In order to “reinforce historical ties,” Ohio’s Ashland University, founded by the Brethren Church, announces that they will only hire Christians and Jews as full-time faculty, and that only people “‘of Christian faith and life'” will be eligible to serve in the president’s cabinet.

Defense lawyers in the Utah “pedophile prophet” case, concerning the kidnapping of then-14-year old Elizabeth Smart by self-proclaimed prophet Brian David Mitchell, have asked the judge to sequester jurors and ban Bibles from their hotel rooms, reports The NY Post.

But what to wear to Falwell’s first party meeting?

It’s enough that people know there was an election, and that moral values carried it, for Jerry Falwell to announce the coming/still here evangelical revolution. The revolution will spring from Falwell’s new organization, The Faith and Values Coalition (the un-catchily-named resurrection of Falwell’s Moral Majority). And the revolutionaries, including Comrades Tim LaHaye and Mathew Staver of Florida’s Liberty Counsel, have pragmaticly listed their goals: lobbying for pro-life judicial appointments, a federal ban on same-sex marriage, and the election of another conservative president in 2008. But what Falwell really wants is an opportunity to complete his “‘salt of the earth’ ministry,” and he plans to organize in all 50 states, lending his National Liberty Journal newspaper to the cause of rallying 40 million evangelical voters for 2008. Because, hey, liberty is precious…

C. of E. choirboys strip for a naval-themed charity calender. While traditionalists bristle, the Portsmouth Bishop, Rt. Rev. Kenneth Stevenson, supports the calender and congratulated the lads on baring more than their souls.

Our favorite logic-smashing Bush apologist, Dr. Paul Kengor, author of God and George W. Bush, socks it to Democrats by pointing out their heretical, godless supporters. “Which ought to be considered a greater liability for an American president: to receive the overwhelming support of devout Protestants and Catholics or to be backed by atheists? …Next to African-Americans, the surest Democratic voter is an unmarried, city-dwelling, Northeast, pro-choice atheist with a graduate degree who thinks that gay people should be legally married.” (We suspect Kengor just hasn’t found an atheist he can understand. Can we help?)

A North Carolina man, Michael Herman Vaughan, who has suffered from severeschizophrenia and psychotic delusions for over twenty-five years — hearing warring voices from both God and the devil in his head, and sometimes believing himself to be Jesus — has been deemed indefinitely incompetent to stand trial for the murder of his elderly friend, whom he believed God wished him to kill. Vaughan, who has been remanded to a mental institution, rejected a manslaughter plea and requested to be sentenced to death.

The Vatican announced yesterday that it will cooperate with Italy’s Culture Ministry by opening more of its archives on the Inquisition in an unprecedented study of how the Church attempted to control religious beliefs and their effect on history. The Vatican statement said that a project of this size, which will catalogue documents concerning the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions, had never been attempted before, and will be “‘of great importance in international reseach of the control of religious ideas in medieval and modern Europe.'”

Intense debate over abortion broke out between religious activists and doctors in Kenya on Wednesday, at the start of the trial of Dr. John Nyamu, a doctor who has been charged with murder after 15 fetuses were found near Nairobi River. All abortion is illegal in Kenya, and murder convictions carry the death penalty. Religious activists condemned not sinner but sin; doctors said: “‘We are always blamed. It is the woman who is doing it — not us.'” And the women “doing it”? Apparently absent, but maybe making their voices heard by dying — at the rate of 2,500 per year — due to post-illegal-abortion complications.

In a parting gesture, John Ashcroft asked the Supreme Court to authorize federal agents to pursue Oregon doctors who assist in the suicides of terminally ill patients under the state’s 1994 “Death with Dignity Act.” The law has popular state support, though it’s rarely been used. Since 1997, only 171 patients have used medication to end their lives, most of them cancer patients, and all of them within their last six months, as confirmed by two doctors, and judged mentally competent to make the decision.

Thurs., 9 am eastern, Catholic conservative Amy Welborn on Relevant Radio, discussing her truly lovely book, The Words We Pray.

Newsweek on a new attorney general with new moral values: “[In] the debates that surrounded the development of the military tribunal policy down in Guantanamo… John Ashcroft was actually the voice of reason and Alberto Gonzales was lined up with the most extreme right-wing voices arguing that there should be virtually no rights to the people who are being tried.”