Spotted at the US Department of Health & Human Services:
A new proposed regulation would increase awareness of, and compliance with, three separate laws protecting federally funded health care providers’ right of conscience. This proposed rule was placed on public display at the Federal Register today by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
“This proposed regulation is about the legal right of a health care professional to practice according to their conscience,” HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt said. “Doctors and other health care providers should not be forced to choose between good professional standing and violating their conscience. Freedom of expression and action should not be surrendered upon the issuance of a health care degree.”
A Nelson County funeral home director is suing the Archdiocese of Louisville and a Roman Catholic priest, whom he accuses of undercutting his business by implementing new rules on conducting funerals at his parish.
DUBLIN, August 20 (Compass Direct News) – As the Olympics draw to a close, new evidence of religious freedom abuses offers a stark contrast to China’s efforts to provide religious services for athletes and visitors during the Games.es for athletes and visitors during the Games.
China hired religious clerics to provide these services and published a special bilingual edition of the Bible for distribution to athletes and official churches during the event. Simultaneously, officials asked house church leaders in Beijing to sign documents agreeing not to hold services during the Games, the China Aid Association (CAA) reported on August 13.
More ominously, China has planned a new crackdown on four “troublesome elements,” including house church leaders, for October, when most Olympic athletes, tourists and journalists will have left the country, CAA reported on Monday (August 18).
“Father Thomas is a martyr: he sacrificed his life for the poor and marginalised. But he did not die in vain, because his body and his blood enrich the Church in India, particularly the Church in Andhra Pradesh”.
Those are the words of Msgr. Marampudi Joji, archbishop of Hyderabad and secretary of the bishops’ conference of Andhra Pradesh (a state in South East India), commenting the barbarous killing of the Carmelite priest Thomas Pandippallyil, 38, assassinated on the night of August 16th in Mosalikunta, on the road between Lingampet and Yellareddy, 90 km from the regional capital.
On the night of August 16th his body was found on the roadside by a group of people, not far from the village of Balampilly; the body of the Carmelite of Mary Immaculate carried wounds to the face while the hands and legs had been crushed and the eyes gouged out.
Vann helped get Kilpatrick elected as Detroit's youngest mayor, and the mayor stood next to Vann as the pastor built dozens of homes near his sanctuary, Second Ebenezer, ran successful youth programs and nurtured a booming congregation.
Vann said he was watching a shooting star.
But now Vann believes the time has come to extinguish that star. He says he intends to call on the city's spiritual community to stand up, speak up and work together to convince Kilpatrick to put the city before himself.
In response to criticisms by the nation's Catholic bishops regarding pro-abortion and anti-family language in Ecuador's new proposed Constitution, a group of people entered a chapel in Guayaquil, grabbed the Eucharistic host that was exposed for adoration, tore it apart, spat on it, and stepped on it, according to ACI Prensa.
The profanation is reportedly the third that has occurred in recent weeks, as frustrated partisans of the socialist party Alianza PAIS lash out at the Catholic Church for criticizing their newly-proposed constitution.
Some clergy think churches should divorce themselves from the wedding business.
The controversy over same-sex marriage – along with a growing sense that many couples who marry in churches never return – has prompted faith leaders to say it's time to reconsider how California couples tie the knot.
After the California Supreme Court ruled gay marriage legal, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California began encouraging all couples to marry outside the church.
Franz Rosenzweig is widely regarded as one of the greatest Jewish theologians of the past century. Best known for The Star of Redemption, published eight years before his death in 1929 at the age of forty-three, he began a new kind of dialogue between Judaism and Christianity when he argued that the two faiths complement each other: Christianity to propagate revelation to the world, and Judaism to “convert the inner pagan” inside each Christian.
Less often mentioned, however, is Rosenzweig’s analysis of Islam, a religion he regarded as a throwback to paganism. Indeed, Rosenzweig predicted a prolonged conflict of civilizations between Islam and the West. “The coming millennium will go down in world history as a struggle between Orient and Occident, between the church and Islam, between the Germanic peoples and the Arabs,” he forecast in 1920
The Rev. Paul Earl Sheppard had recently become the senior pastor of a suburban church in California when a group of parishioners came to him with a disturbing personal question.
They were worried because the racial makeup of their small church was changing. They warned Sheppard that the church's newest members would try to seize control because members of their race were inherently aggressive. What was he was going to do if more of "them" tried to join their church?
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