The Democratic National Convention kicked off yesterday, and I couldn’t help but notice the opening invocation. Polly Baca, a former Colorado state senator, led off with a prayer that mentioned Jesus Christ and ended with her crossing herself “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

That’s how Roman Catholics pray. Others do things differently – and, of course, some people don’t pray at all. It surprised me to see such a sectarian invocation before what was surely a very diverse audience.
There’s been a lot of talk about the increased religiosity at the Democratic Convention. Over at the Religion Clause Blog, Howard M. Friedman raises some provocative questions about whether the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause applies to political parties. Are they government entities or private associations?

Don Byrd at the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty’s blog is also looking at the issue, laying down a series of recommendations for how both parties ought to deal with religion.
But the most interesting reaction came from Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery. For years, Minnery and other FOF honchos have carped that the Democrats are too secular, that the party lacks an outreach to religious voters and that it is even hostile to faith.
Now that the Democrats are adding a hefty dose of religion to their plate, how does Minnery react? He attacks the party for adopting a “gloss of prayer and God-talk” and criticizes it for including non-Christian faiths!

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Courtesy Americans United

NEW DELHI — The remote, destitute state of Orissa, marred for years by Hindu-versus-Christian violence, erupted in a retaliatory killing on Monday after the murder of a Hindu leader led a mob to burn small Christian churches, prayer halls and an orphanage that had housed 21 children.

The police said a woman’s body, charred beyond recognition, was found inside the church orphanage. The church’s pastor, whom the police did not identify and who was injured in the fire, told the authorities that the body was that of a nun working there. No children were injured.

The attack on the orphanage on Monday, in an isolated district called Bargarh, came after the killing Saturday of a Hindu leader who had been associated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council, and who was leading a drive to wean local villagers from Christianity. Radical Hindu groups like the council are vehemently opposed to conversions to Christianity, which in India tend to focus on traditionally downtrodden lower-caste and indigenous groups, and have lately taken to conducting mass ceremonies to convert them back to Hinduism.

The Hindu leader who was killed, Laxmanananda Saraswati, was among five people slain by unidentified armed men who stormed a Hindu school in the nearby district of Kandhamal. The police blamed Maoist insurgents who prevail in the area. Mr. Saraswati’s followers, however, blamed Christians, and called for a statewide strike on Monday. The state government ordered all schools closed.

JERUSALEM — In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on a historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file — among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth — available to all on the Internet.

Equipped with high-powered cameras with resolution and clarity many times greater than those of conventional models, and with lights that emit neither heat nor ultraviolet rays, the scientists and technicians are uncovering previously illegible sections and letters of the scrolls, discoveries that could have significant scholarly impact.

The 2,000-year-old scrolls, found in the late 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea east of Jerusalem, contain the earliest known copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible (missing only the Book of Esther), as well as apocryphal texts and descriptions of rituals of a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus. The texts, most of them on parchment but some on papyrus, date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D.

Only a handful of the scrolls exist in large pieces, with several on permanent exhibit at the Israel Museum here in its dimly lighted Shrine of the Book. Most of what was found is separated into 15,000 fragments that make up about 900 documents, fueling a longstanding debate on how to order the fragments as well as the origin and meaning of what is written on them.

The report claims more than 50,000 women a year have deserted their congregations over the past two decades because they feel the church is not relevant to their lives.
It says that instead young women are becoming attracted to the pagan religion Wicca, where females play a central role, which has grown in popularity after being featured positively in films, TV shows and books.
The study comes amid ongoing controversy over the role of women in all Christian denominations. Last month its governing body voted to allow women to become bishops for the first time, having admitted them to the priesthood in 1994, but traditionalist bishops have warned that hundreds of clergy and parishes will leave if the move goes ahead as planned.
The report's author, Dr Kristin Aune, a sociologist at the University of Derby, said: "In short, women are abandoning the church.
"Because of its focus on female empowerment, young women are attracted by Wicca, popularised by the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
"Young women tend to express egalitarian values and dislike the traditionalism and hierarchies they imagine are integral to the church.
"Women's ordination, as priests and now bishops, has dominated debate and headlines – but while looking at women in the pulpit we have taken our eyes off the pews, where a shift with more consequences for the church's survival is underway."
Her research, published in a new book called Women and Religion in the West, cites an English Church Census which found more than a million women worshippers have left churches since 1989.

ORANGE PARK, Fla. — David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote “Evolution” in the rectangle of light on the screen.

He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium.

“If I do this wrong,” Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, “I’ll lose him.”

In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state’s public schools to teach evolution, calling it “the organizing principle of life science.” Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.

Far from becoming extinct 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs actually co-existed with early humans, and even helped in the construction of the pyramids.
This is the word of Vince Fenech, Evangelist pastor and director of a fully licensed, State-approved Creationist institution which admits children aged between four and 18.
“Of course the ‘dinoceros’ existed (as Fenech pronounces the word). It is mentioned in the Book of Job. They were used to help build the pyramids,” he says, adding that this latter observation is only “his personal belief”, and that it does not form part of the school’s curriculum.
But the curriculum of the Accelerated Christian Academy in Mosta is not exactly free of such fanciful reinventions of history. Fenech reiterates the basic Evangelist tenet that the entire universe was created in 4004 BC… and this time, he also supplies “proof”.
“When man landed on the moon (in 1969), they expected the landing module to sink in a deep layer of dust. But the layer was only a few inches deep. This proves that the universe is still young!”
Does it? I would have thought it merely illustrates that unlike the Earth, the moon has little or nothing in the way of atmosphere… and dust is usually generated as a result of particles which combine as they are buffeted around by the movement of atmospheric molecules. Also, the moon’s gravity is two thirds less than it is on Earth… which in turn means that dust is practically weightless, and therefore doesn’t settle.

Social conservatives are growing more wary of church involvement in politics, joining moderates and liberals in their unease about blurring the lines between pulpit and ballot box, a new study found

Fifty percent of conservatives think churches and other places of worship should stay out of social and political matters, up from 30 percent four years ago, according to a survey released Thursday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

That significant shift in conservative thought has brought the country to a tipping point on the question: a slim majority of Americans — 52 percent — now think churches should keep out of politics.

That's an eight percentage point increase over 2004 and the first time a majority of Americans has held that opinion since Pew officials started asking the question 12 years ago.

On this question, the gap between conservatives and liberals is narrowing: just four years ago, liberals were twice as likely as conservatives to say churches should stay out of politics. Now, 50 percent of conservatives and 57 percent of liberals think that. Four years ago, 62 percent of liberals opposed church involvement in politics. Democrats and Republicans are about even on the question, as well.

Strands of DNA recovered from the fossilised leg bone of a Neanderthal have shed light on the fragility of this ancient hominid species and pinpointed when they first split from what were to become modern humans.

The 38 000-year-old bone was unearthed in a cave in Vindija in Croatia and has become part of a landmark project to read the entire genetic sequence of Neanderthals, a feat scientists believe will help reveal how modern humans evolved into the world's dominant species.

Researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, read the complete DNA sequence held in tiny biological powerhouses called mitochondria, which provide energy for cells. The mitochondria are only passed down the female line, so can be used to trace the species back to an ancestral "Eve", the mother of all Neanderthals.

The team analysed the DNA of 13 genes from the Neanderthal mitochondria and found they were distinctly different to modern humans, suggesting Neanderthals never, or rarely, interbred with early humans. The genetic material shows that a Neanderthal "Eve" lived around 660 000 years ago, when the species last shared a common ancestor with humans.

Further tests on the DNA revealed surprisingly few evolutionary changes, suggesting that the Neanderthals may only ever have existed in relatively small numbers with less than 10 000 alive at any one time.

RICHARD DUTCHER didn't set out to become a filmmaking messiah. Before he became known as "the father of modern Latter-day Saint cinema," Dutcher was simply a writer-director-actor hustling for movie work in late '90s Los Angeles. That is, until the devout Mormon took stock of an underserved filmgoing community -- his own.

"There was Indian cinema for the Indian community. Gay and lesbian cinema was starting to mature. There was black cinema," Dutcher recalled. "I realized there's 12 million Mormons in this country and we don't have a cinema of our own. I thought, 'Holy cow! If I could make a movie for this demographic that's successful and other people could start making Mormon films, it could be a vibrant thing.' "

"God's Army," the low-budget drama about missionaries proselytizing in Hollywood that Dutcher wrote, directed and starred in, garnered nearly $3 million at the box office, a smash by indie-movie standards. The 2000 film had higher production values and asked bigger theological questions than was typical of the straight-to-DVD Mormon movie fare before it. But, more important, it ushered in a new era for Mormon film. He became the first Latter-day Saint filmmaker to land a movie about Mormons, intended primarily (but not exclusively) for Mormon viewership in theaters across the country.

But after filming several other of the genre's touchstone works, Dutcher renounced Mormonism last year, citing a theological evolution he calls "a very frustrating enlightenment." And he tendered his kiss-off to LDS cinema, "leaving Mormon moviemaking to the Mormons," as he put it in a controversial opinion piece that ran in the Daily Herald of Provo, Utah.

Now, after incurring scorn in the Mormon movie world, the faith-based auteur is back with his most personal film to date, "Falling." Glibly marketed as "the first R-rated Mormon movie" in Utah, it opened in Los Angeles on Friday for a one-week engagement at Laemmle's Music Hall in Beverly Hills.

That loud crack heard throughout the evangelical world when national research showed that more than half of American evangelicals believe people of other religions can go to heaven wasn’t thunder from an angry God.

This crack came from the rock upon which the modern American evangelical movement sits. It was splitting right down the middle.

There is both rejoicing and lamentation.

I am among those rejoicing.

The universalist/evangelical finding, which came from the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, was one more sign that American Christianity is entering the most exciting era in our lifetime. Some people believe a new awakening is at hand. Others believe a reformation is in the making. No one knows how long it will take or how far it will go.

What’s clear is that people in the pews are taking back their faith, wresting it from leaders who helped sell the idea that only the most fundamentalist brands of Christian belief could succeed and that their words alone represented that belief.

As an evangelical from Corsicana wrote recently about a powerful evangelical leader, "I found myself not wanting to be this ventriloquist’s dummy anymore."

Southern Baptist Convention leaders were among those lamenting. So they did their own study, which showed that only 20 percent of evangelicals think people of other religions will get a go-to-Heaven pass.

That would be good news for them, except Southern Baptist researchers didn’t use the same criteria in picking their evangelicals that the Pew study used. The Pew study counted anyone who called themselves an evangelical or some variation thereof. That standard reliably returns 25 percent of Americans.