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

Beliefnet News

VATICAN CITY (RNS) When Pope Benedict XVI travels to Portugal next week (May 11-14), the primary purpose will be to worship at the world-famous shrine to the Virgin Mary at Fatima. Yet the pope is also likely to use the four-day visit to address top-level concerns, including the Catholic Church’s crisis over clerical sex abuse,…

SAN FRANCISCO – A federal appeals court says Orange County officials acted legally when they ordered a Muslim inmate in a courthouse holding cell to remove her headscarf. The U.S. Court of Appeals said Monday that since Souhair Khatib was detained for only eight hours, the holding cell didn’t qualify as a penal institution covered…

(RNS) Nearly three-quarters of U.S. Catholics believe the Vatican tried to cover up clergy sex abuse, and a majority says Pope Benedict XVI has handled recent reports of past abuse poorly, according to a new poll, but less than 10 percent have considered leaving the Catholic Church over the issue. The Vatican has been besieged…

(RNS) Southern Baptist theologian Jim Hamilton doesn’t write a lot of parables. But he recently posted an original one on his blog in a bid to delegitimize a popular author who Hamilton says is falsely advertising himself as an evangelical. In the parable, author Brian McLaren transforms a Whole Foods Market into a McDonald’s, yet…

ATLANTA – A gay Atlanta pastor and his partner who have been at the center of a battle over the treatment of gay clergy by the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination are being reinstated to the denomination’s clergy roster, church officials announced Tuesday. The Rev. Bradley Schmeling and his partner, the Rev. Darin Easler, have been…

JERUSALEM – Rabbi David Forman, founder of Rabbis for Human Rights, a prominent group defending Palestinians, has died, a colleague said Tuesday. Forman was 65. He died Monday in a hospital in Dallas, Texas, where he was undergoing treatment, said Rabbi Arik Ascherman, current leader of the human rights group. Forman founded Rabbis for Human…

WASHINGTON (RNS) More than a decade after it was first introduced, an on-again off-again bill to protect employees’ religious expression in the workplace is attracting renewed attention that could lead to action on Capitol Hill in coming weeks. The Workplace Religious Freedom Act would revise and strengthen the existing requirements imposed on employers to accommodate…

TURIN, Italy – Pope Benedict XVI all but gave an outright endorsement of the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, calling the cloth that some believe is Christ’s burial shroud an icon “written with the blood” of a crucified man. During a visit Sunday to the Shroud in the northern Italian city of Turin, Benedict…

The Vatican’s decision to assume leadership of the scandal-plagued Legionaries of Christ won acceptance Sunday from the order itself and praise from those who abandoned the conservative movement now discredited by revelations that its founder sexually abused seminarians and fathered at least one child. But the abuse victims of the Rev. Marcial Maciel said the…

Mormons on Opposite Sides in Immigration Fight No matter how much the LDS Church would like to remain neutral on the issue of illegal immigration, Mormon activists on opposite sides draw on their faith’s doctrines or practices to buoy their positions. Russell Pearce, the Arizona senator who proposed that state’s tough anti-immigration law, is LDS…
archives most recent
search this blog
More from Beliefnet and our partners