Recently in Christianity Category

The Forward has a biting piece tomorrow about the newfound friendship between "John Hagee, the firebrand evangelical Christian minister from San Antonio, Texas," who stole the show at Aipac's convention in March, and a growing number of Jewish federations:

“If you search through Jewish stories around the U.S., a lot of us have pieces of personal memory where non-Jews were there for us — not because they had a hidden agenda, but because they believed it was the right thing to do,” said Michal Kohane, the Israeli-born executive director of the Jewish Federation of the Sacramento Region. “There is a strong aspect of CUFI in which they are the descendants of that ideological concept.”

Just as liberals have criticized Aipac for giving Hagee the dais, they are now speaking out against the pastor’s grass-roots fundraising dinners. Most recently, a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, Betty McCollum, declined an invitation to attend an April 29 “Night To Honor Israel” in Brooklyn Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, citing what she called “Hagee’s extremism, bigotry and intolerance.”

Pray for LA, a ministry started by the pastor of Metro Calvary Chapel in Santa Monica, will host its inaugural 5K run Saturday at Hansen Dam Recreational Center in Lake View Terrace. Entry costs $40 for adults and $25 for children, with $15 from each fee going to the Union Rescue Mission downtown. An entry form can be found here. Registration begins at 6:30 a.m. and the run will start at 8.

Jim McGreevey, the former New Jersey governor who came out of the closet while in office and resigned because of an alleged affair, has converted into the Episcopal Church and will enter its General Theological Seminary in Manhattan. (The ordination of gay priests has become, to put it mildly, a contentious issue in the U.S. branch of King Henry's church.)

Here's the word from the Newark Star-Ledger, which broke the story online today:

It's May Day, and for the second year in L.A. that means marches for immigrant rights will be snarling traffic in the city's busiest corridors. (Avoid downtown and Koreatown.) Last year, massive walkouts and work boycotts drew more than half a million people to L.A. streets, including Cardinal Roger Mahony, once a compatriot of Cesar Chavez.

Here is what the head of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles had to say in advance of today's protests:

While only the U.S. Senate passed meaningful immigration reform legislation in 2006,May 1" 2007 once again gives us the opportunity to support our immigrant brothers and sisters by calling on our legislators to bring an end to the persecution of immigrants and the separation of immigrant families, and fix our broken immigration system that benefits from the hard work of immigrants, while keeping them in the shadows of society.

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.