Stories related to: religion

A $27 million museum opening in Kentucky next week promises a different kind of take on natural history: a biblical one. At the Creation Museum, the Earth is 6,000 years old, evolution is a yarn, and dinosaurs were booked on Noah's Ark. More »

It's impossible to grasp the profound change in American political life in the last quarter-century without understanding Jerry Falwell and the movement he fostered, writes Newsweek 's Howard Fineman. Falwell, who died yesterday, created the Moral Majority, helped launch the Reagan Revolution, and dug the evangelical foundations—currently shifting—on which the modern Republican establishment stands. More »

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority and mixed evangelism with conservative social criticism, died today after collapsing in his office at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. He was 73. A lightning rod for controversy, Falwell once called AIDS "the wrath of a just God against homosexuals" and claimed that God is a Republican. More »

The mother of Seung Hui Cho sought spiritual healing for her angry, troubled son, the Washington Post reports in an examination of the Virginia Tech shooter's mental state. The head pastor of the One Mind Church in Woodbridge, Virginia, said his church was approached last summer to help deliver the young man from "demonic power." More »

James McGreevey, who resigned as New Jersey governor to avoid being outed by a former gay lover, plans to become an Episcopalian priest. McGreevey, who had been a Catholic, was received into the faith at St. Bartholomew's Church in Manhattan Sunday, and has been accepted into the Master of Divinity program at General Theological Seminary. More »

The Times retraces Barack Obama's peripatetic path to the Christianity he embraced 20 years ago and now invokes as he presents his presidential campaign in nothing short of biblical terms. Obama's mother was an anthropologist who schooled her son in the variety of religious experiences; his father's family in Kenya is Muslim. More »

Gunmen in northern Iraq stopped a bus carrying workers home from a textile factory  today, identified 23 members of a tiny religious sect on board, and shot them to death. The bus was filled with Christians and Yazidis, a mostly Kurdish sect that worships an angel, the AP reports. More »

American evangelicals have opened a new front in the culture wars—across the Atlantic. Christian groups, including Pat Robertson's legal organization, the American Center for Law and Justice, are actively challenging German laws against home schooling, defending Britons who refuse to work on Sunday, and combating same-sex marriage and stem cell research across the continent. More »

Another sculpture of Jesus is stirring protest this Holy Week—this time a work portraying Barack Obama as the savior. The Art Institute of Chicago has gotten a flood of angry calls over the piece in an exhibition of student work, close on the heels of the chocolate Christ brouhaha in Manhattan. More »

Celeb church-of-choice Scientology is under surveillance from German intelligence officials, alarmed at the recent opening of its new chapel in Berlin, just blocks from the Reichstag. Leaders' phones have been tapped. "This is a dangerous group… that wants to break the will of each of its members. That's why we have to take massive counter-action,” says one German intelligence official. More »