Inspiration Faith & Prayer Health & Wellness Entertainment Love & Family
Newsletters Special Offers

Beliefnet News

WASHINGTON (RNS) House Speaker John Boehner said on Friday (March 4) that he and fellow lawmakers will defend the Defense of Marriage Act after the Obama administration dropped its support for the law last month. “The constitutionality of this law should be determined by the courts — not by the president unilaterally — and this…

NEW DELHI (RNS) Protesters in Bhutan are denouncing the three-year prison sentence of a Buddhist monk charged with violating the small kingdom’s anti-tobacco law. The 23-year-old monk, Sonam Tshering, was the first victim of a ban rooted in the religious zeal of Bhutanese elders who believe smoking defiles sacred spaces, according to local media reports.…

NEW ORLEANS (RNS) As a high-school student in the mid-1960s, Greg Aymond occasionally saw an angry teacher cuff a student. It never happened to him, nor does the memory of faculty discipline in those days particularly trouble the man who later became the archbishop of New Orleans. But now, as Archbishop Gregory Aymond confronts formal…

(RNS) The Rev. James Martin has seen a lot of religious movies in his life. But the Jesuit priest and author says a new film has sprung to the top of his list. Martin calls Of Gods and Men, a film based on the kidnapping and murder of seven Algerian monks in 1996, “the greatest…

SALEM, Ore. (RNS) A day after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of an anti-gay church to picket funerals, Oregon legislators discussed a bill that would put distance between protesters and mourners. On Wednesday (March 2), the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protects the right of Westboro Baptist Church to protest funerals and…

BALTIMORE (RNS) Martina Bagnoli admits that the exhibit she helps curate here at The Walters Art Museum may gross some people out. After all, the display includes 2,000-year-old teeth, shards of bone and splinters from a first-century execution device. But these are not just any teeth, bones and splinters. Tradition holds that they belong to…

(RNS) Balancing the federal budget at the expense of the poor would be un-Christian, evangelical leaders warned Congress on Thursday (March 3) as they work to reject proposed spending cuts to domestic and foreign aid. “The Bible says that God has a special concern for the poor,” said Ron Sider, president of the group Evangelicals…

PROVO, Utah (RNS) A Brigham Young University basketball star has been suspended from the nationally ranked team for the remainder of the season because he violated the Mormon-run school’s honor code that prohibits premarital sex. Brandon Davies, a 19-year-old sophomore, acknowledged his transgression to BYU officials on Monday (Feb. 28), according to multiple sources. As…

TORONTO (RNS) A labor relations board in Canada has granted an Adventist worker the right to not join a union because of her religious beliefs, raising questions about whether religion should trump labor laws. The Saskatchewan Labor Relations Board ruled last month (Feb.) in favor of an unnamed 24-year-old woman who argued that her Seventh-day…

JERUSALEM (RNS/ENInews) Israel has declined to renew a residency permit for Anglican Bishop Suheil Dawani of Jerusalem, according to the leader of the Jerusalem Inter-Church Center (ICC). The action took place several weeks ago but the bishop’s office was trying to resolve the issue without media attention, said ICC Executive Secretary Yusef Daher. Subsequent appeals…
archives most recent
search this blog
More from Beliefnet and our partners