Religion News

SAN ANTONIO - Hand-scrawled records taken from a polygamist sect are helping untangle the spider-web network of family relationships at the Yearning For Zion ranch, where some husbands had more than a dozen wives.

WASHINGTON - Nearly two-dozen conservative Christian leaders have signed a letter to the Senate Finance Committee questioning an investigation into six large ministries that preach a gospel of prosperity.

NEW YORK - Author Brian McLaren is among the most influential American religious thinkers of the last decade.

PARIS (AFP) - Five years after it was set up by Nicolas Sarkozy, France's official Muslim council has hit a wall: hamstrung by infighting, critics accuse it of failing the country's five million Muslims while giving fundamentalists a stronghold in French public life.

Prominent evangelicals urged Christian conservatives Wednesday to support "an expansion of our concerns beyond single-issue politics," angering some leaders on the religious right who have been closely allied with the Republican Party.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain vowed in a speech on Wednesday to make freedom of religion a key foreign policy issue if he is elected to the White House in November.

Democrat Barack Obama currently does better among Jewish voters than presumed Republican nominee John McCain, according to a Gallup Poll released today. He continued to trail opponent Hillary Clinton slightly among Jewish Democrats interviewed in April. But this looks to be good news for Obama, who has battled persistent and false Internet rumors that he is Muslim. And he appears to have maintained his Jewish support after breaking last month with his former pastor, the Rev. ...

DALLAS (Reuters) - A group of U.S. evangelical leaders called on Wednesday for a pullback from party politics so that followers would not become "useful idiots" exploited for partisan gain.

ROCHESTER, Michigan (Reuters) - Republican John McCain said on Wednesday religious freedom was suffering in China, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere and pledged to champion the right to worship if elected president in a speech aimed at mending fences with conservatives long suspicious of him.

SANTA FE, N.M. - The leader of an apocalyptic sect in northeastern New Mexico was arrested Tuesday and charged with felony sex crimes against children.

Pope Benedict's visit may have pulled the plug on a movement that helped define the faith here for almost a half-century

KEY WEST, Florida (Reuters) - Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain will almost certainly garner less of the evangelical vote in November than the almost 80 percent that President George W. Bush took in 2004, a former top Bush aide said on Monday.

KEY WEST, Florida (Reuters) - White Roman Catholics have become a key base for Sen. Hillary Clinton in her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination and one she needs to win by huge margin, a conference on faith and politics heard on Monday.

PHOENIX - It was a showdown, of sorts, over how far states should go to keep tabs on the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, the group known to endorse multiple wives for men and motherhood for underage girls.

LONDON - Documents released Monday show how the British government tried to send thousands of Palestine-bound Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide back to postwar Germany without inflaming world opinion.

PARIS - A Roman Catholic bishop said Sunday that the church has officially recognized that the Virgin Mary appeared to a 17th-century shepherd girl in the French Alps.

SANTA ANA, Calif. - Federal authorities arrested a man accused of running an investment scheme that netted more than $25 million by targeting Christian investors nationwide.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A US religious freedom watchdog on Friday asked the State Department to include Vietnam, Pakistan and Turkmenistan in its global blacklist of religious freedom violators, and maintained Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, on a watchlist.

FORT WORTH, Texas - More than 200 Methodists attended a lesbian couple's commitment ceremony Friday in defiance of a vote to uphold a church law that says gay relationships are "incompatible with Christian teaching."

TULSA, Okla. - As Oral Roberts University prepares to hand out diplomas to its Class of 2008, Anna Siebring, a junior, will be mailing out applications to transfer to another school. Siebring, a government major, is among many students having second thoughts about staying at Oral Roberts after six months of scandal at the evangelical Christian university.

The recent comments of Rev. Jeremiah Wright have not only complicated the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama, who for more than 20 years has been a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ that Wright once pastored. Some of Wright's remarks--particularly his claim that criticism of his more provocative sermons "is not an on attack on Jeremiah Wright" but instead "an attack on the black church"--have also sparked wide a debate on whether Wright typifies the beliefs of millions of African-American churchgoers and their ministers. U. S. ...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A US watchdog on religious freedom on Friday expressed serious concern over violations in strife-torn Iraq and was considering whether to place the ally of Washington on a blacklist with countries such as North Korea and Iran.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. religious freedom watchdog group urged the United States on Friday to put Vietnam back on a religious rights blacklist, two years after the communist country was removed from the list.

ANKARA, Turkey - The Turkish gunman who shot and wounded Pope John Paul II is applying for Polish citizenship because he wants to live in the country of the late pontiff, whom he called his "spiritual brother."

CHICAGO - About two dozen black ministers from the Chicago area say they're behind Barack Obama despite his split from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Sen. Barack Obama's break with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is putting black pastors and their congregations in a difficult position, their loyalties divided between a politician who could be the first black president and a celebrated preacher who many believe has been vilified.

Maybe it's an only-in-America sort of irony: A prominent scholar who happens to be Jewish makes the case for more Islamic sharia law in Muslim-majority states, while another distinguished legal scholar, a devout Muslim, argues that the best thing for those states, and for sharia, is to keep them separate.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President George W. Bush said Thursday he had found comfort in prayer over the past seven years and that he hoped the world would one day agree to set aside an "International Day of Prayer."

LONDON (AFP) - British Christians will be able to pray together wherever they are in future, by subscribing to a new mobile phone text alert service unveiled Thursday.