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New Orleans — The staccato banging of dozens of hammers dispelled the morning quiet as college students, lawyers and nurses from Massachusetts clambered about four new houses rapidly taking shape at the hands of Habitat for Humanity and St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church. Meantime, across town, students from the University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse University and…

Vatican City — For the past two months, the Catholic Church has been overcome by one fairly straightforward question: Why didn’t the pope know that the ultra-traditionalist bishop he welcomed back into the church was a fervent and public Holocaust-denier? Last week, the pope had an answer. He hadn’t Googled it. “I have been told,”…

NEW YORK (RNS) Religious opponents of the death penalty hope a new book about a Texas death row case by a best-selling author can help their efforts to end the practice of state-sanctioned executions. Thomas Cahill’s just-published book, “A Saint on Death Row,” chronicles the life of Dominique Green, who at the age of 30…

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican’s top bioethics official said the two Brazilian doctors who performed an abortion on a 9-year-old rape victim do not merit excommunication, since they acted to save her life. The statement by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, appeared as the lead article in the Sunday (Mar.…

Bernard d’Espagnat, a renowned French physicist whose research has centered on hidden realities that are “beyond our possibilities of description,” has won the 2009 Templeton Prize, valued at $1.42 million. D’Espagnat becomes the latest in a series of physicists and cosmologists whose work at the intersection of religion and science has won the Templeton Prize,…

WASHINGTON (RNS) The senator who has investigated six prominent ministries for questionable finances has praised one of them — Joyce Meyer Ministries — for joining the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. “This is a positive development,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who is the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. “It’s good to see…

(RNS) As a coalition of nearly 60 clergy and lay leaders demands a new strategic plan and greater transparency from Conservative Judaism, the movement’s synagogue arm has tapped a new leader who hopes to fulfill some of those goals. The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism has named Rabbi Steven Wernick of suburban Philadelphia’s Temple Adath…

WASHINGTON — U.S. Catholic leaders processed more than 800 allegations of clergy sexual abuse in 2008, a 16 percent increase from 2007. The majority of the allegations involved abuse that occurred decades ago. A report issued Friday (March 13) by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops showed 803 allegations were filed by 706 victims last…

Friday afternoons find the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding at the Al-Islam Center in Seattle, reciting Muslim prayers. Come Sunday, she heads about two miles south to kneel in the pews of St. Clement’s of Rome Episcopal Church. “My experience and my call is to continue to follow Jesus,” said Redding, an Episcopal priest for the…

Hartford, Connecticut – Thousands of Roman Catholics descended on the Connecticut statehouse Wednesday, as simmering resentment over bills they consider anti-Catholic reached a boiling point with a recent legislative attempt to give parishioners more say over parish financing. Some of the estimated 1.3 million Catholics in Connecticut – a state of 3.5 million – have…
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