus of Nazareth will be on European bookshelves Monday, Benedict XVI's 80th birthday; an English version is scheduled for release in May. From the LA Times:

In the 448-page tome, Benedict takes on half a century of revisionist scholars who he believes threaten the Roman Catholic faith by distorting the true nature of Christ as both man and God. He calls on readers to reacquaint themselves with "the real Jesus," the Jesus presented in the Gospels.

None of this postmodern nonsense, he writes, that regards Jesus as something less than divine. Introducing doubts undercuts the essence of Christianity, the pope says.

"Intimate friendship with Jesus, on which everything depends, is at risk of floundering in a void," the pope writes.

Two weeks ago, the man synonymous with carefree adverturism, someone who lept the fountain at Caesar's Palace (right), told a Palm Sunday crowd at the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County that he had taken a leap of faith.

"I don't know what in the world happened," Robert "Evel" Knievel said. "I don't know if it was the power of the prayer or God himself, but it just reached out, either while I was driving or walking down the sidewalk or sleeping, and it just—the power of God in Jesus just grabbed me. … All of a sudden, I just believed in Jesus Christ. I did, I believed in him! … I rose up in bed and, I was by myself, and I said, 'Devil, Devil, you bastard you, get away from me. I cast you out of my life.' … I just got on my knees and prayed that God would put his arms around me and never, ever, ever let me go."

Evel's testimony reportedly resulted in hundreds of people being baptized on the spot. From an article I submitted to Christianity Today last night, online now.

Sam Zell got the treatment today from the largest Jewish newspapers in Los Angeles and New York. The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and The Forward recycle the stories of Zell's reputation as a open-shirt-wearing, motorcycle-riding, grave-dancing business maverick.

But, more fascinating, is that both papers note the oddity of Zell, whose parents fled Poland the night before Nazi invasion, placing the winning bid for the Tribune Co, which owns the Los Angeles Times.

From The Forward:

The irony of Zell’s latest success is that it will likely make him the owner of a company that has been the very antithesis of the Jewish summer camp culture in which Zell was molded. The Chicago Tribune, the company’s flagship publication, has had a famously antagonistic relationship with the Jewish community in Chicago — historically because of its right-wing, isolationist stance during World War II, and more recently because of its critical coverage of Israel. Newspaper watchers say that Zell and the Tribune will be an interesting mix.

“The paper has a reputation for having a thick glass ceiling for Jews,” said Michael Siegel, who for 25 years has been the rabbi at Chicago’s Anshe Emet Synagogue, where Zell is a member. “For someone like Sam Zell, who is noted as a grave dancer, here is he is more of a grave spinner. There are probably some past owners and executives who are spinning in their graves right now.”

And from The Jewish Journal:

Happily for them, most of the old-time Los Angeles anti-Semites who used to hang out at the downtown California Club are either dead or too old to care that a Jew is on the verge of owning the L.A. Times.

Not just any Jew. Sam Zell looks as though he's one tough Jew, probably even tougher than the old California Clubbers who stole the water from the Owens Valley and got rich in sneaky San Fernando Valley land deals.

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Another Jew, David Geffen, is waiting in the wings, hoping to be either Zell's joint-venture partner or to buy the Times from him.

However it turns out, we'll probably have a Jew in charge of the Times, which was once one of old Los Angeles' most famous WASP institutions. What a great day for old L.A. Jews with long memories of country clubs and downtown clubs that banned them; restrictive covenants that kept them out of certain fancy neighborhoods; anti-Semitic fraternities and sororities at USC and UCLA and law firms that never seemed able to find a place for a smart Jewish attorney. They also may have memories of the old Times, which, while not anti-Semitic, was a perfect reflection of the conservative Republican WASP culture of Los Angeles' upper classes.

Robin Reynolds considers herself a "child of God, a follower of Christ and a lesbian." Yesterday, she led a busload of queer Christians to Patrick Henry College, a conservative Christian campus outside Washington, D.C., that has a massive homeschooled population and a direct pipeline to White House internships.

The article was written by Hanna Rosin of the Washington Post. (Rosin previously profiled Patrick Henry College for The New Yorker.)

Reynolds had the makings of a public relations problem for Patrick Henry. She is African American, and the school is highly self-conscious of its inability to recruit many African American students (this year it has one out of a student body of about 325). She is earnest and polite and always speaks earnest evangelese -- "goodness gracious" and "my word" and "have a blessed day." Before she eats or takes a trip or makes a phone call, she prays to Jesus.

After breakfast the bus rolled up to the college. The campus is tiny, like a Hollywood set of an Ivy League school. At that moment there were no students anywhere, not even looking out their dorm windows. Only police.

Police cars were parked all along the driveway and across the entrance of the school. About 45 officers made a human barrier. The riders had seen plenty of police presence, but this was "intense," said Katie Higgins, one of the organizers.

Patrick Henry did not forbid its students to talk to the riders, but strongly encouraged them not to. In a letter to parents, the school's president called Soulforce's presence a "rude and offensive disruption" and accused the riders of trying to "manipulate" students.

The riders filed out of the bus and stood in a line. Some held signs: "Open Dialogue" and "All at God's Table." They had all taken care to dress professionally, but "professional" is a relative term. At Patrick Henry, boys wear suits to class and girls look like young interns on the Hill. Although the dress code does not mention them, one senses that the riders' nose rings, arms full of tattoos and pink headbands on males would be frowned upon. Reynolds looked neat, but by Patrick Henry standards boy neat, in a pinstriped button-down shirt and slacks.

Two other Soulforce equality riders were arrested for ignoring a "No Trespassing" sign. Sadly, the article makes no attempt to discuss Christian theology about sexuality, let alone the opinion of the Soulforce members, except for saying they are Christian and gay.

Homosexuality is, of course, not as black-and-white for Christians as most want it to seem. I'm no theologian, but plenty of them have disagreed on this issue. Globally, the mainline denomination's growing bend toward inclusiveness has alienated conservative Christians (see: Rift in the U.S. Episcopal Church -- and with the worldwide Anglican Communion -- over ordination of gays). And last month, the president of the flagship Baptist seminary raised a ruckus when he intimated that homosexuality might be hereditary.

Why are Jews so smart? (Or dumb, depending on your point of reference.) Well, in this month's Commentary Magazine, controversial scholar Charles Murray, a self-described "Scots-Irish Gentile," has a piece titled "Jewish Genius" in which he writes that "going back to the time of Moses, Judaism was intertwined with intellectual complexity."

In the first half of the 20th century, despite pervasive and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite the Holocaust, Jews won 14 percent of Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology. In the second half of the 20th century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from all over the world, that figure rose to 29 percent. So far, in the 21st century, it has been 32 percent. Jews constitute about two-tenths of one percent of the world’s population. You do the math.

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New York City’s public-school system used to administer a pencil-and-paper IQ test to its entire school population. In 1954, a psychologist used those test results to identify all 28 children in the New York public-school system with measured IQ’s of 170 or higher. Of those 28, 24 were Jews.

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Nothing that I have presented up to this point is scientifically controversial. The profile of disproportionately high Jewish accomplishment in the arts and sciences since the 18th century, the reality of elevated Jewish IQ, and the connection between the two are not to be denied by means of data. And so we come to the great question: how and when did this elevated Jewish IQ come about?

Murray, of the American Enterprise Institute, tries to answer that question here. He refutes research published last year in the Journal of Biosocial Science that reported Ashkenazi Jews had heightened intelligence, but not Sephardic or Oriental Jews. Gregory Cochran, an author of that study, snaps back in The Forward.

“I would call it pure speculation,” said Cochran, who is a researcher in Utah. “I don’t think there’s any evidence he’s right.”

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Murray acknowledges that his work is based more on historical impressions than on rigorous science, but it is already provoking debate in a corner of the intellectual world that tends to make Jews very uncomfortable: genetics.

Cochran’s work was widely panned by geneticists, and Murray makes even less of an effort to placate these experts with scientifically grounded evidence. The assumption from which both researchers work — that intelligence has a genetic basis — is still disputed by many scientists. Harry Ostrer, a leading Jewish geneticist, said that Murray’s work was “speculation” and that both Murray and Cochran trade in a “love of group typology — Jews are smart and blacks are great athletes.”

I was going to mention here tomorrow that the Simon Wiesenthal Center has a rare ceremony planned to commemorate Yom Hashoah on Monday, but The Jewish Journal beat me with a cover story that hits newstands in the morning.

The Wiesenthal Center, named for the famed Nazi hunter, will posthumously honor Khaled Abdelwahab, a Tunisian man who saved the lives of Jews under German occupation in 1942. His daughter will accept the award on his behalf, and the daughter of one of the men he helped, Jacob Boukris, lives in Southern California and will be there.

Abdelwahab is the first Arab to be nominated by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust authority, as "Righteous Among the Nations." Here's a portion of the Journal's article:

The Nazi takeover immediately affected Jacob Boukris (wedding photo, right), an affluent household appliances manufacturer, as well as his wife, Odette, and their 11-year-old daughter, Anny. German troops gave the family one hour to evacuate their spacious house in the coastal town of Mahdia, then the soldiers turned it into a barrack and took all the valuables. The family and two dozen Jews found shelter in a nearby olive oil factory, but a few days later, another visitor appeared at midnight.

He was Khaled Abdelwahab (the transliterated Arab name is also spelled Abdelwahhab), a notably handsome man of 32, whose father was Tunisia's most eminent historian. The visitor told the startled Jews that they must leave immediately and explained why. Young Abdelwahab served as liaison between the local population and the Nazi occupiers. He used the position to ingratiate himself with the Germans and, like Oskar Schindler in Poland, frequently treated the officers to meals and endless rounds of wine.

The Germans had set up a brothel and impressed a number of local women, among them Jewish girls. One evening, a drunken officer confided that he had his eye on a particularly beautiful Jewish woman and planned to take her to the brothel and rape her the next night. The intended victim, Abdelwahab quickly realized, was Odette Boukris.

Rest without peace. That's the case for at least 411 Native American remains that have been pulled from the earth beneath a major Playa Vista Development. CityBeat had the cover story this past week:

Robert Dorame is waiting for his call. Or a letter, or any indication that the company behind the 1,087-acre Playa Vista development, Playa Capital Co., LLC, is going to let him get on with his work. He just wants what anyone would want for his family, and the responsibility is weighing more and more heavily on his shoulders. For years, now, he has been getting calls from other Native Americans, wondering just what the hell is going on over there.

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The Native American graves and artifacts on Playa Vista have always been a concern. Playa Vista and its can-do president, Steve Soboroff, had a plan in place since 1991 (renewed in 2001) that would govern how to deal with these “archeological sites.” Archeologists have known for decades about the many village sites along the Westchester bluffs, which had been inhabited for between 5,000 and 7,000 years. The various incarnations of the Gabrielino Tongva tribe, of course, knew full well. Some of them had buried ancestors there as recently as the 1960s.

Nobody, however, was prepared for what has come out of the ground at Playa Vista. Or that the remains would be held in limbo for so long.

To date, 411 sets of Native American remains have been unearthed during the construction of Playa Vista, most of them from one small plot at the base of the bluffs, down below the Loyola Marymount campus. This represents, archeologists say, one of the largest known Native American burial grounds in Southern California, and one of the biggest in North America. The remains have been, as Dorame has testified, “ripped from the earth,” deposited in numbered boxes, and stored in a trailer on the development site. Some of them have been there for three or four years.

I've been getting a lot of response to my article in today's Daily News about Islamophobia. Here is another gem, with added emphasis in bold:

Why do so many Jews in the U.S., continue to apologize and making excuses for radical Islam. Here's a group of people who want to marginalize and destroy Jews all over the world, yet you and many others of the Jewish faith, defend them and push their propaganda.

There is NO such thing as Islamophobia! when is the last time you heard of a Muslim being beaten, raped or murdered in the U.S.???? They are allowed to work where they want, preach when they want and say what they want. nearly the complete opposite of their home country. What there is, is a realization that there are millions of Muslims both here and around the world, who want to impose their backwards, totalitarian beliefs on the rest of us. WHY IS IT THAT LIBERALS LIKE YOU DON'T GET THIS!!!!

So as long as you're giving University teachers a pass on their hate speech against the U.S. and Israel, how about you talk about how:

Muslims burn and loot cars and homes in Paris every night!

a Muslim shot and killed Jewish women at a Synagogue in Seattle

Schools in the U.K. are now BANNING any teaching of the holocaust so they don't offend Muslims.

this list is endless but those are recent examples.

Brad, you're on the wrong side. So while you push your politically correct - multicultural drivel, I'll choose to fight to keep this country strong and safe. While you're waiting in line with your prayer rug on the way to the ovens, I'll continue to shine a light on the hate speech that Imams are spewing in Mosque's.

I should note that based on this man's last name, which is the same way he misidentified my faith -- I am culturally though not religiously Jewish -- he might be Jewish.

Here is what one reader had to say about today's story about Islamophobia:

Its wasnt alienated Muslims that set off bombs in Madrid and London any more than it was alienated Muslims that comitted 9-11....It was evil Islamists.....You try to make the argument that it was alienated Muslims because you think all we have to do to stop the problem of terrorism is simply be more open to Islam, more understandind. But this multicultural attitude is exactly what leads to the spread of radical Islam. As Muslims see such multiculturalism as weakness. You are terrified of the truth: That is we are headed for a civilizational war, not unlike the middle ages.

If Muslims simply want to be included as part of US society, why then do Muslim cab drivers in Minneapolis, refuse to transport passengers carrying alcohol??? Why do Muslim cashiers in Minneapolis refuse to handle packages of pork and bacon??? Why is Minneapolis the test case to see if wider American society will accept Sharia???? Perhaps it is because Minneapolis is a city that pratices the type of tolerance that multiculturalist advocate.

Everywhere Muslism go, war follows.

Last week, CNN contributor Roland Martin asked this question: "When did it come to the point that being a Christian meant caring about only two issues,­ abortion and homosexuality?"

Brian McLaren, author of "A New Kind of Christian," had this reflection in a blog post titled "Which Holy War?"

We've probably heard many people here in the U.S. ask, "Why aren't there more moderate Muslims speaking out against the violent extremists and calling for reform in Islam?" As I reflected on Roland Martin's editorial on Good Friday, 2007, I couldn't help but think, "Maybe around the world, 'behind our back,' so to speak, people are asking a similar question about Christians in the U.S."

An episode of "South Park" last month (a clip is available here and the entire episode here) offered a true pearl of religious-persecution wisdom. The premise of the entire show, in which a rally for Hillary "Hildog" Clinton is disrupted by a dirty bomb that has been slipped inside her, is that Cartman is trying to stop a new Muslim student from carrying out his terrorist plot. Why does Cartman -- who in another episode this season convinced the school that Kyle, the fourth grade's lone Jew, planned 9/11 and in a previous season emulated Hitler -- suspect young Bahir wants to nuke South Park?

Because he is Muslim -- no other reason is needed.

In the Daily News today, I touched on a theme of this "South Park" episode. (It was already in the works, and was turned in long ago. I swear.) Increasingly, Muslim Americans are talking about "Islamophobia." After 9/11, they felt misunderstood. Now they say they are being targeted for discrimination and persecution. One of the people I interviewed, Hussam Ayloush of the SoCal chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, spoke at length about the "industry of hate" that fuels Islamophobia.

Here's a recent post on his blog that names some names. "Are you a professional failure?" Ayloush asks. "... No more worries. Your hardships are gone. I have the right solution for you. Just become a Muslim basher and all your financial and low self-esteem troubles will be gone."

Making Ayloush's list is Steven Emerson, whose reporting for The New Republic last summer enshrouded in controversy the selection of local Muslim Maher Hathout for a county humanitarian award. Coincidentally, on the same day the "South Park" episode aired, The New Republic posted online another Emerson piece criticizing a mainstream Muslim American organization -- Ayloush's CAIR.

CAIR has been accused repeatedly of having terrorists ties, and Emerson again makes the claim, while taking aim at a recent NY Times article, posted here at the International Herald Tribune, that he thought was a CAIR apologia.

Emerson, a self-styled terrorism expert, has, of course, been a controversial figure.

More from the Annals of Clergy Sex Abuse:

A federal judge in San Diego wants to know if the diocese hid assets when it declared bankruptcy in February. From my parents' paper, the U-T:

An apparent attempt to transfer church funds without a federal judge's permission was called a misunderstanding in declarations filed in bankruptcy court yesterday by attorneys representing the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego.

The lawyers were responding to federal Judge Louise DeCarl Adler's “order to show cause” why they and certain pastors should not be held in contempt and face sanctions.

The diocese sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Feb. 27 in the face of numerous lawsuits alleging sexual abuse by priests in the diocese dating back decades.

At issue is what the judge said was an apparent conspiracy by church officials and their attorneys to create new bank accounts, separate from diocese accounts, without her permission.

Church attorneys and officials insisted it was a "misunderstanding."

"The nation's Roman Catholic bishops and religious orders received 714 claims of clergy sex abuse in 2006, the second consecutive year the number of allegations has dropped, according to a new report on the church's efforts to protect children," the AP reported today.

That much should be expected. Most new complaints are decades old. By now, most accusations against those priests have already been leveled. The AP also reported that the cost of settling cases declined in 2006. That wasn't the case for complaints involving priests with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles -- the country's largest. The archdiocese and a religious order shelled out $10 million to settle with seven people who claimed to have been abused. The Carmelites insurer paid 95 percent of the settlement.

This January, the archdiocese settled 45 cases at a cost of $60 million. Much bigger costs are expected. About 500 cases remain.

How could those who seek holiness earn money from companies that do business with a government accused of committing genocide? That's the question an increasing number of religious groups are asking, according to today's LA Times.

The article quotes Father Paul Spellman, who convinced the Archdiocese of Los Angeles' Council of Priests, to urge its retirement manager, Fidelity, to stop investing in companies that do business with Sudan. The Sudanese government has been accused of arming the janjaweed militias and ordering attacks against rebels. At least 200,000 -- many experts put the number at 400,000 -- have been killed in the Darfur regions and millions left homeless.

Spurred on by celebrities including Mia Farrow, Don Cheadle and George Clooney, the grass-roots campaign to use America's economic heft to help halt the violence in Sudan is gathering steam. The divestment movement is expanding from college campuses to Jewish organizations, evangelical Christians, African American leaders and security-minded conservatives.

Forty-two colleges and universities, including the University of California, Stanford and Harvard, have restricted their holdings in companies with links to Sudan, said the Sudan Divestment Task Force, a Washington-based umbrella group. California and seven other states have begun selling off Sudan-related investments and 17 more are considering doing so.

In February, the city of LA announced it would divest its pension fund from Darfur, stripping an estimated $27 million from businesses associated with Sudan. That push was largely led by Rabbi Harold Schulweis and his Encino humanitarian group, Jewish World Watch. California and other states have done the same.

Alhough U.S. companies are prohibited from doing business in Sudan because of its human-rights violations, it's not illegal for Americans to invest in companies making money there.

"Back in World War II, the U.S. government's policies denied visas to Anne Frank's family and many others in the same situation," Bernard Elbaum, an economics professor at UC Santa Cruz, whose parents were Polish Jews who lost most of their families in the Holocaust, told the Times.

"You can't just look to the government."

So tonight, the Muslim Public Affairs Council and Muslim students at CSUN want to teach the community that Islam is nothing to be afraid of. But tomorrow at UCLA, the Ayn Rand Institute and Daniel Pipes want to convince you Islam is scary.

A distinguished panel of Middle East experts will provide new and illuminating answers to the most important questions of our time: Is the West ready to concede victory so easily? Are the terrorists a fringe group of fanatics, or are they part of a much wider ideological movement? What threat do they pose to the West? What can the West do to ensure victory? Is peace possible?

The event will be begin at 7 p.m. iin Moore 100 and is sponsored by a student group called L.O.G.I.C., which stands for Liberty, Objectivity, Greed, Individualism and Capitalism. Last year, they hosted a forum to display the 12 controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that had incited rioting in the Muslim world.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Muslim Student Association at Cal State Northridge will host a sensitivity seminar Wednesday night to help counter Muslim Americans' biggest growing concern -- Islamophobia.

"(W)hen the world is compelled to coin a new term to take account of increasingly widespread bigotry, that is a sad and troubling development," former UN Secretery-General Kofi Annan said in December 2004. "Such is the case with Islamophobia."

The seminar is open to the public and will be held in the Lake View Terrace room of the University Student Union. A flier for it states: "This growing phenomena -- best characterized by harsh and hateful anti-Muslim rhetoric from elected officials and national media personalities -- is a cancer that hurts all Americans and their understanding of their Muslim neighbors. Our future as a community depends on what we do today."

To schedule a workshop in your community, MPAC officials ask that you contact them at (213) 383-3443.

I recently wrote a story about Islamophobia that should run in the Daily News in the next few days.

Marijuana has played a limited role in formal religious experience. Rastafarians believe it is a sacrament; so too does Craig X Rubin, a Jewish convert to Christianity who founded Temple 420 in Hollywood and is being charged with distributing marijuana. And last week The Jewish Journal carried a JTA story that asked, "Is Pot Kosher for Pesach?"

But who knew marijuana had connections to Islam? From the Asia Times:

The issue of substance abuse, intoxicants and Islam rose to the Turkish media's attention recently when police carried out a raid on the home of private citizen Nazif Kamil Orde in Istanbul for the benefit of current-affairs documentary program Arena. They smashed their way into the home of the man newspapers have nicknamed "the junkie teacher" - Esrarc Hoca - a self-styled imam who interspersed his lessons on Islamic philosophy with some strong tokes on a lit joint and encouraged the young followers sitting around his living room to do likewise. He extolled the virtues of cannabis and said no one could make him stop - smoking was his duty to God.

(skip)

Generally in orthodox Islam, conservative scholars deem cannabis an intoxicant and therefore, according to the Hadith, it is classified as haram (as is coffee). The Hadith is the book of sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, which states: "If much intoxicates, then even a little is haram." There are dissenting voices, however, who say that the word used in the Koran itself is khamr - which means "fermented grape" - and that this classification doesn't cover use of marijuana. Liberal Muslims believe that opposition to cannabis on religious grounds in Islamic countries has in essence been based on narrow-minded dogma that seeks to regulate all private pleasure in the name of religion.

Certainly some Islamic countries are closely associated with dope smoking and cultivation (Afghanistan, Lebanon, Indonesia, Egypt and Morocco, for example) but its use is often for recreational purposes and largely takes place among the lower classes. In Turkey, while cannabis use is not tolerated by the police or state, there is a smoking culture and a well-known saying, helal ottur, gunah yoktur ("it's a holy weed that carries no sin").

The Forward published a lengthy article last week titled, "California Campuses Gain a Reputation as Hotbeds of Anti-Israel Rhetoric."

It opens with a January protest in Irvine sparked by a lecture from Daniel Pipes, a polarizing Middle East expert and a visiting professor at Pepperdine University:

The lecture topic was “The Threat to Israel’s Existence.” The speaker was Daniel Pipes, a Middle East analyst known for his hawkish pro-Israel views and sharp denunciations of Islamic extremism. The setting was the University of California, Irvine, a campus with a national reputation as a hotbed of anti-Israel rhetoric.

Students wearing Palestinian kaffiyehs clustered in the center of the auditorium.

The stage was set for confrontation.

Sure enough, 15 minutes into Pipes’s speech, just as he had built up to one of his main points — “The Palestinians must have their will crushed so that they will no longer be trying to eliminate Israel, so they will tend to their own affairs and leave Israel alone” — dozens of Muslim students interrupted him with hostile shouts, before promptly marching out of the lecture hall, chanting “anti-Israel, anti-oppression.”

Afterward, the student protesters gathered outside, where they listened to a speaker vow, “It’s just a matter of time before the State of Israel will be wiped off the face of the earth.”

Here's the nut:

U.C. Irvine though is only the most recent in what can seem like a rotation of California campuses to emerge as the focus of Jewish communal concern. At a number of California public universities, Jewish students have long faced particularly inflammatory rhetoric from anti-Israel activists — a state of affairs that predates even the most recent intifada. While at any given school, such activity tends to ebb and flow, established Muslim student groups in California repeatedly have brought fiery anti-Israel speakers to campus, including one who regularly praises suicide bombers, expresses support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and rails against “Zionist Jews.”

“I think the tenor and the tone of the debate and the shrillness of identity politics is meaningfully different in California,” said David Harris, director of the Washington-based Israel on Campus Coalition. “There are different challenges on campuses across the country, to be sure, but at some schools in California — especially large state schools — Israel’s supporters on campus are confronted with distinct challenges, including strongly heated rhetoric and a lack of respect and common civility.”

Surprisingly, the article offers no voice of moderate Muslims. Only this from Oakland cleric Amir Abdel Malik Ali (pictured):

Last spring, Ali gave a notorious speech at U.C. Irvine during a week of activities sponsored by the campus Muslim Student Union under the rubric “Holocaust in the Holy Land.” Speaking on a campus plaza behind a sign reading “Israel, the 4th Reich,” Ali noted that Israelis are “reluctant to get on buses and things, or go to the café,” adding, “It’s about time that they live in fear.” He said that whereas Israelis are “coming to live,” they are opposed by “people who are ready to die, who say either victory or martyrdom. You can’t fight against that.”

“We will fight you until we are either martyred or until we are victorious,” he said. “That’s how we look at it. And they know that that’s how Muslims believe.”

I called Shakeel Syed, the executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, which overseas area mosques, to see if, in fact, Ali spoke for all Muslims.

"I categorically would dispute the myth that all Muslims feel that way," Syed said. "I don't think anybody speaks for all Muslims to beign with. And it is not right for Forward to say that all California campuses -- the only controversy that exists on this is at the UC Irvine campus. Both Hillel and the Muslim group are unable to reconcile and both have been quite hostile to each other."

Remember when the Dodgers were battling the Giants for a spot in the 2001 playoffs and slugger Shawn Green announced he wouldn't play on Yom Kippur? Well, this story out of America's heartland is similar, except the superstar is a Christian, and the sport is spelling. From the Indianapolis Star:

Elliot Huck, a 14-year-old from Bloomington who finished 45th out of more than 250 spellers in the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., last year, says competing on Sunday conflicts with his view of the Biblical commandment to rest on the Sabbath.

"I always try to glorify God with what I do in the spelling bee because he is the one who gave me the talent for spelling," said Elliot, a student at Lighthouse Christian Academy in Bloomington.

"Now I think I'm going to not spell and try to give glory to God in that."

After slipping on holy water and fracturing his hip Saturday, Chicago Cardinal Francis George was back in the saddle Monday, joking, "I feel good except when it hurts."

It was reported Saturday that George broke his hip while blessing Easter meals with holy water. But the Chicago Sun-Times said today that he actually fractured a node on his femur.

No, it's not for any work I did last year. But thanks for the consideration. Instead, I'd like to draw some attention, and plenty has been given, to Andrea Elliott's three-part profile of a Brooklyn Muslim leader -- "An Imam in America."

To his congregants, Mr. Shata is far more than the leader of daily prayers and giver of the Friday sermon. Many of them now live in a land without their parents, who typically assist with finding a spouse. There are fewer uncles and cousins to help resolve personal disputes. There is no local House of Fatwa to issue rulings on ethical questions.

Sheik Reda, as he is called, arrived in Brooklyn one year after Sept. 11. Virtually overnight, he became an Islamic judge and nursery school principal, a matchmaker and marriage counselor, a 24-hour hot line on all things Islamic.

Day after day, he must find ways to reconcile Muslim tradition with American life. Little in his rural Egyptian upbringing or years of Islamic scholarship prepared him for the challenge of leading a mosque in America.

Here are parts one, two and three.

In January, Elliott visited Sheik Reda Shata in Middletown, N.J., where he had relocated. Elliott's reporting for the NY Times, which already won an American Society of Newspaper Editors award, was expected to be a front runner for a Pulitzer Prize, but it didn't appear on the finalists list that leaked out. Pulitzers will be announced Monday.

Like it or not, religion is already playing a major role in the 2008 presidential race. Most everyone knows that Mitt Romney is a Mormon and Rudy Giuliani is a Catholic whose social mores are too loose for conservative Christians, but what else do you know about the religious affiliation of the men and woman who want to run the free world?

To sort fact from fiction, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has created a site called Religion & Politics '08. Here is a sample of Barack Obama's religious biography:

After graduating from college, Obama began attending a congregation affiliated with the United Church of Christ, a mainline Protestant denomination with 1.2 million members. Obama has said that he was moved by the "power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change" while working as a community organizer for a group of churches in Chicago, and that he "felt God's spirit beckoning me." He was baptized in the church he now attends, Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ.

So far, Romney, Giuliani and Obama have had the sharpest focus placed on their religious beliefs. Polls have asked whether Americans would elect a Mormon, Christians have expressed apprehension about a candidate on his third marriage and accusations, since fully discredited, were made by Fox News and Insight Magazine that Obama had attended an Islamic extremist school in Indonesia. There also was the sculpture of Obama, dressed like the Messiah, that went on display in Chicago.

For the past 50 years, Nettie Berkson, 91, has attended Dodger home openers religiously. For her grandson Glen Greenberg (no relation to me), the Dodgers have been as much a part of his life as Moses' law. "When I was born," Greenberg said while sitting in the family seats a few rows behind home plate during yesterday's home opener, "it was like, Alright, I'm Jewish and I'm a Dodgers fan."

Jon Weisman, who writes the blog Dodger Thoughts, took that connection between being Jewish and loving the Dodgers several steps farther.

My 13th birthday came in 1980, which is of some significance to the Jewish people. However, I was never a religious person. I flunked out of Hebrew school after my first year because most days, I stayed home to watch the Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Hour instead of attending. I was not moved to change my ways when my older brother was bar-mitzvahed in 1976, nor when my sister was bat-mitzvahed in 1978. In the case of my sister, she had herself quit Hebrew school after a couple of years, but then did a crash course at the last minute when she realized that she was going to miss out on a heck of a lot of presents if she didn't get that bat mitzvah.

Me, I didn't want the presents that badly. I was a pretty content kid. But as the time approached, my father grew a little concerned that I would follow my sister's less-than-sincere path. So, in a fashion he compares to "The Devil and Daniel Webster," he made me an offer. If I gave up my right to have a bar mitzvah, my Dad would give me a lifetime pass to the Dodgers.

Yep, that was the offer. I hope it doesn't alienate the more righteous of my readers to learn that I snapped that offer up in a second. (I would say that about 10 percent of the people to whom I tell this story are appalled to some degree.) But that's why, in at least one respect, the Dodgers are my religion.

There's been a ton of talk in the past few years about the coming American theocracy, one fueled by conservative Christian support of President Bush, not of a nation where the majority of people profess to be Christians but something like a Saudi Arabia for the West.

Whether this ever could happen, I don't know. But certainly it's not going to happen any time soon. The Republicans lost Congress in November, and Bush has became a really, really lame duck. Still pundits, authors and the blogosphere find this a concern worth fretting about.

Last weekend, a "blogswarm dedicated to the separation of church and state" held the first Blog Against Theocracy, for which members were asked to write at least one blog post. This was the message that preceded the event:

The post will be against theocracy, in favor of our Constitutional guarantee of separation of church and state. But there are a LOT of issues tied to this, as is pointed out in the First Freedom First website:

No religious discrimination.
PRO End-of-Life Care (no more Terri Schiavo travesties)
Reproductive health decisions made by individuals, not religious "majorities"
Democracy not Theocracy
Academic Integrity (like, a rock is as old as it is, not as old as the Bible says)
Sound Science (good bye so-called "intelligent" design)
Respect for ALL families (based on love, not sexual orientation. Hellooooo.)
And finally,
The right to worship, OR NOT.

So take your pick and write your post(s). Really, the wider variety of topics makes it all the more interesting.

Thanks to the Dallas Morning News' religion blog for pointing this out.

I left religion out of today's story about a 91-year-old Dodger devotee because it really wasn't germane. But it is worth a mention.

Of course, to many Americans, sports are religion. But Nettie Berkson's Westside apartment isn't decorated like it belongs to someone who will attend their 50th consecutive Dodgers home opener today. It has no room filled with True Blue memorabilia, and the family didn't even take photos at the games until her great-grandchildren started attending four years ago.

Instead, her living room walls are lined with her childhood menorah, her father's shofar and a large portrait of her father deep in Torah study.

Nettie was the only one of 12 children born outside Poland -- in Chicago -- and she grew up a loyal Cubs fan. Every Friday, she would ditch school early to catch the El to Wrigley Field. Back then, the Cubs played all their games during the day, which was fortunate for an Orthodox Jew like Nettie who had to be home before the Sabbath candles were lit Friday at sundown. Wrigley Field added lights in 1988, but the Cubs still play every Friday home game at 1:20 p.m.

The New York Times Magazine featured a lengthy cover story on Pope Benedict XVI this Easter Sunday. The article begins in the heart of Bavaria, of which the pope formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger is the "most illustrious native." But Bavaria has lost its soul, gone wholly secular, along with the rest of Europe, and the magazine wants to know whether this man, elected pope two years ago at age 78, can save Western civilization.

Benedict is one of the most intellectual men ever to serve as pope — and surely one of the most intellectual of current world leaders — and he has pinpointed the problem of the age, as well as its solution, at the level of philosophy. His argument, elaborated in the years leading up to his election and continuing through his daily speeches and pronouncements, reduces to something like this: Secularism may be one of the great developments in history, but the secularism that holds sway in much of the West — that is, in Western Europe — is flawed; it has a bug in its programming.

The mistaken conviction that reason and faith are two distinct realms has weakened Europe and has brought it to the verge of catastrophic collapse. As he said in a speech in 2004: “There exist pathologies in religion that are extremely dangerous and that make it necessary to see the divine light of reason as a ‘controlling organ.’ . . . However . . . there are also pathologies of reason . . . there is a hubris of reason that is no less dangerous.”

If you seek a way out of the vast post-9/11 quagmire (Baghdad bomb blasts, Iranian nukes, Danish cartoons, ever-more-bizarre airport security measures and the looming mayhem they are meant to stop), and for that matter if you believe in Europe and “the West” (the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, the whole heritage of 2,500 years of history), then now, Benedict in effect argues, the Catholic Church must be heeded. Because its tradition was filtered through the Enlightenment, the thinking goes, the church can provide a bridge between godless rationality and religious fundamentalism.

Ending up in the hospital certainly wasn't what Cardinal Francis George of the Archdiocese of Chicago had in mind when he decided he would bless Easter meals with holy water.

George, 70, was hospitalized after he slipped on a patch of marble floor that had been splashed with holy water and fractured his hip Saturday. From the Chicago Tribune:

He did not lose consciousness and even continued with the blessing. But shortly after the service, the pain in his right hip grew more severe and he was taken to Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood in a private car.

Though the injury was not serious and did not require surgery, spokeswoman Colleen Dolan said George would remain hospitalized for a few days of physical therapy and using a walker, to not apply pressure to his hip.

"He took a fall . . . in his exuberance with the holy water," Dolan said. "He was concerned when it started to hurt more. That is why he wanted to check, and we're glad he did."

Question: How many Jewish-American princesses does it take to screw in a light bulb?

If you've heard the joke, that answer is pretty easy. But what is more difficult is determining how many Jewish-American princesses there are, or how many Jewish Americans for that matter.

A new study by the Steinhardt Social Research Institute at Brandeis University, an esteemed school outside Boston that is named after the first Jew to join the Supreme Court, reported that the American Jewish community is between 6 million and 6.4 million. Seven years ago, the National Jewish Population Survey estimated American Jewry had fallen from 5.5 million in 1990 to 5.2 in 2000.

"What some people ask is 'Why does anybody care how many there are?' " Len Saxe, director of the Steinhardt institute, told the LA Times. "In the Jewish community the numbers, especially since they all hover around 6 million, have particular relevance. In the wake of the Holocaust, where 6 million were killed, how many Jews are remaining and whether the community is regenerating or not — it's a very sensitive issue."

More of Los Angeles' 600,000 Jews –- second in population outside Israel only to New York -- live in the Valley Hills, where 48 percent of affluents residents are Jewish, than anywhere else.

"West Los Angeles is a close second to Valley Hills in the major categories, making the two expensive 'golden ghettoes' the most Jewish in the city and country," the Jewish Journal reported in January.

Counting Jews is notoriously difficult in the United States because the U.S. Census is not allowed to ask questions about religion. There is also the variable of affiliation. When Jewish population surveys are administered, it is challenging to control for the fact that some people will identify as Jewish because they converted and attend synagogue while secular Jews won't, and vice versa.

As for the original question: The answer was two. One to get a Tab, and one to call Daddy.

A U.S. District Court judge issued a preliminary injunction this week supporting a street evangelist's lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles for violating his freedom of speech.

Last May, Cyril Gordon, a member of Jews for Jesus, was distributing religious fliers outside an Israel Independence Day event at Woodley Park when he was arrested for trespassing. Charges were later dropped but Gordon sued with the backing of the American Liberties Institute and the Alliance Defense Fund, an ACLU for Christian causes.

"This is a major victory for free speech, not only for Jews for Jesus, but for all other groups who wish to proclaim their faith," Gordon's lawyer, William J. Becker, said.

Jews for Jesus, which has an office in Westwood, is an international Christian organization that reaches out to Jews. The group has been accused by Jewish organizations of using "aggressive proselytizing to target disenfranchised or unaffiliated Jews, Russian immigrants and college students" -- efforts Rabbi Efraim Davidson of Torah Atlanta considers "manipulative, deceptive and anti-Semitic."

Messianic Jews -- Christians who keep kosher and observe the Sabbath -- also don't like being lumped in with Jews for Jesus, who don't necessarily observe Jewish traditions.

As everyone has noticed by now, today is Good Friday. (That's why your office closed early.) But what makes this Friday better than any other? In fact, without the celebration of Jesus' resurrection Sunday, isn't it a lot worse?

As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:

(I)f Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. ... And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.

Over at the Huffington Post, Chris Meserole discusses the political reasons we call this Good Friday.

The pat explanation for the misnomer, of course, is that the crucifixion was "good" precisely because it was so tragic. The total depravity of the cross, that is, was beneficial insofar as it allowed Christ to demonstrate the superlative glory and power and mercy of God.

Yet such logic is as dangerous as it is flawed. For starters ...

"Once you've seen the brutal face of evil, says the Rev. Robert Barry, you start looking for the tender face of God."

That's the lede of a Religion News Service article about the role of military chaplains. Chaplains don't carry guns. They don't fight in the war. They are the silent forces on the battlefield that heal the spiritual wounds caused by war.

"The word really has power with these people," Barry said. "Shrapnel hits the body, but it also hits the soul, and that's where we come in."

I can't imagine this task is getting any easier at the beginning fo the war's fifth year. Chaplains also have the pleasure of comforting servicemen after they return home to find their world a different place. Here's the beginning of an article I wrote two years ago for The Sun in San Bernardino:

TWENTYNINE PALMS - Navy Lt. Robert Grove awoke before the sun rose and prayed.

During the next 12 hours, Grove chaplain for the 3rd Battalion, 11th Marines welcomed 40 Marines and sailors to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center here; he prayed over 103 men leaving for Iraq; and he celebrated with 139 returning home.

It was a typical whirlwind. Grove's workload has been heavy since he joined the Navy after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

It intensified two years ago when the United States attacked Iraq, where 150,000 American troops remain. There are another 17,000 in Afghanistan. California has sent more troops to the Middle East than any other state; thousands have been from Twentynine Palms, Fort Irwin and the California Army National Guard.

Peppered throughout the nation's military are about 4,000 chaplains with a daunting task: Win the emotional wars waging within troops.

"I am responsible for the spiritual fitness of this battalion," Grove told the new Marines and sailors during a breakfast address.

That day, newspaper headlines announced the death toll for American troops in Iraq topped 1,500.

The number didn't phase Grove, a two-tour veteran of Iraq.

Death is sad, he said without a hint of emotion, but it is part of war. It's the reason the military employs chaplains.

"There are no atheists in foxholes," the axiom says. And so military ministers are there to prepare troops to meet their maker whatever they believe it may or may not be.

"They are the spiritual backbone of the unit. ..." said Gunnery Sgt. Frank Patterson, Twentynine Palms base spokesman. "Chaplains provide an invaluable service."

Read the rest here.

If you didn't see this expose of Scientology in Rolling Stone last year, it's worth reading now. (I'd recommend printing it out and boiling a pot of coffee.) The reporter, Janet Reitman, was recently named a finalist for a reporting award from the American Society of Magazine Editors.

The Workplace Religious Freedom Act, which would strengthen the federal requirement that employers accommodate their employees' religious beliefs and is again before Congress, has caused a rift between Jews. The measure is being supported by many Jewish organizations, from the Orthodox Union to the American Jewish Committee, but it's also being opposed by civil-liberty organizations with strong Jewish constituencies, such as the ACLU.

“This legislation, whose intent is to serve as a shield against religious discrimination, may be used by some to advance their majority religious agenda, which could result in discrimination, proselytizing or harassment,” Deborah Lauter, national civil rights director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote in an e-mail to the Forward, which has a story on the split.

The bill plays into a growing push by people wanting to better incorporate faith in the workplace. Advocates say that it is not about proselytizing others but about decompartamentalizing their own lives. The Workplace Religious Freedom Act was introduced in Congress more than a decade ago, but is now enjoying broader religious support. The Forward story has the background.

Donohue's Catholic League responded to last night's "South Park" with this brief press release:

I have no idea why "South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker caricature me as a heartless thug. In any event, I stand convicted and have no defense. Now I have to get back to business -- I hear someone just took some liberties with the Easter Bunny.

I actually think that was a joke. It certainly was a gentler treatment of Hollywood than Donohue has given in the past. I still can't find the entire episode on the web, but the "St. Peter" clip at ComedyCentral.com talks about the show's premise that St. Peter -- the first pope -- was in fact a rabbit.

"South Park" tonight absolutely skewered Catholic League President Bill Donohue in a ridiculous episode that used the Da Vinci Code formula to claim their was a centuries-old conspiracy to cover up the fact that St. Peter was in fact a rabbit -- Peter Rabbit.

Donohue, a firebrand in the culture-wars arena, is so hell-bent on capturing and killing Snowball, a descent of Peter and the rightful heir to the papacy, that he actually imprisons Pope Benedict and Jesus. The blasphemy only grows worse as the episode moves on, peaking when Christ bisects Donohue, who has appointed himself pope, with a throwing star.

It hasn't been uploaded yet, but it should be here soon.

There have been a bunch of stories recently about whether a Carlsbad church should welcome a repentent child molester or bar him from attending. In compiling these stories and a few others, GetReligion invokes the story from the Gospel of John in which Jesus comes across a group that wants to stone a woman caught in the act of adultery. "If any one of you is without sin," Jesus says, "let him be the first to throw a stone at her."

"That’s why I find this story so interesting," Mollie Ziegler of GetReligion writes. "I assume that my fellow congregants are like me: we all have a lot of very dark and secret sins that we’re glad are not out in the open. I assume that each person has their own struggle but that the struggle is serious and profound. Maybe that’s why I wish some of these stories — though the ones I highlighted were far and away the best — had a bit more perspective on the general theological approach to sin."

Last Wednesday, LA Weekly published this story about what happened to Rabbi Juda Heschel after he "unwittingly downloaded" two photos of child porn:

Heschel’s nine months at Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution, one of which he spent in solitary confinement, were only the beginning of his downward spiral. Seven years after those fateful mouse clicks to illegally download child porn, Heschel has abandoned his last name (Heschel is his middle name) and lives an impoverished life in a tiny Venice apartment, decorated with the pictures of his three children who live on the East Coast. In Los Angeles, his potential employers and landlords usually assume that “registered sex offender” means rapist or child molester. He has been denied jobs and turned down for apartments. One of the most difficult moments came when a Los Angeles synagogue initially told him he was no longer welcome — even as a congregant.

As Los Angeles Archbishop Roger M. Mahony becomes embroiled in new claims that he knew about — and failed to stop — sexual abuse by a California priest, a number of high-profile sex scandals involving rabbis here and elsewhere have created a simmering fear among believers.

“We in the Jewish community are recognizing that we aren’t immune from these problems,” says Rabbi Mark S. Diamond, executive vice president of The Board of Rabbis of Southern California — one of the area’s two main rabbinical bodies, along with the Rabbinical Council of California. “For too many years I’ve heard Jewish people say this is not our problem, it just affects other faiths and denominations. We’re seeing otherwise.”

Diamond was horrified, for instance, to see his close colleague Rabbi David Kaye ensnared last year on Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator.” (Kaye was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for attempting to seduce an actor who, working with Dateline, posed as a 13-year-old boy.) Around the same time, the principal of one of Los Angeles’ most popular Jewish schools, Rabbi Aron Tendler, stepped down amid allegations that he had sexually abused teenage girls. A few months later, Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, a popular leader in the Jewish Renewal movement, lost his chair at Los Angeles’ Stephen S. Wise Temple Elementary School after confessing to molesting several of his former female students.

The story ran under the headline, "To Forgive or to Shun," and writer Justin Clark quoted Rabbi Mark Borovitz, a convicted felon and spiritual leader of Beit T'Shuvah, an addiction recovery center for Jews in the Pico-Robertson area. (I was at Beit T'Shuvah for Passover Monday. It was nice to see, as I have before, how blending the 12 steps program with Jewish teachings can help some addicts recover and move forward.)

Borovitz credits Heschel with bringing nearly two dozen individuals into Beit T’Shuvah’s Sex Addicts Anonymous program.

“As with alcohol or drug addiction,” Borovitz says, “the best sexual-addiction counselors are those who are in recovery themselves.”

Nevertheless, Heschel says he misses having the rabbi’s pulpit, and regularly sends out his résumé — without success. “When I send my résumés, it’s my curiosity,” he says. “Is this group willing to accept someone who has made genuine t’shuvah?”

It's been almost a year since Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, wrote The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, a book promoters dream. Collins was written up in just about every major publication, from the LA Times to the Times of London.

Today, a little late on the story, CNN.com posted this commentary from Collins that begins, "I am a scientist and a believer, and I find no conflict between those world views."

Collins is not alone among scientists -- just a dramatic minority. Several polls have found about 40 percent of scientists believe in God -- but only 10 percent of those elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

"It never seemed to me there was a contradiction. ... They are both different ways of knowing about the world,'' Kenneth R. Miller, a prominent biology professor at Brown University and author of Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, told me last fall for a story about Moorpark College's Year of Science and Religion. "Science is the best method we have, the only method we have to understand the nature of the material world, how it works, what the history of this planet has been like. And what religion tells us is the meaning of our place in that world. It's different sides of the same coin.''

Miller's name comes up in a book I'm currently reading called Monkey Girl by Los Angeles Magazine writer Edward Humes. Centered around the 2005 Dover school board debacle, Humes tries to separate myth from fact when it comes to the tenants of evolution, and science from faith when it comes to the origin of species.

Miller, Collins and most other God-fearing scientists have little in common with the Dover board members who decided every student should be taught the gaps in evolutionary theory and be given a supplementary text called Of Pandas and People. Dover was a case study for the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank pushing Intelligent Design, which critics called Creation in new clothes. Dover science teachers, vehemently opposed to Of Pandas, wanted to use a text book written by Miller.

Monkey Girl is a good, fair book, a crash course in the histories of evolutionary theory, creation science and the to-the-grave opinions that separate their polarized faithful. Here is what Collins had to say about evolution in an interview seven years ago with PBS' Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly:

ABERNETHY: What do you say to your fellow Christians who say, "Evolution is just a theory, and I can't put that together with my idea of a creator God"?

COLLINS: Well, evolution is a theory. It's a very compelling one. As somebody who studies DNA, the fact that we are 98.4 percent identical at the DNA level to a chimpanzee, it's pretty hard to ignore the fact that when I am studying a particular gene, I can go to the mouse and find it's the similar gene, and it's 90 percent the same. It's certainly compatible with the theory of evolution, although it will always be a theory that we cannot actually prove. I'm a theistic evolutionist. I take the view that God, in His wisdom, used evolution as His creative scheme. I don't see why that's such a bad idea. That's pretty amazingly creative on His part. And what is wrong with that as a way of putting together in a synthetic way the view of God who is interested in creating a group of individuals that He can have fellowship with -- us? Why is evolution not an appropriate way to get to that goal? I don't see a problem with that. The only problems that get put forward are by those who would interpret Genesis 1 in a very literal way. And that interpretation in many ways is a -- is a modern one. Saint Augustine in 400 AD, without any reasons to try to be an apologist to Charles Darwin, agreed that that was not a particularly appropriate way to interpret the words that are written in that first chapter of the Bible.

That was the question a Slate headline asked today. The answer is no. But it can calm your nerves, help slow down your life and boost your immune system. That's what I've found, though I'm more of an Earl Grey fan.

Described as soothing and gentle, it sits paradoxically at the red-hot intersection of New Age health mania and industrial chemistry. Green tea the flavor is rapidly becoming ubiquitous both upscale and down-market, available in a martini glass at trendy L.A. lounges and in a Styrofoam cup at Dunkin Donuts. In the United States, "Eastern" tends to blur together Hinduism, Buddhism, and hucksterism.

The article by Slate Editor Jaboc Weisberg is full of links to other stories, products like New Zen Green Tea Truffles and medical research. (That's a photo of green tea potato chips.) Weisberg waxes sarcastic about the fact that green tea's benefits are not judged by reality but by the way it makes you feel:

The implicit bargain in buying these products is that green tea will make you not just spiritually complete, but morally superior. This is partly because green tea had the good sense to have the word green as part of its name. It is not entirely clear how drinking tea resists climate change, but it is evident that serene, grounded green tea sippers—unlike those aggressive, overcharged coffee-heads—emit only minuscule quantities of carbon. With "one sip" of Tazo green tea, whose logo is expressed in what looks like ancient runes, "you reincarnate the original spirit of enlightenment that may have inspired the Japanese tea ceremony." After a second sip, it seems unlikely that you will invade a Middle Eastern country. The canister on my desk says the tea bags it contains embody "a wisdom beyond wisdom, capable of enlightening both mind and body." I just drank several cups and I do believe it's working.

Imagine you've decide to star in a $45 million film about the 10 plagues that preceded the Exodus being unleashed in modern times. Rivers of blood. Frogs falling from the sky. Boils that won't heal. The death of every firstborn child.

OK, now imagine you are filming in Louisiana when a storm of "biblical proportions" hits the Gulf of Mexico -- twice.

That's what happened to Hilary Swank and crew. Filming for "The Reaping," the team was forced to evacuate as hurricanes Katrina and Rita roiled the Gulf, according to a story in today's Daily News.

"I didn't draw parallels to the film," said David Morrissey, who plays a schoolteacher and possible love interest who lures Swank's character to the plagued burg of Haven.

I'm not going to either. Regardless of any similarities between those horrendous hurricanes and the story of the Flood or plagues in the Bible, Hollywood always seems to miss the mark on these movies. A quick Google News search revealed this piercing review: "'The Reaping' looks good, but it's dumb, silly and confused"

Did London and Tehran just stave off World World III?

I've been on a journey of late to learn more about where my family comes from. My Catholic grandfather's dad came over on a boat from Italy. But of my three Jewish grandparents, all of whom were born in the United States, only one is alive, and she doesn't know where her parents emigrated from. Germany and Poland are safe guesses, but that barely narrows the field.

This led my wife to note last weekend that we should both learn more about our family histories before there is no one left to learn from. Today, The New York Times profiles an 81-year-old substitute teacher who is ensuring his students don't suffer from a broken oral history.

He is no beleaguered sub from Central Casting. He has never had to call security. He does not even have to write his name on the blackboard. Everyone knows Mr. Blume.

In a school where the average age of the teachers is under 40, and the students’ grandparents include many of the baby-boomer cohort, Mr. Blume has emerged as a sort of older person in residence, an on-call doctor of memory.

He is the only person in the building, for instance, who remembers the shantytown Hooverville that once blanketed Riverside Park at 72nd Street. He talked about it the other day in Miss Mostrande’s eighth-grade social studies class.

He is the only one who had ever heard of, much less laid eyes on, a sign that said “No Jews, No Negroes, No Dogs Allowed.”

The Jewish history was passed down from an oral tradition, and, in two weeks, Jews will observe Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. It's been 62 years since World War II ended and Hitler's plan to exterminate the Jews failed, though not without taking 6 million Jews and millions of Gypsies, Slavs, gays and the disabled. The Holocaust seems so long ago, even child survivors are now approaching and surpassing old age.

One of the lessons I've learned from writing a few Yom Hashoah stories over the years is that some survivors want to keep telling their story so the Holocaust deniers will never be able to gain a foothold in shaky future historic texts.

It's been a long time since any of the Abrahamic faiths -- Christianity, Islam and Judaism -- spoke with a singular voice. For atheists the wait has been eternal. Currently, a schism is building between "athiest fundamentalists" -- who seek to eradicate religion, the purveyor of war and ignorance -- and secular humanists who stress the importance of individuals, of equality and of social justice.

This article from the Associated Press digs into the atheist split. The article focuses on Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard University, who takes issue with the "New Atheists" -- people like Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, and Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason and the diatribe Letter to a Christian Nation.

Epstein calls them "atheist fundamentalists." He sees them as rigid in their dogma, and as intolerant as some of the faith leaders with whom atheists share the most obvious differences. ... "Humanism is not about erasing religion," he said. "It's an embracing philosophy."

Harris said that not everyone needed to be as radical in religious opposition as he is. But "an intellectual intolerance of people who strongly believe things on bad evidence is just 'basic human sanity.'"

"We do not jail people for being stupid," he said, "but we do stop listening to them after a while"

If not gaining steam, the American atheist movement has at least been gaining visibility for the past few years, something I wrote about last November. Atheists, who account for 3 percent to 10 percent of Americans, depending on the poll, finally have a lobbyist in Washington (Lori Lipman Brown of the Secular Coalition for America) and a think tank (the Center for Inquiry's public policy office). And last month, Rep. Pete Stark of Fremont came out of the closet as Congress' first atheist in history. Democratic political strategist Dan Newman told the Chronicle that a year ago such a statement "would have been political suicide."

Non-theists -- atheists, agnostics, brights humanists and free thinkers -- are certain there have been, and are, more like Stark. But the others are too politically savvy. A 1999 Gallup poll found 49 percent of Americans would be willing to vote for an atheist president -- up from 17 percent in 1958, but still more than 40 percentage points lower than for a Catholic, Jew or African-American and 10 points lower than for a gay candidate.

As atheists continue to push for acceptance, the question is which godless philosophy -- the fundamentalists or the humanists -- will win the movement's soul.

(For anyone wondering why The God Blog would write about those who don't believe in a Supreme Being, click here.)

So there certainly is a crowd of Democrats that hopes Barack Obama is the messiah their forefathers spoke of. But seriously, this? Last Saturday, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago put on display an undergraduate's papier mache sculpture of Obama in the Son of God's robe and with a neon halo around his head.

In the 2008 presidential race, in which Obama is trying to beat out Hillary Clinton and then the Republican nominee, religious beliefs have already become an issue. There were the flimsy reports by the Washington Times' sister magazine and Fox News that Obama studied as a youth at an Indonesian madrasa (recruitment academies for Islamic fundamentalists). Cathleen Falsani of the Chicago Sun-Times, however, had this more informed, nuanced take on Obama's faith.

As for odd religious images, the Obama sculpture is hardly alone. The day before it went on display, the planned Holy Week exhibition of a life-size chocolate Jesus -- being crucified in the nude, with respect to anatomy -- was cancelled after it was widely ripped by Christains. But that's nothing in the history of outrageous art.

* As expected GetReligion has, rightfully so, posted a piece criticizing the Obama sculpture reportage:

In all seriousness, the first news report I saw on this item was frightfully poor. A.J. Sterling of Fox News Chicago states glibly that "some may be offended by the suggestion that Christ is black, or that the United States could have a black president, but they don’t seem to be at the exhibit this night." I guess the Grand Kleagle of the closest Klan had a previous engagement.

Gas prices are again poking through the stratosphere. The price for a gallon of unleaded in California closed Monday at $3.27, up 36 cents from a month ago and 48 cents from a year ago. Oil futures closed at $66 a barrel and were down about a buck today, high but well below their peaks last summer.

What can be done? AAA has a bunch of suggestions: drive less, turn the A/C off and keep the windows shut, empty the trunk. We also could start by having more people pump biodiesel, which costs an unfluctuating $3.25 a gallon, into their diesel engines. But there isn't enough biodiesel for every American, most of whom would need to buy new cars.

Maybe what we need is for PrayLive to return. A mobile prayer network that brought its power of heavenly persuasion to Hollywood last year, the group has expressed a concern with the pressure high pump prices put on the country. Theologians, though, have told me that our fuel pain might be just what God has in mind to ween us off a limited natural resource.

From the article I wrote last year about PrayLive:

The Rev. Beatrice Williams drove 110 miles to Hollywood on Wednesday to beg the Lord for lower gasoline prices.

"There is victory when we stand together," Williams said, after joining eight others in prayer. "We will overcome, and we will overcome this if there are enough people who believe that God cares."

Standing beneath the Gothic Revival tower of Hollywood United Methodist Church - and across from a Chevron station charging $3.43 a gallon for unleaded - the group asked God to comfort those paying more while driving less.

"We give you praise and honor and glory. You are king of all kings. You know our needs," Bishop Donald Downing, pastor of Heart to Heart Christian Center in Fort Washington, Md., prayed as cars zipped through the intersection of Highland and Franklin avenues, occasionally honking.

"These high gas prices, Lord, bring them down, oh Father."

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Gasoline experts have been offering advice for months on how drivers can reduce fuel prices: empty the trunk, combine errands, keep tires properly inflated, maintain a steady speed.

"People seek - what is the word I'm looking for? - relief in many ways," said Jeff Spring, a spokesman for the Automobile Club of Southern California. "We would recommend they continue to try to cut their use of gas to try to lower the prices. Reduced demand will lower their prices."

What about asking for help from above?

"I'll leave that question up to the theologians," Spring said.

In Scripture, God's children tend to pray for illnesses to be healed and for persecution to be stopped, said Patrick Miller, professor emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary.

"Situations that evoke people's crying out to the Lord - what I would call prayers for help - tend to be situations when the community is in dire straits," Miller said.

But rising gas prices are different because it's possible God is reminding Americans the world has limited natural resources, Miller said. Praying to overcome human excess would be like praying to ace an exam that wasn't studied for.

On the other hand, it would be appropriate to pray for wisdom to respectfully live in God's creation and conserve natural resources, Miller said, which was why the Rev. Ed Hansen agreed to have Wednesday's prayer session outside his church.

"It is very unjust that profits can be so high when people are so deeply affected," said Hansen, who drives a 2004 Prius and lives a mile from his church. "From a faith perspective, I believe God wants us to work for justice."

The Rev. Albert Mohler, president of the flagship Southern Baptist Theological seminary, made waves last month by discussing the possibility that homosexuality is hereditary. Such a circumstance would mean one of two things: Either homosexuality is not a sin because we are created in the image of God or that God does punish children for their parents errors.

The latter circumstance is pretty unlikely based of 2,000 years of theological research. The former also is unlikely based strictly on the energy conservative Christians put into lobbying against gay marriage, though some liberal denominations, like the Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ, have more inclusive understandings of homosexuality, even if it is splitting the church itself.

As for Mohler, he had the (dis)honor two weeks ago of being the springboard for Stephen Colbert's satirical segment "The Word," which I found being re-run late last night. An often hilarious spin on a single news issue, with the punchlines being delivered as subtitles while Colbert talks, "The Word" on Mohler lacked wit, instead relying on a snotty intellectual elitism.

"We can use science to make the real world look more like the Bible," Colbert says while "Already Working On Flood" flashes on the screen. OK, that's clever, particularly because the next night's Word took issue with the schism forming between evangelical Christians seeking solutions to global warming and those who only want to focus on the "core values" of sexuality and abortion (see the first paragraph here).

But this, not so much. "According to the Old Testament, the sun goes around the earth. So I am calling on NASA to attach giants rockets to the sun and get it to revolve around our globe. And I certainly hope Rev. Mohler will join me. Because then the world won't just be natural. It will be supernatural," Colbert closes with. "And that is The Word."

Is it irresponsible for Christians to abuse the environment? Is it a sin? The debate over that question has been growing in intensity for years. And, like with most nuanced religious issues, there hasn't been a clear divide between liberal and conservative Christians. Last month, the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals drew the ire of longtime allies -- fundamentalists like James Dobson and Pat Robertson -- by taking time away from fighting abortion and gay marriage to worry about global warming.

But at the micro level of how to represent Jesus Christ's triumphal return for being tempted by the devil in the desert, more American churches are opting for "green" palm fronds cut from Latin American forests, according to Sunday's New York Times:

Slightly more expensive than the average palm, eco-palms are the rage in churches across the United States because of the social and environmental benefits they represent. They are collected in a way that helps preserve the forest, and more of the sale price ends up in the pockets of the people who cut them.

"We want to be a green congregation," said the Rev. David C. Parsons, pastor of St. John-St. Matthew-Emanuel Lutheran Church in Brooklyn, which purchased eco-palms for the second straight year. "We are conscious of our footprint on the earth. There is a biblical mandate to do that."

(skip)

The program began in 2005 with 20 American churches that bought about 5,000 palms. It grew last year, with 281 congregations placing orders for 80,000 palms. On this Palm Sunday, 1,436 churches will distribute 364,000 eco-palm stems.

That still represents just about 1 percent of the palms that are purchased for Palm Sunday, the day when the most palms are used; American churches use 25 million to 35 million palms, say officials involved in the project.

A Catholic's sobering reflection on Palm Sunday, via the Daily Dish.