Ex-Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey warns Christianity is facing “marginalisation”, after prayers are banned from a council’s meetings.

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Christians ‘marginalised’ – Carey

Calls new contraception regulation “war on Christianity.”

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Newt: Obama’s Attacking Religion

Proponents of a boycott of the Salvation Army say people often know little about the organization’s evangelical Christianity and its opposition to homosexuality.

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Beliefs: Beliefs: Salvation Army Hears Dissent Over Gay Views

LYNCHBURG, Va. — Texas Gov. Rick Perry is a man of faith, and one of the big questions about him has been whether he would seek the presidency more as an evangelist or as a job-creator. On the debate stage, Perry decidedly has done the latter. But he demonstrated Wednesday that he would not shy away from cloaking his candidacy in his Christianity, delivering an address here at the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University that presented his life in deeply spiritual terms and cast his political aspirations as destiny. Read full article > >

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Perry talks about his faith, forsaking talk of jobs for a day

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Friday it will free an American detained for reportedly proselytizing after a visiting U.S. official expressed regret. Eddie Jun was arrested in November and accused of committing a serious crime against North Korea, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said. Pyongyang didn’t provide details about the alleged crime, but South Korean press reports say Jun, a Korean-American with business interests in North Korea, was accused of spreading Christianity. Read full article > >

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North Korea says it’s freeing American detained since November following US envoy visit

Can immortality be contagious? TIME Magazine’s cover story on Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, and the prospects for abolishing death by 2045 is only the latest of a series of media features. The New York Times Magazine cover story by Rob Walker a few weeks ago featured the virtual immortality of Facebook and other social media pages. And Nicholas Jackson took up the theme on the site, with a book excerpt. A leading Evangelical Christian magazine, Christianity Today , in its January cover feature, showed how complex the issue can be theologically.  You can now create your own electronic immortality festival with videos from NOVA scienceNOW and the Swedish artists Bigert & Bergström . (More here .) Lev Grossman’s feature may be the most sympathetic mainstream media coverage of the Singularity movement yet. As he concludes: [E]ven if they’re dead wrong about the future, they’re right about the present. They’re taking the long view and looking at the big picture. You may reject every specific article of the Singularitarian charter, but you should admire Kurzweil for taking the future seriously. Singularitarianism is grounded in the idea that change is real and that humanity is in charge of its own fate and that history might not be as simple as one damn thing after another. Kurzweil likes to point out that your average cell phone is about a millionth the size of, a millionth the price of and a thousand times more powerful than the computer he had at MIT 40 years ago. Flip that forward 40 years and what does the world look like? If you really want to figure that out, you have to think very, very far outside the box. Or maybe you have to think further inside it than anyone ever has before. That’s an ingeniously noncommittal endorsement. But is immortality by 2045 really a serious possibility?  Major names in neuroscience, mathematics, and other disciplines have taken sides against the Singularity, as here in Wired . (In his recent book What Technology Wants , the magazine’s co-founder, Kevin Kelly, considers it an inspiring myth, like Superman.) Singularity fans might counter with one of the great science fiction writers and futurist Arthur C. Clarke ‘s most famous laws: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong. But given popular responsiveness to features about immortality and the Singularity, we should also bear in mind the corollary of Isaac Asimov: When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion — the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.

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Will Death Become Obsolete?

During the first two weeks of February, military bases and schools across the country will join dozens of other organizations is holding annual “prayer breakfasts” and luncheons in coordination with the controversial National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC. While military chaplains are expected to provide non-denominational options to those in uniform, critics charge that prayer breakfasts sometimes favor conservative and evangelical brands of Christianity that are intolerant of other faiths and perspectives. read more

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Air Force Academy Taps "Member of Lord’s Army" to Speak at National Prayer Luncheon

An American tourist was stabbed to death in Israel Saturday while hiking in a forest near Jerusalem. The woman, Kristine Luken, was part of an evangelical ministry that sought to promote Christianity among Jews. Her companion on the hike played dead…

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American Woman Killed in Israel

Promoting his new book, Jimmy Carter, whose version of Christianity allows ample scope for what some Christians consider the sin of pride, has been doing something at which he has had long practice — praising himself. He is, he says, “probably superior” to all other ex-presidents , and would have…

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November election results will vindicate or undercut Obama

This article titled “Barack Obama appeal halts pastor’s plan to burn Qur’ans – for now” was written by Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Aunohita Mojumdar in Kabul, for The Guardian on Friday 10th September 2010 23.29 UTC

The Florida pastor who sparked an international crisis with his plan to burn hundreds of Qur’ans has given an undertaking that he will not carry out the stunt, after an intervention by Barack Obama warning he would put American lives at risk.

The promise from Terry Jones, head of a congregation of about 50 at the Dove World Outreach Centre in Gainesville, came after 48 hours in which he made frequent changes of mind. Having announced on Thursday that he would cancel the stunt, Jones appeared to backtrack yesterday.

In the latest of a bizarre series of twists, he and an evangelical colleague, KA Paul, from Texas, appeared on television and issued a two-hour deadline to Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam at the centre of the row in New York over the siting of a mosque and Islamic cultural centre near Ground Zero.

They demanded he meet them in New York and agree to move the proposed buildings to another location. The deadline passed without any response from Rauf.

Paul and Jones then told reporters that they still intended to make the trip to New York. Paul added that Jones would not carry out the Qur’an burning.

Earlier, Obama attempted to defuse the crisis, which yesterday claimed several lives as thousands of Afghans protested against the possible desecration of the Qur’an. Speaking at a White House press conference, Obama called on Jones to abandon his plan. “My hope is that this individual prays on it and refrains from it,” the president said.

In Afghanistan, two people were killed and several injured when police shot protesters in the north-eastern city of Faizabad. Reports from Farah province in western Afghanistan said one civilian was killed and three wounded in violence which erupted when several thousand protesters gathered outside a Nato base in the Bala Baluk district of Farah province.

The face-off between Obama and the Florida pastor came as feelings were running high across the country, with a series of ceremonies planned to mark 9/11 and rallies in New York for and against the proposed Islamic centre.

Obama issued a blunt warning to Jones and any copycats who might tempted to issue similar threats to burn Qur’ans to gain publicity. In a rare show of emotion, he said burning Qur’ans would risk the lives of young Americans serving in the military in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere round the world. “This is a way of endangering our troops, our sons and daughters … you don’t play games with that,” he said.

Jones was adamant on Wednesday that he was going to burn the Qur’an but by Thursday morning, in the face of increasing pressure, he was having second thoughts. After a phone call from the defence secretary, Robert Gates, Jones said he was cancelling the stunt and claimed he was doing so after securing talks with Rauf and a promise that the New York mosque and cultural centre was being moved.

But Rauf issued a statement saying: “I am prepared to consider meeting with anyone who is seriously committed to pursuing peace. We have no such meeting planned at this time. Our plans for the community centre have not changed.”

A Florida imam, Muhammad Musri, had been in discussion with Jones, who portrayed him as a go-between with Muslims in New York. When Rauf denied any plan to move to a new location or to have organised any meeting, Jones accused Musri of having “clearly lied to us”. Musri, from the Islamic Society of Central Florida, said Jones had “stretched and exaggerated” their conversation.

Obama’s press conference, which the White House had hoped would focus on plans to revive the economy, was instead dominated by questions about Islam, including whether relations with Muslims in America and elsewhere round the world had deteriorated over the last nine years.

Obama told reporters: “The idea that we would burn the sacred text of someone else’s religion is contrary to what this country stands for.”

The president suggested that blame for the extensive coverage that Jones’s threat had received lay with the media, not the White House. “I hardly think we were the ones who elevated this story. But it is something, in the age of the internet, something that can cause us profound damage around the world, so we have to take it seriously,” Obama said.

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How the Chinese state is investing in Christianity

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Church boom

This article titled “Divine dispatches: a religion roundup” was written by Riazat Butt, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 11th August 2010 13.30 UTC

I’m writing this after a long day in the Sahara with a very grumpy camel, so I’m glad to be sitting on something flat and stationary.

✤ Here’s a gem. The Catholic church in England and Wales has more on its papal preparations. Britain’s Got Talent fans will remember Manchester’s Liam McNally, who wowed Amanda Holden and Piers Morgan. Only Simon Cowell was not 100% in favour of letting him through to the next round. According to Liam’s website: “Simon Cowell admitted he was concerned his outstanding voice could break at any moment and told him to make the most of this opportunity while he could.” Liam has taken Cowell’s advice and recorded two tracks for a commemorative CD – the one Catholics are paying for with their “pilgrim pass“. First Susan Boyle, now Liam. I hope they do better than Kelly Clarkson, who massacred Ave Maria in front of the Holy Father in 2008. I felt sorry for him having to sit through her “performance”.

People accuse the press of mocking the papal visit and Catholicism. I think it’s more a combination of fevered interest and idle curiosity about an unprecedented event taking place in a vastly changed religious and social landscape. Catholic officials in this country aren’t helping themselves – charging for entry, unimaginative merchandise and unappetising logistics. The beatification of Cardinal Newman starts at 9am on Sunday. People have to be in place by 8.30am. So if you’re travelling from far away, you might want to stay overnight. Who will pay for your hotel? You will, of course. Good luck trying to get a room. Of course, the nation’s bishops may simply be acceding to the demands of the Vatican, which will have given most of the input into when, where and how. But why not break with protocol and put Catholics first? Right now it feels like papacy by numbers. At the risk of being (more) provocative, the fact that the Sunday parish donation drive raised a little more than £1m is hardly a cause for optimism either. Average weekly mass attendance is around one million. You do the maths. I’ve put more into leaving collections.

✤ Israel. It’s so hot right now. This penetrating insight comes from Ashton Kutcher, the polymath who gave us Punk’d, Dude Where’s My Car? (I secretly like this film) and endless pictures of his cougar wife Demi on Twitter. He’s holidaying in Israel, according to the Jewish Chronicle. Kutcher is a follower of Kabbalah. It means a lot to him. He and Demi wed in a Kabbalah ceremony five years ago. So a visit to the Holy Land should be, well, holy. We could have had an “awesome” from the Western Wall or a “cool” from the Tower of David. But no, what really struck Kutcher was the August heat. Thousands of years of history were not enough to move a man who records every breath, thought and fart of his life in 140 characters or less. Judaism would be all the poorer without you Ash.

✤ The Hindu – no, not Julia Roberts – reports that the first documentary to be made about the work of Mother Theresa will not be part of a film festival celebrating her centenary. “We were very keen on having the documentary as the opening film of the festival. I wrote to the BBC three times, including a letter to its director-general Mark Thompson, but got no response”, festival director Sunil Lucas told the paper. Organisers say they tried to screen the film on two previous occasions. The BBC agreed on one of them – but requested a £250 fee.

✤ Congratulations to David Bailey – no not that one – who has been ordained and consecrated as the bishop of the Episcopal church of Navajoland. I like the Episcopalians – I know they have their knockers – but they are so at ease with their faith. Episcopal Life says:

“Several hundred Diné – many wearing traditional Navajo clothing – visitors and guests attended the 11am service. Medicine Man Herbert Yazzie led the procession with prayers, followed by Catharine Plummer, widow of the late Navajo Bishop Steven Plummer. She and Cathlena Plummer, using sacred blessing bowls and eagle feathers, smudged the gathering with smoldering sage and sweetgrass incense, a traditional ritual of blessing and cleansing.”

✤ Nuns. They’re meat and drink for journalists. Ruth Gledhill of the Times was a nun for a day and so was Jan Moir. Yes, that one. They were at the same convent – I wonder if they were there at the same time. I’ve done several stories about nuns. Female journalists, or at least their bosses, are fascinated with the lives of nuns. I don’t see the men of Fleet Street doing the same. It would be interesting to see Jonathan Wynne Jones or Johann Hari have a stab at monastic life.

Next week – a Ramadan special.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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