That loud crack heard throughout the evangelical world when national research showed that more than half of American evangelicals believe people of other religions can go to heaven wasn’t thunder from an angry God.

This crack came from the rock upon which the modern American evangelical movement sits. It was splitting right down the middle.

There is both rejoicing and lamentation.

I am among those rejoicing.

The universalist/evangelical finding, which came from the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, was one more sign that American Christianity is entering the most exciting era in our lifetime. Some people believe a new awakening is at hand. Others believe a reformation is in the making. No one knows how long it will take or how far it will go.

What’s clear is that people in the pews are taking back their faith, wresting it from leaders who helped sell the idea that only the most fundamentalist brands of Christian belief could succeed and that their words alone represented that belief.

As an evangelical from Corsicana wrote recently about a powerful evangelical leader, "I found myself not wanting to be this ventriloquist’s dummy anymore."

Southern Baptist Convention leaders were among those lamenting. So they did their own study, which showed that only 20 percent of evangelicals think people of other religions will get a go-to-Heaven pass.

That would be good news for them, except Southern Baptist researchers didn’t use the same criteria in picking their evangelicals that the Pew study used. The Pew study counted anyone who called themselves an evangelical or some variation thereof. That standard reliably returns 25 percent of Americans.

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Courtesy The Star-Telegram.

 A toddler whose remains were found inside a suitcase in Philadelphia this spring was starved to death by members of a religious cult, including his mother, in part because he refused to say "amen" after meals, police said.

Ria Ramkissoon, the mother of Javon Thompson, was charged Sunday with first-degree murder in the boy's death, and Baltimore police said Monday that three other members of a group called 1 Mind Ministries have also been charged with first-degree murder. Police and Ramkissoon's family say the group is a cult.

Members did not seek medical care for Javon when he stopped breathing, and the boy died in his mother's arms, according to court documents that described police interviews with a confidential informant and two children. He would have been about 15 months old when police say adults stopped feeding him in December 2006.

Ramkissoon, 21, was being held Monday in the psychiatric ward of Baltimore's Central Booking and Intake Center, and a bail review was postponed until Tuesday. Her public defender declined comment.

The three other people charged in Javon's death - Queen Antoinette, 40, also known as Toni Ellsberry or Toni Sloan; Marcus Cobbs, 21; and Trevia Williams, who turns 21 on Tuesday - were already in custody. They were arrested in May in New York City on warrants charging them with failure to appear in court in Baltimore. Those charges stemmed from a scuffle with police in a child custody dispute.

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Courtesy CBS News

Rowan Williams believes that gay sexual relationships can “reflect the love of God” in a way that is comparable to marriage, The Times has learnt.
Gay partnerships pose the same ethical questions as those between men and women, and the key issue for Christians is that they are faithful and lifelong, he believes.
Dr Williams is known to be personally liberal on the issue but the strength of his views, revealed in private correspondence shown to The Times, will astonish his critics.
The news threatens to reopenbitter divisions over ordaining gay priests, which pushed the Anglican Communion towards a split.
As Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Williams recommitted the Anglican Communion to its orthodox position that homosexual practice is incompatible with Scripture at the Lambeth Conference, which closed on Sunday.
However, in an exchange of letters with an evangelical Christian, written eight years ago when he was Archbishop of Wales, he described his belief that biblical passages criticising homosexual sex were not aimed at people who were gay by nature.
He argued that scriptural prohibitions were addressed to heterosexuals looking for sexual variety. He wrote: “I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.” Dr Williams described his view as his “definitive conclusion” reached after 20 years of study and prayer. He drew a distinction between his own beliefs as a theologian and his position as a church leader, for which he had to take account of the traditionalist view.

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Courtesy (London) Times online

A group of senior Anglican clergy has told the Lambeth Conference that liberal churches must end the ordination of gay bishops and stop blessing same-sex relationships if the Communion is to arrest its slide towards a permanent split.
The working party given the task of finding possible solutions to the rift told the 650 bishops meeting in Canterbury that traditionalist churches in Africa must also stop setting up parallel church bodies in the United States as homes for congregations splitting away from the American Church because of the dispute.
The group, headed by the former Archbishop of the Middle East Clive Handford, said in the long term some sort of statement of shared beliefs and an agreement to abide by them would be necessary.
But in the short term, a ban on gay bishops and blessings was needed to prevent "irreparable damage" to the Communion.
Bishop Handford made it clear that did not mean that the openly gay Bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson, should resign.
But it did mean the Episcopal Church promising not to repeat such ordinations.

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Courtesy: BBCNews

Diners have been flocking to a restaurant in northern Nigeria to see pieces of meat which the owner says are inscribed with the name of Allah.
What looks like the Arabic word for God and the name of the prophet Muhammad were discovered in pieces of beef by a diner in Birnin Kebbi.
He was about to eat it, when he suddenly noticed the words in the gristle, the restaurant owner said.
A search of the kitchen's meat revealed three more pieces which bore the names.
The meat was boiled and then fried before being served, owner Kabiru Haliru told newspaper Weekly Trust.

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Courtesy: BBC News

Despite strong opposition from conservative Anglicans, the Church of England has Voted to allow women to become Bishops.  While feminine clergy in Anglican affiliated churches  is common in North America and Australia, this is a first in Britain.  Though the Measure passed by a wide margin, the  implementation of  the Women as Bishops Policy will NOT be immediate.  The conservative factions of the church of England have threatened further schism.

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The United States is one of the most religious countries in the world, but American views often defy categorization and contradict the teachings of their faith, according to a huge survey released Monday.

Some Highlights

70% of those claiming religious affiliations believe multiple religions can lead a person to salvation, while 68 percent say there is more than one way to interpret the teachings of their religion.
57% of evangelical Christians say that multiple religions can lead to salvation, though nary an evangelical theologian or minister would be likely to say that.
58% of Catholics believe society should accept homosexuality, a view that is greatly at odds with U.S. Catholic bishops, including those in the Bay Area.
12% of Eastern Orthodox Christians say they speak in tongues once a week, though it is largely a Pentecostal practice that is not in Orthodox liturgy.
21% of self-defined atheists believe in God - leading scholars to think that these atheists see how they identify themselves as a position against organized religion, not divinity. (Ed Comment: Huh?)

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Courtesy: SFGate

More than half of Britons think Christianity is likely to have disappeared from the country within a century, according to a survey

Research by the Orthodox Jewish organisation Aish found that just over a third of people thought religions like Christianity and Judaism would still be practiced in Britain in 100 years' time.

Although four in 10 people said they would choose to be a member of the Christian religion, almost the same number said they would rather practice no religion at all.

Buddhism however, proved more attractive than both Islam and Judaism, and was chosen by nine per cent of those questioned.

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Courtesy Telegraph (UK)

Late Saturday evening, a young father beat his baby son to death to 'get the demons' out.‡ he told fellow drivers who had stopped to urge him to relent. Police said.  Sergio Casian Aguiar, a 27 year old resident of Turlock CA, further said to persons pleading  with him to stop that the  boy was just "trash".  As well as asking for a knife, witnesses stated. Aguiar was shot dead by police when he stated he was not going to prison and flipped the officers the bird.  Neighbors and fellow co-workers of Aguiar, a grocery store employee, expressed shock and surprise at the news of the incident.  At the time of this writing, no autopsies had been performed on either Aguiar or his son.

‡Original Article courtesy: SFGate.

Little green men might shock the secular public. But the Catholic Church would welcome them as brothers.

That's what Vatican chief astronomer and papal science adviser Gabriel Funes explained in a recent article in L'Osservatore Romano, the newsletter of the Vatican Observatory (translated here). His conclusion might surprise nonbelievers. After all, isn't this the same church that imprisoned Galileo for saying that the Earth revolves around the sun? Doesn't the Bible say that God created man -- not little green men -- in his image?

Indeed, many observers assert that aliens would be bad for believers. Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research, once wrote that finding intelligent other-worldly life "will be inconsistent with the existence of God or at least organized religions." But such predictions tend to come from outside Christianity. From within, theologians have debated the implications of alien contact for centuries. And if one already believes in angels, no great leap of faith is required to accept the possibility of other extraterrestrial intelligences.

Since God created the universe, theologians say, he would have created aliens, too. And far from being weakened by contact, Christianity would adapt. Its doctrines would be interpreted anew, the aliens greeted with open -- and not necessarily Bible-bearing -- arms.

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Courtesy: Wired

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