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ON FAITH

washingtonpost.com/onfaith

Throughout the week, go to On Faith for updates, discussions, commentary and news about faith and religion. On Faith, led by Sally Quinn and Jon Meacham, is one of the online world’s most popular news and religion features, offering informative, interesting and insightful commentary every day on religion’s impact on Washington, national and international events. On Faith’s panel and contributors include distinguished theologians, scholars and thinkers on the subject of faith for believers and nonbelievers, as well as an award-winning blog, Under God.

I D

“moderates” in religion or politics? Author Susan Jacoby says it’s time to retire the word. Go to

newsweek.washingtonpost.com/ onfaith/spirited_atheist.

6

No Easter service in custody case

Manya A. Brachear

A Chicago man in a conten- tious divorce and custody dispute was told by a judge this week that he cannot take his daughter to Catholic services on Easter. The order maintains an in-

junction imposed against Joseph Reyes last year after he had the girl baptized in the Roman Catholic Church without the con- sent of his estranged wife, who claims that they had agreed to raise the daughter in the Jewish faith. Reyes had asked for an exemp- tion for Easter, but the judge in the couple’s divorce case refused on Wednesday. Reyes already faces a possible contempt charge for allegedly defying the injunc- tion and taking his daughter to Mass — with a television news crew in tow. Joseph and Rebecca Reyes were married in October 2004 but split four years later. Rebecca Reyes was granted full custody last month, but the divorce battle continues. In a sworn statement in the di- vorce case, Rebecca Reyes says that her husband, raised a Catho- lic, converted to Judaism after their marriage and agreed to raise their daughter in the Jewish faith. He denies that he agreed to raise her only in the Jewish faith. Her attorneys argue that the daughter, who attends a Jewish preschool, would “suffer confu- sion to her emotional detriment” as a result of what they called Jo- seph Reyes’s “malicious” actions.

— Chicago Tribune

Twiturgy Twitter aggregator

Tracking tweets from some of America’s most popular and influential pastors. Go to

washingtonpost.com/twiturgy/.

Guest Voices

Chris Matthews, host of

MSNBC’s “Hardball,” on the Catholic Church. Go to

newsweek.washingtonpost.com/ onfaith/guestvoices

The Spirited Atheist

Are there really any

Visions of Faith

Religion through the lens of Post photographer Katherine Frey

Putting in a good word for the Bible

Discrepancies and skeptics haven’t shaken Christians’ beliefs

by G. Jeffrey MacDonald

Vanderbilt University student

Katherine Precht knows what skeptical scholars say about the Bible: It’s full of errors, contra- dictions and a murky historical record.

Still, none of that has shaken

her Christian faith. That’s because Precht embraces

a big-picture view of biblical truth. For her, it means the Bible speaks truth on ultimate things, such as Creation and salvation. “Sure, there may be contra-

even though we don’t know why.” He dropped 20 pounds with- out trying. Since Ash Wednesday, the cast of the Via Crusis or

O

scar Rivera, 26, is ready. He avoided portraying Jesus for the past two years, but this year, he felt ready. He said, “the calling is always there. We have to listen to the call

Way of the Cross had practiced for the Good Friday reenact- ment that wends its way through the streets of Takoma Park and Silver Spring, from Our Lady of Sorrows Church to St. Ca- millus. During the procession, he said: “Dont’ give me water. Don’t give me anything because I’m really I’m really living it.”

dictions, [but] God was working through the scribes who put it to- gether,” said Precht, a United Methodist from Montgomery, Ala. “Even though [the Scripture] is 2,000 years old, I see it alive and living . . . in friends, in Christians, in the world.” As Christians prepare to mark

Should the pope resign?

Excerpts from the On Faith panel at washingtonpost.com/onfaith

Below is an excerpt from “On Faith,” a daily online religion section sponsored by The Washington Post and Newsweek. Each week, Jon Meacham and Sally Quinn engage figures from the world of faith in a conversation about an aspect of religion. This week, On Faith asked: Should Pope Benedict XVI be held responsible for the escalating scandals over clerical sexual abuse in Europe? Should he be investigated for cases of abuse that occurred under his watch as archbishop of Munich or as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer? Should the pope resign?

Anti-Catholic bias: The question of whether Pope Benedict XVI should resign is, frankly, silly, because it assumes guilt where none has been proven or even credibly asserted. . . . The charge that Ratzinger, when archbishop of Munich,

knowingly reassigned a dangerous predator to pastoral ministry has been flatly denied by both the archdiocese and the Vatican. Anyone who knows the elementary facts of the history of the Holy See’s handling of these cases over the last decade knows that Ratzinger was at the forefront of efforts to bring abusers to book, swiftly and decisively, and his recent letter to the Catholic Church in

Ireland demonstrates beyond cavil that he is determined to continue those efforts, wherever they lead.

George Weigel,

Catholic theologian and author

Ordination does not equal immunity from prosecution: Of

course he should be held accountable. He approved

moving Cardinal Bernard Law to the Vatican to keep him from having to answer questions under oath. . . . Child abuse is a

crime. Covering up a crime is also a crime. Ordination and a position in the Roman Catholic hierarchy does not make one immune to the consequences of

criminal behavior.

John Shelby Spong, former bishop,

Episcopal Diocese of Newark

Everyday believers vs.

institutional scandal: The pope ought to act himself and act fast to end this by acknowledging the mistakes made and stepping away from his post. When he does, the relief for victims, their loved ones and the mostly ignored, and

almost completely unaffected everyday Catholics living

Time for an apology and

amends: If the pope recognizes that mistakes were made, he should make apologies and amends. If he recognizes that he was the one who made the mistakes, he should similarly clear the air and, using his best Latin, cry “mea culpa.” People are far more willing to forgive when honest admissions

of culpability are made than when one comes clean only after a coverup has been exposed to the light of day.

Max Carter, director,

Friends Center, Guilford College

Heaven is the presence of

Christ: No, Pope Ratzinger should not resign. He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice — the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution — while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and

preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears.

Richard Dawkins,

British evolutionary biologist, author

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READER COMMENTS

dcodco: Replace with a pope who cares about people, especially the kids, not just the church. The present pope and all the cardinals want to protect the church . . .

Lufrank1: If the pope resigns, he will only be replaced by another bishop who believes that he speaks for God and is infallible.

To read the complete essays and more “On Faith” commentary, go to

washingtonpost.com/onfaith.

POINTS & REWARDS

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Do we expect the pope to do a

perp walk? From my limited vantage point, it appears this pope is trying to work through a problem that was not adequately addressed by previous regimes. In as large an organization as the Roman

Catholic Church, with its dense

joyfully today will breathe easily and move on with their lives and

their faith, as they should.

Mark Tauber, senior vice president, HarperCollins Publishers

network of power relationships, I can’t imagine that’s an easy task. I’m generally disinclined to tell other ecclesiastical bodies how to manage their internal affairs, but if I weren’t so polite and reticent, I still wouldn’t tell

the pope to resign.

Jason Poling, founding pastor,

New Hope Community Church

Benedict should stay and clean

house: Should Catholics be angry about the ongoing revelations of clergy sexual abuse? Absolutely. Do victims deserve a full accounting of how those cases were handled? Yes again. Should Benedict resign? No. He should do what a good father would do: root out the filth

in his house, acknowledge the church’s past failings frankly and let his flock know, in both word and action, that he shares their fury at these unspeakable crimes and their resolve that

they never be repeated.

Colleen Carroll Campbell,

columnist, tv/radio show host for Eternal World Television Network

A resignation would be mind-boggling but

soul-healing: So though the thought of the pope resigning still boggles my mind, what a powerful statement it would be to all Catholics and people everywhere! Perhaps the Catholic Church would not crumble but instead emerge as a stronger tradition. Embattled yes, but embattled in

the service of being a force for good, and no longer for enabling

criminal behavior.

Donna Freitas, assistant professor

of religion, Boston University

Easter, the culmination of the ho- liest week of the year, many are mindful of hard-to-ignore cri- tiques that would deem creeds and Scripture, at best, untrust- worthy and at worst, downright false. Many have heard “Jesus Wars” author Philip Jenkins insist their beliefs are merely the result of ancient politicking. Still, they trust what the Gospels say about Jesus’s last days, despite the doubts of biblical scholars like Bart D. Ehrman, whose public questioning has made him a best- selling author. Christians aren’t necessarily dismissing the research of nay- sayer scholars. Many just think conclusions have been way over- blown — sometimes by scholars with an anti-faith agenda. Some scholars “get fixated on some of the marginal issues about who was where and when,” said Craig Evans, professor of New Tes- tament at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia. In the Gospels, “the discrepant witnesses are allowed to stand side by side, and I think that’s a strength in the end, not a weak- ness. But the naive reader — the person beguiled by the notion that discrepancies somehow cast doubt on the truth of the entire re- port — might not know that,” Ev- ans said. Traditional Christian beliefs continue to resonate with large swaths of Americans: 70 percent believe in a personal God, accord- ing to the 2008 American Reli- gious Identification Survey, and nearly a third believe the Bible is the actual word of God that should be taken literally, accord- ing to recent Gallup polls. An- other 47 percent believe the Bible is divinely inspired. Some writers, however, have

cast doubt on Christian doctrines. Ehrman, author of “Jesus, Inter- rupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them),” takes aim at fundamen- talist beliefs that the Bible is a flawless record of events. “The view on the religious right, about the Bible being some kind of inerrant revelation or an infallible revelation from God. . . simply isn’t tenable anymore,” said Ehrman, a fundamentalist- turned-agnostic who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Yet, by and large, Christians seem to be holding fast to their beliefs and sometimes reconciling them with scholarly challenges. Frank Stegall Jr., a medical stu-

dent at the University of Georgia and a Presbyterian, said he thinks that “to be a Christian, you have to believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God and is infallible. “The inerrancy of the Bible is

evidenced in the fact that it is the most transformative piece of lit- erature that’s ever been written,” Stegall said. “It transforms peo- ple’s lives in a way that nothing else can come close to.”

—Religion News Service

SATURDAY, APRIL 3, 2010

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