Father Gerhard Maria Wagner, who said Hurricane Katrina 'divine retribution,' was made Bishop

Pope appoints bishop who said Hurricane Katrina was 'divine retribution'
Richard Owen in Rome
Hard on the heels of a Holocaust denial row, Pope Benedict XVI has appointed an ultra-conservative bishop in Austria who described Hurricane Katrina as God's punishment for sin and sexual excess in New Orleans.

Father Gerhard Maria Wagner, 54, a parish priest at Windischgarsten in Austria since 1988, said in the parish newsletter four years ago that the death and destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina was "divine retribution" for excessive sexual permissiveness, including tolerance of homosexuality.

He noted that Katrina destroyed not only nightclubs and brothels in New Orleans, but also abortion clinics, adding "The conditions of immorality in this city are indescribable". Father Wagner, who has been appointed as auxiliary Bishop of Linz in Austria, has also accused the popular Harry Potter books and films of "spreading Satanism".

Vatican sources said despite the row over pontiff’s controversial reinstatement of a bishop who denies that the Holocaust occurred, Pope Benedict remained determined to "bring back into the fold" not only the four bishops from the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) who whose excommunications were lifted a week ago but also the 500 priests of the fraternity, founded by the late renegade French bishop Marcel Lefebvre.

Robert E. Seaver, Professor Emeritus, Union Theological Seminary dies at 90

Union Mourns
Robert E. Seaver, Proclaimer of the Word
Professor Emeritus of Speech and Drama at Union Theological Seminary

Robert E. Seaver, Professor Emeritus of Speech and Drama at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, died at St. Luke’s Hospital on January 28. He was 90 and lived in Morningside Gardens, a stone’s throw from his beloved place of work for 56 years.


He had been in declining health for some time, said Dr. Janet Walton, Professor of Worship and Co-Director of the Seminary’s Theology and the Arts program.

During the time he taught at Union, generation after generation of students took Prof. Seaver’s not-to-be-missed course in voice building. Even after his official retirement in 1986, he continued to offer several sections each semester due to popular demand, until advancing age finally overcame his devotion to teaching and forced him to step down in 2005.

“Bob believed that it was his job as a teacher to draw out and develop the distinctiveness of each person,” said Walton. “And he did it and it was marvelous.”

In 1986 the New York Times described one class like this:

“Do it,” said Robert Edwin Seaver, Union’s professor of speech and drama, in [one student’s] voice-training course. He told the assembled students to talk through their clenched teeth. It seemed as if the room were filled with people impersonating Katharine Hepburn. “Now, let it go,” Seaver said. “Feel how free it is.” Seaver yawned and stretched exaggeratedly. Everyone in the class followed suit.

“Let your jaw hang,” Seaver said. “Get the feeling of being the town fool.” More

US priests 'in $800,000 theft'

shifting shadows: faddism Exposed: US priests 'in $800,000 theft'

The Bendy Bus Campaign: mass marketing of atheism

A Reaction to Christian Fundamentalist Bible Advertisement

On Jan. 6 some 800 British red "bendy" buses carried the sign: "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

The Atheist Bus Campaign organizer, a young comedienne named Ariane Sherine, took exception last June to several London buses swathed with biblical quotes, placed by Christian fundamentalists.

Her idea to fund a few challenge ads took off; donors sent in $200,000 in two days. Ms. Sherine was joined by Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, a leading British atheist and author of "The God Delusion."

He predicted anger from believers. "They have to take offense, it is the only weapons they've got," Mr. Dawkins said as the first bus rolled through the streets of London. "They've got no arguments."

But the response by most faith leaders isn't quite what was expected.

Religious institutes, church pastors, and divinity school professors have not treated the ads with Old Testament wrath, but with a relatively open mind and even embrace of so important an issue.

If Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, they say, the ads remind that an unexamined faith is not a real faith, and people need to think, and even pray, more deeply.

"The campaign will be a good thing if it gets people to engage with the deepest questions of life," says the Rev. Jenny Ellis, Spirituality and Discipleship Officer of Britain's Methodist church.

"Many people simply never think about God or religion as a serious question, and if this prods them a little bit, then that's great," says the Rev. Stephen Wang, of the Westminster diocese of the Roman Catholic church.

Moreover, in a secular post-cold-war world, where godless communism is said to be replaced by godless consumerism, a declaration of atheism is hardly a renegade position, some theologians say.

.............................

Believers have criticized the second part of the message, "stop worrying and enjoy your life." Nick Spencer, of Theos, a public theology think tank in London, felt the "enjoy yourself" message – coming in the midst of an economic crisis that is taking jobs and spreading anxiety across Europe, possibly implies selfish indifference, and "could not be more ill-timed.... But since Brits are frightfully embarrassed about bringing up God in public, it is a godsend in some ways to have the atheists do it for us."

Dawkins, whose book, "God Delusion" sold 1.5 million copies, told the Los Angeles Times that "We've all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You're not allowed to criticize it."

Christianity does have a history of intolerance, theologians admit. But it also has a healthy history of doubt and skepticism, as well as interchanges between faith and science – and has reformed itself through a seeking of truth in and outside the church. Some of its best-known modern thinkers have expressed admiration for nonbelievers.

Reinhold Niebuhr, a leading midcentury American theologian, sometimes invoked by Barack Obama, said he preferred honest agnostics to overly pious believers.

The Lutheran Karl Barth, a leading 20th-century European theologian, wrote the forward to the English language version of Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach's prominent atheist critique, "The Essence of Christianity." Barth wasn't worried about the atheism, says Herman Waetjen, professor emeritus of New Testament studies at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, because Barth felt Feuerbach exposed many fault lines, mistakes, social and collective projections, and other falsifications of Christianity that had arisen around the 19th-century church.

"Barth was happy to write a forward to a book that exposed the kind of Christianity he felt to be so unlike the radical God of the Bible he was reading. He saw the value of Feuerbach. So for a campaign like the bus ads that forces us to think – well, I thank them for it," Professor Waetjen says. Read it all 

For Further Reading go to  : Evolutionblog

Robert T. Handy, Church Historian, dies at 90

The Rev. Dr. Robert T. Handy, Henry Sloane Coffin Professor Emeritus of Church History at Union Theological Seminary, died at Crane’s Mill Retirement Community in West Caldwell, New Jersey, on January 8. He was 90 years old.

During the 36 years he taught at the Seminary, Handy made a name for himself as an impressive scholar of American church history, an exceptional teacher, and a gifted administrator.

"From the very first I knew him to be one of a cluster of faculty who could be counted on always to put the good of the school above their own good," said former UTS president Donald W. Shriver, Jr. As a member of Union's presidential search committee, Handy in 1975 had helped to bring Shriver to Union. Shriver in turn appointed Handy dean of the faculty in 1976, a post Handy held for two years.

"By the end of those two years, he felt obliged to return to full time teaching of church history," Shriver reminisced recently in an email, "but by then he had restored many fractured relationships among faculty, administration, students and board.

"Bob was a born reconciler," Shriver continued. "He brought to academic work the skills and commitments of a Baptist pastor as well as the training of a disciplined scholar. His is a combination rare in the halls of academe, rare among human beings, too."

Handy's students and colleagues have long since acknowledged him as a leading historian of American church history. His work on church and state, on religious liberty, on nineteenth-century attempts to establish a "Christian America," and his labor with fellow Union professors David W. Lotz and Richard A. Norris, Jr., in revising and updating Williston Walker's standard, A History of the Christian Church, produced books that are still in use and considered classics. Among his great contributions to the Seminary was A History of Union Theological Seminary in New York, published in 1987 as part of Union's sesquicentennial celebration.

Handy's tenure at Union as a member of both the faculty and the administration gave him particular insight into the critical issues affecting the Seminary during his time. He also successfully illuminated events of other eras of Union's past, particularly the troubled times of the Charles A. Briggs trial in the late nineteenth century. An exacting and tireless researcher, Handy spent countless hours in the Seminary's archives, fact-checking details and building on the work of earlier scholars of Union's history, among them former Union president Henry Sloane Coffin and faculty members G.L. Prentiss and Charles R. Gillett. The result was a readable and entertaining history, both objective and accurate, yet tempered by Handy's respect and affection for the sons and daughters of Union Seminary. more

Horrifying 10-foot sculpture of Jesus on the cross removed from the Church

Vicar has 'horrifying' statue of crucifixion removed from church
Resin sculpture that 'scared children and deterred worshippers' to be replaced by steel cross

Helen Pidd and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 6 January 2009 15.10 GMT

A statue of the crucifixion has been taken down from its perch on a church in Sussex because it was scaring local children and deterring worshippers, a vicar admitted today.

The Rev Ewen Souter, the vicar at St John's Church in Horsham, West Sussex, ordered the removal of the 10-foot sculpture of Jesus on the cross just before Christmas, branding it "unsuitable" and "a horrifying depiction of pain and suffering".

The 10ft resin sculpture, by Edward Bainbridge Copnall, a former president of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, will be replaced by a more "uplifting" stainless steel cross – to the dismay of more traditional parishioners.

Souter, formerly a cell biologist, said: "The crucifix expressed suffering, torment, pain and anguish. It was a scary image, particularly for children. Parents didn't want to walk past it with their kids, because they found it so horrifying.

"It wasn't a suitable image for the outside of a church wanting to welcome worshippers. In fact, it was a real put-off.

"We're all about hope, encouragement and the joy of the Christian faith. We want to communicate good news, not bad news, so we need a more uplifting and inspiring symbol than execution on a cross."

St John's Church was opened in 1963 and the crucifix was installed within a year. The sculpture was removed unceremoniously on a low-loader truck and delivered to nearby Horsham Museum, where it will be displayed

A long-standing member of the church, who asked not to be named, said: "The crucifix is the oldest and most famous symbol of the Christian church. Pulling it down and putting up something that would look more at home on the side of a flashy modern shopping centre is not the way to get more bums on seats.

"Next they'll be ripping out the pews and putting sofas in their place, or throwing out all the Bibles and replacing them with laptops. It's just not right."

Souter, who has been vicar at St John's since 2001, believes the modern new cross – designed by artist Angela Godfrey – will present "a positive message of hope" on the side of his church.

A spokesman at Horsham Museum said: "Thanks to the generosity of St John's we have been given the remarkable sculpture of Jesus on the Cross by Edward Bainbridge Copnall. The museum was keen to have the figure because it is a stunning example of Edward's ability and skill as a sculptor.

"Being made out of coal dust and resin it represents the cutting edge of materials, as well as being a dramatic interpretation of a well-known image." source

Archbishop of Canterbury's New Year message

Archbishop of Canterbury's New Year message: Children are worth more than money

The Archbishop of Canterbury has called on society to recognise that children are more valuable than money in his New Year message.

 

By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent 
Last Updated: 9:41PM GMT 31 Dec 2008

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has received support from other leading bishops over the disestablishment of Church and state. Photo: PA

Dr Rowan Williams said he realised that many people fear losing their jobs or their homes as recession looms.

But he warned that "our hearts would be in a very bad way" if we worried more about our finances than the welfare of our fellow human beings, in particular the young and vulnerable.

It is the latest in a series of comments made by the most senior cleric in the Church of England about the dangers to society of the growing economic crisis.

As the banking sector unravelled in September, Dr Williams claimed that Karl Marx had been right about the consequences of unbridled capitalism.  more