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CHENNAI, India (RNS) For the second time in two days, Pakistani officials have restricted access to a popular Internet site that it deems offensive to the country’s majority Muslim population. The government Thursday (May 20) blocked access to YouTube because of what it considers sacrilegious content on the video-sharing website. The country’s Telecommunications Authority did…

BERLIN (RNS) A Scientologist may offer child care services so long as she does not mix religion with work, a German court ruled Wednesday (May 19). An unnamed 38-year-old Munich woman had been providing day care for five children, earning about 1,600 euros ($1,982) a month, reported the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung. City regulators ruled she…

WASHINGTON (RNS) The U.S. Catholic bishops withdrew from a national civil rights coalition on Wednesday (May 19) after the group advocated on behalf of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. The Washington-based Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (LCCR) was founded in 1950 by African American and Jewish leaders to press for the passage of…

WHITE PLAINS, New York – A federal judge has refused to dismiss the criminal case against four men who claimed they were entrapped by a federal informant into a plot to bomb synagogues and shoot down military planes. Judge Colleen McMahon said precedents establish that even when the government helps commit a crime, others can…

(RNS) Europe’s burqa debate and a steady stream of media images showing veiled women have led to a widespread impression that all Muslims are obsessed with covering the female body. It might be a surprise, then, that many Muslim Americans are toasting Rima Fakih, who made history on Sunday (May 16) by becoming the first…

(RNS) Evangelicals are calling on the Obama administration to enact long-promised prison reforms, saying the incarcerated deserve protection from violence and rape. In 2003, former president George W. Bush signed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which aimed to lower the estimated 13 percent of inmates sexually assaulted each year. The bill called for the Department…

(RNS) Former Colorado megachurch pastor Ted Haggard, who resigned top evangelical posts after a sex-and-drug scandal, denied reports that he is starting a new church. “A corporation does not a church make,” Haggard, the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said in a brief interview on Tuesday (May 18). He said the incorporation…

(RNS) The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, President Obama’s former pastor, said Obama “threw me under the bus,” according to a letter obtained by The Associated Press. During his presidential campaign, Obama resigned from Wright’s Chicago church after controversial and racially tinged comments by the pastor were widely reported. Calling himself “toxic” in a letter to Africa…

(RNS) When Nate Phelps’ son was about five years old and had been caught misbehaving, he taught his dad a lesson about ending the cycle of family abuse. “I’d clung to the idea that corporal punishment was a requirement by God, because that’s what we were taught,” said Phelps, who says he was raised amid…

JERUSALEM – Moshe Greenberg, an influential scholar whose work won the first-ever Israel Prize for biblical studies, has died, one of his sons said Monday. He was 81. Greenberg’s award-winning Bible scholarship bridged the gap between the commentary of ancient Jewish sages and modern-day religious studies, said Israel Knohl, a professor at Hebrew University of…
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