Faith

From an article with the same title by David Haldane of the LA Times:

At a small Catholic church south of Los Angeles, the pressing moral question comes to this: Does kneeling at the wrong time during worship make you a sinner? Kneeling "is clearly rebellion, grave disobedience and mortal sin," Father Martin Tran, pastor at St. Mary's by the Sea, in Huntington Beach, Calif., told his flock in a recent church bulletin. The Diocese of Orange backs Tran's anti-kneeling edict. While told by the pastor and the archdiocese to stand during certain parts of the liturgy, a third of the congregation still gets on its knees every Sunday. "Kneeling is an act of adoration," said Judith M. Clark, 68, one of at least 55 parishioners who have received letters from church leaders urging them to get off their knees or quit St. Mary's and the Diocese of Orange. "You almost automatically kneel because you're so used to it. Now the priest says we should stand, we … ignore him." The debate is being played out in at least a dozen U.S. parishes. Since at least the seventh century, Catholics have been kneeling following the Agnus Dei, the point during Mass when the priest holds up the chalice and consecrated bread and says, "Behold the lamb of God." But four years ago, the Vatican revised its instructions, allowing bishops to decide at some points in the Mass whether their flocks should get on their knees. The debate is part of the argument among Catholics between tradition and change. Traditionalists see it as the ultimate posture of submission to and adoration of God; modernists view kneeling as the vestige of a feudal past.

To kneel or not to kneel? Seems kind of silly. When church leaders typically see themselves as figures of authority to be obeyed and church members typically aren't willing to yield to authority in conflict with their own view, then I guess silliness like this is bound to ensue. Maybe church members need to learn submission and church leaders need to be examples of servants, not rigid authoritarians.

From a Christianity Today article of the same title by Brad Greenberg:

Daniel Berry was practicing his faith, but his employers felt he took it too far. They told him to keep his Bible tucked in a desk drawer, to take down a "Happy Birthday Jesus" sign, and to stop praying with clients. Berry didn't like the orders given by the Tehama County Department of Social Services, so he sued, claiming his First Amendment rights had been infringed. The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against him in May, further affirming the limitations on overt Christian behavior by government employees... Beginning in 2001, Berry hosted informal and unscheduled prayer meetings in a conference room, even after the county told him he could not use the site. They said he should use a break room instead. Later that year, he challenged a departmental rule and placed a Bible on his desk and hung a Jesus sign on his cubicle. He was seen praying with clients. Berry had never been prevented from sharing his faith with coworkers. But the county strictly prohibited religious conversations with clients, because they feared such dialogue could be perceived as government endorsement of religion... "Generally, an employee is not barred from giving a religious testimony-even to the general public," Derek Davis, director of the Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University, told CT. "If you invited the client to pray with you and the client said, 'Sure-why not?' that would be okay. If the client resisted, then you would need to back off." The case would have been different had Berry not been a government employee. The "cloud" of "separation of church and state sometimes shuts peoples' mouths when they don't have to [be] shut," said Os Hillman, director of the International Coalition of Workplace Ministries. "Yet there are clearly times you don't want to overstep your bounds." One of those is evangelizing on company time. Another is proselytizing a coworker who feels harassed. The best things Christians can do, Hillman said, are work hard, demonstrate integrity and love, and share how God is transforming their lives. "I particularly like what St. Francis of Assisi said, 'Preach the gospel always, and when necessary use words,'" Hillman said. "That is especially important in the workplace."

From a NY Times article of the same title by Helena Andrews:

Muslim women do not think they are conditioned to accept second-class status or view themselves as oppressed, according to a survey released Tuesday by The Gallup Organization. According to the poll, conducted in 2005, a strong majority of Muslim women believe they should have the right to vote without influence, work outside the home and serve in the highest levels of government. In more than 8,000 face-to-face interviews conducted in eight predominantly Muslim countries, the survey found that many women in the Muslim world did not see sex issues as a priority because other issues were more pressing. When asked what they resented most about their own societies, a majority of Muslim women polled said that a lack of unity among Muslim nations, violent extremism, and political and economic corruption were their main concerns. The hijab, or head scarf, and burqa, the garment covering face and body, seen by some Westerners as tools of oppression, were never mentioned in the women's answers to the open-ended questions, the poll analysts said... The most frequent response to the question, "What do you admire least about the West?" was the general perception of moral decay, promiscuity and pornography that pollsters called the "Hollywood image" that is regarded as degrading to women.

From an article by Terry Mattingly of the Scripss Howard News Service:

The Christian moviemakers behind a low-budget film called "Facing the Giants" were stunned when the MPAA pinned a PG rating on their gentle movie about a burned-out, depressed football coach whose life _ on and off the field _ takes a miraculous turn for the better. "What the MPAA said is that the movie contained strong 'thematic elements' that might disturb some parents," said Kris Fuhr, vice president for marketing at Provident Films, which is owned by Sony Pictures. Provident plans to open the film next fall in 380 theaters nationwide with the help of Samuel Goldwyn Films, which has worked with indie movies like "The Squid and the Whale." Which "thematic elements" earned this squeaky-clean movie its PG? "Facing the Giants" is too evangelistic. The MPAA, noted Fuhr, tends to offer cryptic explanations for its ratings. In this case, she was told that it "decided that the movie was heavily laden with messages from one religion and that this might offend people from other religions. It's important that they used the word 'proselytizing' when they talked about giving this movie a PG. ... "It is kind of interesting that faith has joined that list of deadly sins that the MPAA board wants to warn parents to worry about."

From a post of the same title on the Dilbert blog:

Speaking of skeptics, a reader pointed me to a web site titled Why Won't God Heal Amputees? The rhetorical point of the question is that God only heals the sort of people that might have gotten better on their own, such as cancer patients and the like. That always leaves some ambiguity as to whether it's a true miracle or a routine remission. Why are there no clear miracles such as God making an arm grow back? That's just one argument of many on the site: http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/

From that web site:

For this experiment, we need to find a deserving person who has had both of his legs amputated. For example, find a sincere, devout veteran of the Iraqi war, or a person who was involved in a tragic automobile accident. Now create a prayer circle like the one created for Jeanna Giese. The job of this prayer circle is simple: pray to God to restore the amputated legs of this deserving person. I do not mean to pray for a team of renowned surgeons to somehow graft the legs of a cadaver onto the soldier, nor for a team of renowned scientists to craft mechanical legs for him. Pray that God spontaneously and miraculously restores the soldier's legs overnight, in the same way that God spontaneously and miraculously cured Jeanna Giese and Marilyn Hickey's mother. If possible, get millions of people all over the planet to join the prayer circle and pray their most fervent prayers. Get millions of people praying in unison for a single miracle for this one deserving amputee. Then stand back and watch. What is going to happen? Jesus clearly says that if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. He does not say it once -- he says it many times in many ways in the Bible. And yet, even with millions of people praying, nothing will happen. No matter how many people pray. No matter how sincere those people are. No matter how much they believe. No matter how devout and deserving the recipient. Nothing will happen. The legs will not regenerate. Prayer does not restore the severed limbs of amputees. You can electronically search through all the medical journals ever written -- there is no documented case of an amputated leg being restored spontaneously. And we know that God ignores the prayers of amputees through our own observations of the world around us. If God were answering the prayers of amputees to regenerate their lost limbs, we would be seeing amputated legs growing back every day. Isn't that odd?

What do you think? I think this is thought-provoking and brings to light the fact that something isn't quite right about the conventional understanding of the purposes and of prayer.