17 June 2004

Basava Premanand, “India’s leading guru-buster” and “scourge of all miracle-makers,” has been burgled again, the BBC’s Tanya Datta reports. Premanand, who has been trying to debunk India’s biggest spiritual leader, the “self-proclaimed ‘God-man,'” Sri Satya Sai Baba, for nearly 30 years, suspects that the burglars sought his case-folder on the guru. Sai Baba’s followers believe he is an Avatar, or human incarnation of God. Premanand accuses him not just of charlatanism, but of sexual abuses as well.

12:05 pm: “The Vatican said Tuesday that fewer witches were burned at the stake and fewer heretics tortured into conversion during the dark centuries of the Inquisition than is generally believed, but it also sought renewed forgiveness for sins committed by Roman Catholics in the name of church doctrine.” Read more from Jason Horowitz’s article, “Vatican downsizes the Inquisition.”

“If God’s Man in Texas were God’s Man in Tampa Bay, Randy and Paula White would be the main characters,” writes Sharon Tubbs in the St. Petersburg Times. The regional-theatre play, inspired by the late megachurch-minister, W.A. Criswell, has been very successful and has been praised by ministers for dealing with the “core issues [facing] pastors during an era when the very definition of church is changing.” Tubbs commendably explores the local implications of God’s Man and of “Selling God to the Masses.”

11:11 am: It’s “as a Jew,” that Marcus J. Goldman writes about “Bush’s ‘God thing’: Divine Providence and Liberal Jewish Hatred,” at BushCountry (“Promoting the Ideals of Conservatism”). Goldman tsks: Jewish liberals “confuse absolute theocratic abuses with moral conviction…Invoking God’s name to steady a weary nation is a comfort not a liability…
Sadly, once again, the chosen people are choosing poorly.”

Schism-watch: “‘We have been two churches for a long time. The lid has been blown off.'” Episcopal delegates decided yesterday to recognize same-sex unions and that locally created blessings for the unions were part of church doctrine. Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News reports on the deciding committee’s chairperson, Rev. Frank Wade, who explained: “‘That means those local communities [and] dioceses that are in the practice of blessing some same-sex unions, in whatever form, are operating within the parameters and understanding of this church and its doctrine and disciplines.'” Correction: Weiss’s story was accidentally reprinted by the Dallas Morning News. The story originally ran last year.