Inspiration Faith & Prayer Health & Wellness Entertainment Love & Family
Newsletters Special Offers

Beliefnet News

WARSAW, – Poland’s president has celebrated the start of Hanukkah with Warsaw’s Jewish community – the first time a Polish head of state has attended a religious service in a synagogue. The Jewish community is describing Lech Kaczynski’s visit Sunday as a historic step. Kaczynski entered Warsaw’s century-old Nozyk synagogue just after sundown. The congregation…

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Benedict XVI defended the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day as a “great feast of faith,” rejecting descriptions and criticisms of the popular annual event as a mere “rock festival.” Benedict made his remarks on Monday (Dec. 22), during his Christmas address to the Roman Curia, the Catholic Church’s international government at…

(RNS) U.S. congregations have changed significantly in the last eight years, according to a new study, with them becoming more ethnically diverse, more technologically savvy and more informal in worship. Predominantly white congregations reported greater racial and ethnic diversity between the first and second surveys of U.S. houses of worship by the National Congregations Study.…

(RNS) A Virginia judge ruled on Friday (Dec. 19) that three parcels of land belong to parishes that have broken away from the Episcopal Church, handing conservatives an important, if tentative, legal win. An 1867 state law, passed as Virginia congregations separated over slavery, allows a parish to disaffiliate from a denomination where a division…

(RNS) The recession has forced Hadassah, the national Jewish women’s organization, to cancel its 2009 convention in New Orleans, a local Hadassah officer said. The organization’s national convention, once scheduled for mid-July 2009 typically would have attracted 1,500 to 1,800 women, said national Vice President Roselle Ungar. But the group has canceled the meeting. “We’ve…

VATICAN CITY (RNS) The Vatican on Friday (Dec. 19) called for the decriminalization of homosexuality, but said a proposed United Nations declaration on gay rights is vague and excessively far-reaching. The statement by the Holy See’s UN delegation was a response to the “Declaration on Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity,” presented to the…

Washington – Paul Weyrich, a man who worked away from the limelight to galvanize conservative Christian political advocacy, died Thursday (Dec. 18). Weyrich, 66, co-founded the now-defunct Moral Majority with the late Jerry Falwell and served as the first president of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based conservative think tank. “He was key behind the scenes…

Chennai, India – The Dalai Lama said Wednesday (December 17) the movement he has led for nearly five decades should now be guided by the prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile. “I have grown old and already taken semi-retirement. It is better if I retire completely and get out of the way of the Tibetan…

Washington – A new federal regulation will allow healthcare workers to abstain from performing abortions or any service they object to on religious or moral grounds. The regulation, introduced Thursday (Dec. 18) by the Department of Health and Human Services, is directed primarily at shielding those with religious or moral objections to abortion or sterilization.…

(RNS) Megachurch pastor Rick Warren and civil rights leader Rev. Joseph Lowery will deliver the invocation and benediction, respectively, at President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration next month (Jan 20). The roles of Warren, a best-selling author and leader of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., and Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the…
archives most recent
search this blog
More from Beliefnet and our partners