It’s a slender thread, admittedly, that runs from a 16th-century pope to the Olsen twins to a converted car dealership in San Bernardino.

It’s there, though, hidden in the unlikely form of a new iPhone application that is dedicated to support of the Vatican Observatory, one of the quirkier institutions in Christendom.

Confused? Pause for a moment and step into St. Bernardine’s Catholic Church in downtown San Bernardino, where muted light filters through stained-glass windows and Father Mike Manning is at the pulpit, just finishing an impassioned sermon on “the power of accepting God’s love.” He is answering the question of whether it’s hypocritical for a sinner to go to church.

“The church is a place of sinners,” says Manning, a distinctly cinematic sort of priest with milky blue eyes and a glistening smile. “May we sinners never give the impression that we’re better than anyone else, and may we never hinder anyone from coming into our experience of the Lord in our church. Thank you ”¦ and may Jesus’ love for you always make you smile.”

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Small bands of elite American Special Operations forces have been operating with increased intensity for several weeks in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan’s largest city, picking up or picking off insurgent leaders to weaken the Taliban in advance of major operations, senior administration and military officials say.

The looming battle for the spiritual home of the Taliban is shaping up as the pivotal test of President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, including how much the United States can count on the country’s leaders and military for support, and whether a possible increase in civilian casualties from heavy fighting will compromise a strategy that depends on winning over the Afghan people.

It will follow a first offensive, into the hamlet of Marja, that is showing mixed results. And it will require the United States and its Afghan partners to navigate a battleground that is not only much bigger than Marja but also militarily, politically and culturally more complex.

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In monastic terms, the liturgy is the path towards an exalted “ecstasy”, a flight into the cloud of unknowing, the place where God is, and where the true contemplation of the creative stillness of God is possible.

And this is a reality which is beyond the ability of historians, theologians, linguists, biblical scholars or even pastoral liturgists to express. Their contributions may even hinder rather than help. The intensity and intangibility of this experience can only be expressed through the arts.

This is why music of quality is a critical element within the life of the Church. It is a necessity, not a luxury. It is neither a frivolous confection nor an elitist distraction from the real business of faith. Music of quality, in the context of worship, does not entertain or divert. It reveals.

By means of evolving harmonies, rhythms, textures, modulations, orchestrations, melodies, counterpoints, imitations, this rich art form has the potential to create an aural environment which enables us to contemplate the mystery of God.

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…fidelity to Thomas also demands that a Catholic university teach theology as a divine science, and not religious studies, a human one dependent on rational inquiry alone. Even though the core beliefs of Christianity are revealed and held by faith, students have to be informed of what they are. Aquinas never suggests that explaining the content of the articles of faith will bring about a response of faith, but he does think that we need to be told them. Theology courses at a Catholic university propose sacra doctrina. They set out what Christ taught in the Gospels, since he “is the first and chief teacher of spiritual doctrine and faith”. Consequently, a Catholic university should be a place in where special attention is given to ensuring that students learn from theologians who propose the teaching of Christ as historical and authoritative.

Authentic Christian faith does not fear reason “but seeks it out and has trust in it”. Faith presupposes reason and perfects it. Nor does human reason lose anything by opening itself to the content of faith. When reason is illumined by faith, it “is set free from the fragility and limitations deriving from the disobedience of sin and finds the strength required to rise to the knowledge of the Triune God”. The Holy Father observes that St Thomas thinks that human reason, as it were, “breathes” by moving within a vast horizon open to transcendence. If, instead, “a person reduces himself to thinking only of material objects or those that can be proven, he closes himself to the great questions about life, himself and God and is impoverished”. Such a person has far too summarily divorced reason from faith, rendering asunder the very dynamic of the intellect.

What does this mean for Catholic universities today? Pope Benedict answers in this way: “The Catholic university is [therefore] a vast laboratory where, in accordance with the different disciplines, ever new areas of research are developed in a stimulating confrontation between faith and reason that aims to recover the harmonious synthesis achieved by Thomas Aquinas and other great Christian thinkers”. When firmly grounded in St Thomas’ understanding of faith and reason, Catholic institutions of higher learning can confidently face every new challenge on the horizon, since the truths discovered by any genuine science can never contradict the one Truth, who is God himself.

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Archbishops representing three-quarters of the Anglican world are rallying for firm action against two Western Churches for ”˜celebrating’ homosexuality.

The decision by the top leadership of the Global South of the Anglican Communion was prompted by the recent election by The Episcopal Church (U.S.) of a partnered lesbian as a bishop.

Heads of Churches in the Anglican Global South will be persuading their representative assemblies to reconsider communion with the North American Churches. This is “until it becomes clear there is genuine repentance,” in the words of a communiqué. The ”˜Fourth Trumpet’ was released Friday after an Anglican Global South summit held throughout the week at St. Andrew’s Cathedral.

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There is a lot of reporting on how terrorist groups get started and how they develop, but very little about how they end. Obama administration officials have been saying for weeks that its drone attacks over the past year have got al-Qaida on the run, but experts say it isn’t just drone attacks that are weakening al-Qaida. The group is defeating itself.

Al-Qaida is still a serious threat, and nothing could deny the fact the group is focused on attacking the U.S. any way it can. But if history is any guide, terrorist groups can eventually burn out.

Audrey Kurth Cronin, a professor at the National Defense University, lists the way such movements end.

“There are different ways that groups end, and those include decapitation, the capture or the killing of the leader,” she said. “Sometimes negotiations can help lead to the end — success which is, by the way, relatively rare; failure where groups lose popular support; and finally reorientation of the violence of a group.”

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The latest school battle over the separation of church and state may not feature prayers at football games, after-school Bible clubs or even a moment of silence.

Actually, there’s no prayer at all.

The newest battleground could be a church building itself ”” and whether it’s a proper venue for public school graduation ceremonies. In school districts searching for ever-bigger venues at bargain prices, churches are an appealing (and weatherproof) alternative to civic centers, high school gyms and athletic fields.

An advocacy group that monitors church-state disputes says it has intervened in nine proposed church commencements in seven states over the past two years.

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By his election, Okoh, a civil war veteran, becomes the first non-Yoruba to become the head of the Anglican Church. He follows a line of distinguished former Primates like Olufosoye Adetiloye and Akinola who were all giants of the church. It is the foot-prints of these men that Primate Okoh would now follow and possibly surpass.

We welcome the election of Primate Okoh to this elevated position in the Anglican Church. More so, as his election addressed a sore point within the Anglican Communion that has seen parishioners chaff under the headship of shepherds they felt did not share their culture and who they felt ensured that they were marginalized in church affairs.

This situation led to instances where, within the same communities, rival Anglican Churches emerged to cater to the different ethnic groups that established them.

It is a mark of the sagacity of the College of Bishops that elected Okoh that they shifted the office away from the ethnic group that has traditionally produced the top leadership of the Church. Call it zoning, if you like.

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The school’s action not only raises questions about the CLS students’ freedom of association ”” which lead counsel Michael McConnell compellingly raised in Monday’s oral arguments before the court ”” but it also threatens a founding principle of religious freedom. Hastings says that it is banning discrimination against gays and lesbians, but they are doing so by singling CLS out and punishing it for its religious beliefs. If a future, more liberal CLS leadership decided to allow voting members to promote or engage in premarital or homosexual intercourse, they would obviously regain official status because they will have adopted the school’s preferred belief: the affirmation of homosexual practice.

This decision could set a precedent for broader state action against traditional religious groups. Would the court be prepared to apply the all-comers standard to organizations representing any and all faiths? The justices should remember that many religions, including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism have significant constituencies with similar beliefs about sexual behavior.

Christians like those in the CLS hold that the Old and New Testament’s prohibitions against premarital and homosexual sex still apply today. This is a serious, albeit disputed, religious belief about sexuality that is protected by the First Amendment. Authentic freedom of religion requires broad, utterly compelling justifications for the state to deprive anyone of privileges because of his beliefs, no matter how offensive the precepts in question are to some Americans. We should not require religious organizations such as the CLS to abandon core convictions in order to remain in the state’s good graces.

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Annie Laurie Gaylor clicked through a flurry of e-mail messages warning her to repent or she would burn in hell.

“Herod,” one messenger called her.

Ms. Gaylor leaned back and sipped from a cup of tea, unfazed and even a bit surprised at the relative tameness of the attacks. Fresh from her latest godless triumph, she had expected more vitriol.

“It used to be a lot worse,” said Ms. Gaylor, 54, an atheist whose organization, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, recently won a suit in federal court here that declared the National Day of Prayer to be a violation of the First Amendment. “Things are changing. Society is becoming more secularized. It’s becoming acceptable to be atheist and agnostic. And there are more of us.”

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The rector of Christ Church Grosse Pointe has been temporarily removed from his position because of a “serious allegation” that wasn’t specified, congregants learned this morning.

Rev. Brad Whitaker has run the prominent Episcopal church since 2002.

A representative of the Episcopal Bishop of Michigan addressed worshippers at the 9 a.m. service, followed by remarks by vestry senior warden Libby Candler.

Two calls placed to the home phone number listed for Whitaker the rector were hung up.

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I was struck during that zoning controversy how little I did to keep the church together. The ones really leading were the old ladies””molasses-sweet, blue-haired, Bible-believing old ladies who attended our Wednesday night prayer meeting.

The dispute did hurt our church. Longtime members threatened to leave, or at least resign leadership posts (which they left effectively vacant anyway). People worried openly about a church split. In one administrative board meeting I found myself with one candidate and his spouse and the campaign manager of the other and his spouse. The two men had once been close friends. Their sons still were. They’d known each other since their baptisms. Their parents still talked about how wonderful the other’s grandparents were. And their dispute wasn’t nearly as nasty or personal as that between their wives. But the two couples were not speaking. How were we to pass a budget together?

The most painful part was that they were all good people who still knew how to get their hands dirty and fix a motor, prepare a casserole and teach a Sunday school lesson, and in their business lives they could balance a million-dollar budget. But they could not, for the life of them (or their pastor), get along.

And precisely there is the small church’s glory. You can’t avoid the person you hate. You can’t wiggle out of the meeting with the person you’re not speaking to. And so you have a shot at being Christian.

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Almighty God, who by the hand of Mark the evangelist hast given to thy Church the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God: We thank thee for this witness, and pray that we may be firmly grounded in its truth; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’

–Matthew 5:1-3

O God our Father, who hast taught us that our citizenship is in heaven, and hast called us to tread a pilgrim’s path here on earth: Guide us, we pray thee, on our journey through this world to the Celestial City; defend us from the perils that await us in the way; give us grace to endure faithfully to the end; and at the last bring us to thy eternal joy; through the mercy of thy Son, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Pope Benedict XVI is planning to make the first general apology for the abuse of children and minors by Roman Catholic priests when he meets thousands of clergymen from around the world in June at the climax of the International Year for Priests, Vatican sources say.

In the past there have been papal or church apologies for individual cases of paedophilia or for abuse in specific countries, for example during the German pontiff’s recent visit to Malta. What is being prepared now would be the first time a pope seeks to atone publicly for the extent to which paedophilia has been a major stain on the modern history of the church touching a constellation of countries, say the sources at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy. It could be considered comparable to the historic step that the previous pope, John Paul II, took in apologising to the Jews for historic church anti-Semitism and for misdeeds during the Crusades, they say.

Vatican officials hope such an unprecedented act of penance by Benedict, together with thousands of clergymen in St Peter’s Square, 9-11 June, will do much to lay to rest the scandal and defuse protests that might disrupt his trip to Britain in September. The encounter will form the climax of the special year of events designed in part to encourage vocations to the cloth but which instead has been marred by the mushrooming paedophile scandal.

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The sexual-abuse crisis which has engulfed the Catholic Church is, above all, an occasion of profound regret at the damage done to the victims. But it is also an occasion of anger at the way the Church has treated those victims. The pain caused by clerics has been exacerbated by the misgovernance of bishops. So deep is the hurt that the victims feel, that it is understandable that attention has turned to the role of the Pope himself in the crisis. Calls for Pope Benedict’s resignation have come from victims and groups representing them, for only such a cathartic action would be proportionate to the anger and hurt they feel. Nevertheless, Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster was right to say on television last weekend that there were “no strong reasons” for Pope Benedict to resign.

Contrary to the impression given by recent, increasingly aggressive coverage by the media, Pope Benedict’s actions have reflected concern for the victims and a deep desire to clean up the Catholic Church. The Pope’s letter to the Catholic Church in Ireland was unsparing in his condemnation of offenders and of bishops who failed in their leadership and made grave errors of judgement….

A serious question about the CDF [the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith] does remain unanswered. Why did it take the Congregation in particular and the Vatican in general so long to realise that such an instruction about reporting all cases to Rome was necessary? By then, hundreds of priests had been dealt with on a pastoral or administrative basis, and were subsequently reinstated, often after reference to a therapist, but many then resumed their abuse of children. What triggered the change of approach?

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When he was a young boy growing up in a rural rectory in East Anglia, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s parents used to drive him around to look at churches. His father, one of a line of Scottish Protestant Anglican ministers, didn’t really encourage stops at Catholic churches. But humans are always most interested in what is forbidden, and in the due course of time, MacCulloch grew up to be interested in the multiple ways in which Christianity has morphed, clashed, invented and re-invented itself.

MacCulloch, who teaches the history of the Church at Oxford University, has put his interest into a massive new book called Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.

That subtitle isn’t an error. MacCulloch says it was important to look back over the thousand years that preceded Jesus’ birth to see how Christianity shaped itself, and at the timelines of the two cultures that influenced what the religion would become.

“It’s really two different sets of thousand years, one of them a Jewish thousand years and the other is a Greek thousand years. And both those lie behind Christianity,” MacCulloch says. “These two cultures — Jewish culture, Greek culture — they’ve got entirely different views of what God is. And then you get a man coming along who people regard as God: Jesus.”

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There is a whiff of exuberance around the world economy these days. Financial markets are buoyant, business confidence is rising and global growth seems increasingly robust. In its latest forecasts, released on April 21st, the IMF predicts that global output will grow by 4.2% this year on a purchasing-power basis, a full percentage point more than it foresaw six months ago. Other seers are even more optimistic, predicting growth of more than 4.5%””or close to the average pace of the boom years before the recession. The level of global output is now back to where it was before the downturn. And given the scale of the financial crisis, the recovery is surprisingly brisk. With global business investment accelerating and consumer spending strong, there is growing optimism that the recovery is becoming self-sustaining.

Some of this optimism is justified. Just as financial stress worsened the recession, so healthier financial markets are now reinforcing the recovery. Higher asset prices have propped up consumer spending and narrower corporate bond spreads have eased firms’ borrowing costs. Economic recovery, in turn, has helped ease financial pain. The IMF has reduced its estimate of banks’ total losses from the crisis by $500 billion, to $2.3 trillion, two-thirds of which has already been written off.

The trouble is that the good fortune has not been shared equally….

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No pool coverage of today’s visit by President Obama to Billy Graham, just White House statements about the meeting first arranged when Obama called Graham in November to wish him a happy 91st birthday.

“The president had a private prayer and conversation with Rev. Graham,” said White House spokesman Bill Burton. “He is extraordinarily gratified that he took the time to meet with him.”

White House spiritual adviser Josh DuBois also attended the session in Graham’s mountaintop cabin in Montreat, N.C.

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Parishioners at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church received a welcome surprise on Easter Sunday, a surprise that helped them put their 100-year-old church’s history in perspective.

Suddenly adorning a courtyard leading to the sanctuary they found beautiful stained-glass windows dating back to about 1890.

The windows, commissioned in memory of George Kelly Dunlop, the Episcopal Bishop for Arizona and New Mexico, had been featured in the original Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix, but they didn’t fit when the new church moved to its present location.

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Opposition to the Pill among conservative Catholics was consistent from the beginning, but it was only after it had been in widespread use for years that some conservative Protestants began rethinking their views on contraception in general and the Pill in particular. “I think the contraceptive revolution caught Evangelicals by surprise,” observes Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “We bought into a mentality of human control. We welcomed the polio vaccine and penicillin and just received the Pill as one more great medical advance.”

But beginning in the 1990s, many conservative Christians revisited the question of what God intends in marriage and pondered the true nature of the gift of sexuality. The heart of the concern, in this view, is that using contraception can weaken the marital bond by separating sex from procreation. The ideal of marriage as a “one-flesh union” places the act of intercourse, with the possibility of creating new life, at the center of the relationship. “Go back a hundred years,” Mohler says. “The biblical idea you’d have adults who’d intend to have very active sex lives without any respect to the likelihood of children didn’t exist. And it’s now unexceptional.” This is not to say that everyone has an obligation to have as many children as possible; Mohler has two, not 12, he notes, and as long as a couple is “not seeking to alienate their sexual relationship from the gift of children, they can seek to space or limit the total number of children they have.” But the ability to control human reproduction, he says, has done more to reorder human life than any event since Adam and Eve ate the apple.

Steinem disputes this whole framework, noting that sex and procreation have never been as tightly connected as Mohler suggests. “Most animals seem to have periods of heat, in which sexual activity is most concentrated and they are most likely to conceive,” she says. “Human beings uniquely don’t. So for us, sexuality is a mark of our humanity, like our ability to reason or remember or think about thinking. Sexuality is not only a way we procreate but also a way we communicate and express love and caring and community.”

Women’s-rights leaders see multiple agendas at work in the counterrevolution: an attempt not just to roll back access to contraception but also to return women to more traditional roles. “The cynic in me says, Hmm, they are winning the abortion fight, so they need to raise money some other way, which means go somewhere else. They go to contraception,” says NOW president O’Neill of social conservatives. “If the project is to re-establish patriarchal structures, where women are subordinate to male family members, they have to end women’s access to contraception.”

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Losing a life partner or two could happen to anyone, but going through seven requires some effort. The vast majority of Americans ”” about 97% ”” wimp out and do not wed more than three times. As an octospouse, the 76-year-old [Larry] King is in rarefied company. Elizabeth Taylor has also hatched and dispatched eight unions. (Recent reports of a ninth have proved erroneous.) So has Mickey Rooney. Zsa Zsa Gabor has been married nine times. William Shatner has an impressive number of exes, as do Billy Bob Thornton and Joan Collins. Like news anchoring, the field of extreme spouse collecting is dominated by women who were once considered very good-looking and men who almost never were.

The official record holder until recently, it’s gratifying to note, was not a celebrity. The late Linda Wolfe of Indiana had 23 ex-husbands, although she admitted she married the last one as a publicity stunt. The other 22 were thus completely, totally genuine and heartfelt, and when last contacted by the press, Wolfe said she wouldn’t mind marrying again. She was hoping for a straight man; on the two occasions she married a gay guy, it didn’t take….

All of which raises the question: How many marriages are too many? Statistics show that more second marriages break up than first ones and more third marriages ”” about 75% ”” break up than second ones. Given that trajectory, shouldn’t a referee step in after the third or fourth and suspend play for the good of all?

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In the first decade of the American nation, a former slave turned itinerant minister by the name of Richard Allen found himself preaching to a growing number of blacks in Philadelphia. He came to both a religious and organizational revelation. “I saw the necessity,” he later wrote, “of erecting a place of worship for the colored people.”

Allen’s inspiration ultimately took the forms of Bethel African Church, founded in 1794, and the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, established in 1799. As much as it can be dated to anything, the emergence of a formal African-American Christianity can be dated to Allen’s twin creations.

Over more than two centuries since then, the Black Church has become a proper noun, a fixture, a seeming monolith in American society. Its presence is as prevalent as film clips of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivering the “I Have a Dream” speech and contestants on “American Idol” indulging in the gospel style of melisma.

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