NewsTrust - Faith and Reason - Most Recent Stories: News (Mainstream)

Christian pastor faces execution in Iran for refusing to renounce his faith

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Mail - Sep. 29 (News) - Telegraph.co.ukChristian pastor faces execution in Iran for refusing to renounce his faithDaily MailBy Daily Mail Reporter A man who converted from Islam to Christianity is facing the death penalty in Iran for refusing to return to his former religion. Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, 34, of the Church of Iran, faces hanging after refusing a court order to ...Lawyer hopes Iran Christian pastor will be freedTelegraph.co.ukIran: Christian Convert May Still Be HangedSky NewsIran Prepares to Execute Christian PastorHuman EventsWashington Post -CNN (blog)all 274 news articles »

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Obama calls for religious tolerance

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 21:05:42 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Christi Parsons - Sep. 10 (News) - On the eve of the Sept. 11 remembrance, President Obama spoke of his own Christianity on Friday while calling on Americans to turn away from religious divisions and join together as "one nation, under God." It was a rare personal reference from the president, coming in a news conference that sounded more like a homily to the nation before a somber anniversary.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Files show future pope resisted defrocking priest - Yahoo! News

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Gillian Flaccus, Brooke Donald, Eric Gorski, John Mone, ,Raquel Maria Dillon,VictorL.Simpson - Apr. 10 (Investigative Report) - LOS ANGELES – The future Pope Benedict XVI resisted pleas to defrock a California priest with a record of sexually molesting children, citing concerns including "the good of the universal church," according to a 1985 letter bearing his signature.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Ex-Scientology lawsuits reveal elite Sea Org group

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - Mar. 28 (News) -

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Death Becomes Him

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Bruce Falkner - Mar. 03 (Investigative Report) - Over the past decade, Ludwig Minelli has helped more than 1,000 people kill themselves and has turned Zurich into the undisputed world capital of assisted suicide. Minelli sees himself as a crusader for what he calls “the last human right”—and he believes that helping more and more people to die advances his cause. Even if you believe in an absolute right to die on your own terms, how far is too far in the quest to secure that right? By Bruce Falconer

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

How Christian Were the Founders?

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Russell Shorto - Feb. 12 (Special Report) - Conservative activists on the Texas Board of Education say that the authors of the Constitution intended the United States to be a Christian nation. And they want America’s history textbooks to say so, too.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

His name: Jihad. His message: peace

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Duke Helfand - Nov. 29 (Special Report) - ... prominent community members see Turk as representative of a new generation of American-born Muslims who can break down stereotypes and more easily explain the Muslim experience to those beyond the walls of their mosques.

NewsTrust Rating: Not rated yet - See Info » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Did Christianity Cause the Crash?

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Hanna Rosin - Nov. 15 (Special Report) - "America's mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated- one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now."Hair-raising and horrifying, truly scary, and truly sad. Jesus wept.

NewsTrust Rating: Not rated yet - See Info » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Iraqi searches for brothers in ancient cemetery

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Sameer N. Yacoub , Bushra Juhi - Oct. 27 (News Report) - Nobody knows just how many Iraqis went missing during the sectarian warfare that tore the country apart. But at least 17,477 unidentified bodies have been found since May 2005, according to an Associated Press tally based on reports from morgue and police officials. That figure is only a minimum. Many Iraqis were afraid to report loved ones missing, and many more people may be buried in still-undiscovered mass grave

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Prayer Effort Seeks 'Right Thinking' From Liberals

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

All Things Considered - By Barbara Bradley Hagerty - Oct. 04 (Special Report) - A Christian conservative group, fearing a liberal drift in the country's leadership, has put 11 prominent politicians and activists on an "Adopt a Liberal" roster. They're asking God to help their targets change their stances on a variety of social issues.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

'No More Mr Nice Gay' as Mormons face vote backlash

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

The Independent - By Guy Adams - Nov. 08 (News Report) - Daniel Ginnes carried a banner declaring: "No More Mr Nice Gay." Brian Lindsey held up a sign billing Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, as a "prophet, polygamist, paedophile." Hundreds of others simply chanted: "Mormon scum." More than 2,000 gay rights protesters marched on a Mormon temple in Los Angeles on Thursday, throwing the church and its followers on to the front line of the battle over California's decision to ban same-sex marriage. Earlier this week, 52.5 per cent of voters in the supposedly liberal state decided to back Proposition 8, a ballot measure that adds 15 words to the constitution, saying that: "Only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognised in California." The development marked a massive setback for gay rights and left 18,000 couples, who had married in the five months since California legalised same-sex weddings, in legal limbo. In the large and traditionally laid-back gay community, it also left a sense of injustice. Proposition 8 passed with the assistance of a $70m (£44m) campaign largely funded by out-of-state donations from Mormons. "It's taken something like this to make us realise the need to be more aggressive and angry and active," said Mr Ginnes, a graphic designer from West Hollywood. "People didn't think they were going to lose the vote, so they didn't realise it was worth fighting for.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Barack, Thy Name is Biblical

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By David E. Scheim - Aug. 28 (News Analysis) - The way some pundits are using name associations is beyond simply naive; it is truly shameful," "As names, both Barack and Hussein have noble pedigrees, and this fact should be used to promote understanding and not to provoke political or religious enmity."

NewsTrust Rating: 3.2 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Faithful give other religions benefit of doubt

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Eric Gorski - Jun. 24 (Special Report) - America remains a nation of believers, but a new survey finds most Americans don't feel their religion is the only way to eternal life -- even if their faith tradition teaches otherwise. The findings, revealed Monday in a survey of 35,000 adults, can either be taken as a positive sign of growing religious tolerance, or evidence that Americans dismiss or don't know the fundamental teachings of their own faiths.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Undercover with the Christian Right

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - May. 01 (Special Report) - By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this -- once you've gone this far -- you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the issue. It's that once you've gotten to this place, you've left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 10 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Religion in spotlight, especially Romney's

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Associated Press - By Jennifer Dobner - Jan. 20 (Special Report) - The church was founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith, who claimed that God and Jesus appeared to him in a forest grove and implored him to restore the true church to the world. Smith further said that an angel, Moroni, led him to a set of buried gold plates that, when translated from an ancient script, became the Book of Mormon.

NewsTrust Rating: 2.4 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Religion and Public Life - In God's name

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:51:54 -0700

Economist - Nov. 01 (Special Report) - With modernity now religion's friend, an eternal subject has become fashionable. Father Richard John Neuhaus points out that when he founded his Centre for Religion and Society in 1984, there were only four centres of religion and public life in America; now, he thinks, there are more than 200. Religious people are getting more vocal in all sorts of fields, including business. Religion is also cropping up in economics. Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian, re-examined Max Weber's theory of the Protestant work ethic to explain why Europeans work less than Americans.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Texas seminary espouses the gospel of gender inequality

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 08:09:09 -0700

Boston Globe - By Stephanie Simon, - Oct. 21 (News Report) - You hear that a lot on the lush green campus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. God values men and women equally, any student here will tell you. It's just that he's given them different responsibilities: Men make decisions; women make dinner. This fall, the internationally known seminary - a century-old training ground for Southern Baptists - began reinforcing those traditional gender roles with college classes in homemaking. The academic program, open only to women, includes lectures on laundering stubborn stains and a lab in baking chocolate-chip cookies

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average - 7 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 09:19:05 -0700

Time - By David Van Biema - Aug. 26 (Special Report) - A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever--or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist." That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and--except for a five-week break in 1959--never abated.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Bell tolls for Germany's churches

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 06:55:51 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Jeffrey Fleishman - Apr. 22 (Special Report) - The village church is struggling for relevance in modern Europe. The continent is rooted in Christianity, but devotion is ebbing and church attendance has dropped steadily for years. In Germany and other nations, Protestant and Roman Catholic churches are selling properties or leasing them to other religious groups, especially in cities and villages where structures are left vacant as shrinking congregations merge.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.3 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The New Crusaders

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:43:41 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Andrew Higgins - Apr. 12 (Special Report) - With 40 minutes to go before show time, the 500-seat Alexis de Tocqueville auditorium was already packed. A fan set up a video camera in the front row. A sound engineer checked the microphones. The star: Michel Onfray, celebrity philosopher and France's high priest of militant atheism. Dressed entirely in black, he strode onto the stage and looked out at the reverential audience for his weekly two-hour lecture series, "Hedonist Philosophy," which is broadcast on a state radio station. "I could found a religion," he said. Mr. Onfray, 48 years old and author of 32 books, stands in the vanguard of a curious and increasingly potent phenomenon in Europe: zealous disbelief in God. Passive indifference to faith has left Europe's churches mostly empty. But debate over religion is more intense and strident than it has been in many decades. Religion is re-emerging as a big issue in part because of anxiety over Europe's growing and restive Muslim populations and a fear that faith is reasserting itself in politics and public policy. That is all adding up to a growing momentum for a combative brand of atheism, one that confronts rather than merely ignores religion. Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun and prominent British author on religion, calls the trend "missionary secularism." She says it mimics the ardor of Christianity, Islam and Marxism, all of which have at their core an urge to convert nonbelievers to their worldview. Mr. Onfray argues that atheism faces a "final battle" against "theological hocus-pocus" and must rally its troops. "We can no longer tolerate neutrality and benevolence," he writes in "Traité d'athéologie," or Atheist Manifesto, a best seller in France, Italy and Spain. "The turbulent time we live in suggests that change is at hand and the time has come for a new order." As with many fights involving faith, Europe's struggle between belief and nonbelief is also a proxy for other, concrete issues

NewsTrust Rating: 4.5 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Just Why Do Americans Attend Church?

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 06:21:10 -0700

Gallup - By Frank Newport - Apr. 06 (Poll) - More than 40% of Americans claim to attend church or synagogue regularly, and only about 15% say they never attend. Easter is one of two times a year, along with Christmas, when pews are filled to capacity in many churches, bringing to mind the question: Just why do Americans attend church?

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Jaeger now in service to next calling ... helping kids

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 06:40:55 -0800

USA Today - By Douglas Robson - Mar. 09 (Special Report) - LOS ANGELES -- Andrea Jaeger darts around the fourth floor of Childrens Hospital like she once sprinted along the baseline when she tore up the women's tennis tour in the early 1980s. Instead of Wimbledon whites, Jaeger is sporting a religious habit. The former prodigy in pigtails became an Episcopal nun last fall -- officially Sister Andrea.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Approaching Prayer

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 17:14:49 -0800

American Public Media - By Krista Tippett - Dec. 28 (Special Report) - We are religious and non-religious, devout and irreverent. But in astonishing numbers, across that spectrum, most of us say that we pray. We open up the subject of prayer and explore how it sounds and what it means in three different traditions and lives.

NewsTrust Rating: 5.0 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

A Mission to Convert

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 15:59:17 -0800

The New York Review of Books - By H. Allen Orr - Dec. 24 (Other) - During the last year, a number of popular books on religion by scientists or philosophers of science have appeared. Daniel Dennett kicked things off with his Breaking the Spell (2006), an investigation into the possibility of a science of religion. Reviewing evolutionary, psychological, and economic theories of the origin and spread of belief, Dennett covered much ground but reached few conclusions. In the last few months, three prominent scientists--all biologists--have published their own books on belief. Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has given us The God Delusion, an extended polemic against faith, which will be considered at length below.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Episcopalians Reach Point of Revolt

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 14:22:06 -0800

New York Times - By Laurie Goodstein - Dec. 17 (News Report) - For about 30 years, the Episcopal Church has been one big unhappy family. Under one roof there were female bishops and male bishops who would not ordain women. There were parishes that celebrated gay weddings and parishes that denounced them; theologians sure that Jesus was the only route to salvation, and theologians who disagreed.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 7 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer