Faith

That's Joe Beam's diagrammatic representation from the Grace Centered Magazine web site describing what he thinks is going on in the churches of Christ. To me, his analysis seems to be right on. The article goes into great detail. I think it's probably several years old, but it's exact age wasn't obvious to me. It's an interesting read. His conclusions:

Ultimately things will occur as God wills. I'm not a prophet, just an observer. Division is already occurring and will be very pronounced within 3 to 8 years unless wise leaders in the Traditional churches disregard Zealots. Neither the Opens, Cautious, or Satisfieds are driving this division; Zealots are. They accomplish it through their continually tightening rules of fellowship that Satisfieds are accepting. They will never see that but will believe the split was caused by the Opens who led their churches to become Innovative. Our greatest enemy isn't going beyond clear New Testament doctrine. It is making laws where God never did and chaining our great brotherhood from its task by those laws.

Via Digg, from a Reuters article of the same title by Thomas Ferraro:

The religious right, which helped re-elect President Bush in 2004 by rallying opposition to abortion and gay marriage, is now facing a pushback from the religious left. With a faith-based agenda of their own, liberal and progressive clergy from various denominations are lobbying lawmakers, holding rallies and publicizing their positions. They want to end the Iraq war, ease global warming, combat poverty, raise the minimum wage, revamp immigration laws, and prevent "immoral" cuts in federal social programs... "The religious right intends for you and I to live in a country where church and state are united -- where only their interpretations of biblical law dictates the law of our land," said the Rev. Welton Gaddy, a Baptist minister in Washington who heads The Interfaith Alliance which seeks to maintain the constitutional separation of church and state. But it's unclear how big an impact the religious left will have. Laura Olson, a Clemson University expert on religion and politics, said the religious left is energized, but "a lot of times it shoots itself in the foot. It often pushes an overly broad agenda that results in conflicting priorities." "The call of the gospel is to help the poor," Meyers said. "The strong ought to help the weak, instead of the strong helping the strong get stronger, which the Bush administration is all about."... Amid the war of words, some clergy are making a point to steer clear of labels. Rev. Jim Wallis, who heads a faith-based group in Washington called Sojourners, has been widely viewed as part of the religious left. Yet he rejects the name and preaches the need to bring the nation to "a moral center." "I'm an evangelical Christian who thinks that justice is a biblical imperative," said Wallis." The monologue of the religious right is finally over and a new dialogue has just begun."

From an article of the same title by Charles Piller in the LA Times:

Yoism - a faith invented by a Massachusetts psychologist - shuns godly wisdom passed down by high priests. Instead, its holy text evolves online, written by the multitude of followers - much the same way volunteer programmers create open-source computer software by each contributing lines of code. Adherents of Yoism - who count Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud among their saints - occupy the radical fringe of the open-source movement, which is quickly establishing itself as a new organizing principle for the 21st century... At its core, the process presumes the intelligence of crowds, and Yoans build their faith around the notion that, together, they take the place of divine inspiration... To Dan Kriegman, who founded Yoism in 1994, an open-source framework offered the solution to an age-old challenge: how to make religion inclusive, open to change and responsive to collective wisdom. "I don't think anyone has ever complained about something that didn't lead to some revision or clarification in the Book of Yo," said Kriegman, a 54-year-old psychologist in Chestnut Hill, Mass. "Every aware, conscious, sentient spirit is divine and has direct access to truth…. Open source embodies that. There is no authority."... The open-source frontier is religion. That's where Yoism comes in. But is it really a religion? Chester L. Gillis, chairman of Georgetown University's theology department, is skeptical. Yoism, he says, embraces a transitory view of reality that contradicts traditional concepts of religion based on belief in fundamental truths. "There's an authoritative source in religion that [Yoism] lacks. It doesn't talk about revelation from the divine," he said. "Any religion that hopes to survive is essentially conservative - it conserves elements of the faith. This one lacks that." But Yoans have an answer for Gillis. As it is written in the Book of Yo, "There always exists the possibility of one day discovering that all our current truths are indeed wrong."

From a certain perspective, it's not all THAT much different from a traditional religion, like Christianity, where the Christian community strives together to properly understand, interpret, and apply that which has been revealed. A big difference, as pointed out by Chester Gillis in the article, is that the Christian community believes that their wisdom originated with a deity while the Yoans believe it originated with themselves.

From an article of the same title by Alan Finder in the NY Times (via James Wiser's blog):

The request seemed simple enough to the Rev. Hershael W. York, then the president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. He asked Georgetown College, a small Baptist liberal arts institution here, to consider hiring for its religion department someone who would teach a literal interpretation of the Bible. But to William H. Crouch Jr., the president of Georgetown, it was among the last straws in a struggle that had involved issues like who could be on the board of trustees and whether the college encouraged enough freedom of inquiry to qualify for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Dr. Crouch and his trustees decided it was time to end the college's 63-year affiliation with the religious denomination. "From my point of view, it was about academic freedom,'' Dr. Crouch said. "I sat for 25 years and watched my denomination become much more narrow and, in terms of education, much more interested in indoctrination.'' Georgetown is among a half-dozen colleges and universities whose ties with state Baptist conventions have been severed in the last four years, part of a broad realignment in which more than a dozen Southern Baptist universities, including Wake Forest and Furman, have ended affiliations over the last two decades. Georgetown's parting was ultimately amicable. But many have been tense, even bitter. In Georgia and Missouri, disputes over who controls the boards of Baptist colleges led to prolonged litigation. In Tennessee, a clash over whether Belmont University in Nashville could appoint non-Baptists to its board led the Tennessee Baptist Convention to vote in May to remove the entire board. Belmont's trustees are still running the university, and while negotiations are continuing, the battle for control could end up in court.

Wiser discusses the trends in relation to the situation at Pepperdine and summarizes:

...I'm thankful that numerous Christian colleges and universities around the country are asking tough questions about what it means to be faithful to their respective missions. Those conversations can only make the Christian university landscape better, more vibrant, and more vibrantly Christian.

From an article of the same title BBCNews.com:

Scientists have condemned a leading Catholic cardinal's calls for those who carry out embryonic stem cell research to be excommunicated. Vatican-based Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo told a Catholic magazine such research was "the same as abortion". He said excommunication should apply to "all women, doctors and researchers who eliminate embryos"... But Dr Stephen Minger, leading stem cell expert at Kings College London, said: "Having been raised a Catholic, I found this stance really outrageous. "Are they going to excommunicate IVF doctors, nurses and embryologists who routinely put millions of embryos down the sink every year throughout the world? "It is more ethical to use embryos that are going to be destroyed anyway for the general benefit of mankind than simply putting them down the sink."