Wednesday, October 26, 2005

• Stranded on a mountainside, Baptist workers minister to Pakistan’s earthquake survivors

  by Goldie Frances*, posted Wednesday, October 26, 2005 (18 years ago)

  Care in the countryside Relief workers in remote Pakistan create a makeshift sling for a woman who suffered a broken arm in the Oct. 8 earthquake.

  ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (BP)--Stranded for the night without adequate protection against the frigid mountain air, Southern Baptist worker Josie Gabdon* shivered under a thin shawl as she replayed in her mind chilling scenes from the day -– hurting patients, collapsed school buildings, freshly dug graves.

        “All the places that we have been, there’s not a single person who hasn’t lost a family member –- at least two or three family members,” Gabdon said. “I think it was very important for the people to show us the graves of their family members -– and to make sure that we heard about the ones who were lost.” Read More

• Volunteers treat post-traumatic stress, pray for quake victims

  by Goldie Frances*, posted Wednesday, October 26, 2005 (18 years ago)

  ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (BP)--Southern Baptist medical volunteers working in Pakistan’s quake zone say many of the patients they are treating suffer from post-traumatic stress -– and nearly all are in despair. Read More

• Miers' views on self-determination worry some conservatives

  by Michael Foust, posted Wednesday, October 26, 2005 (18 years ago)

  WASHINGTON (BP)--News that Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers once embraced the concept of "self-determination" -- a phrase often trumpeted by abortion rights groups -- has conservative groups that already were worried about her nomination even more concerned. Read More

• Prison Fellowship becomes latest church-state battleground

  by James Patterson, posted Wednesday, October 26, 2005 (18 years ago)

  Faith under fire Mark Earley, president of Prison Fellowship, visits with Texas prisoners participating in the voluntary, faith-based InnerChange Freedom Initiative – now the target of a federal lawsuit in Iowa.

  DES MOINES, Iowa (BP)--Despite an impressive record of turning prisoners’ lives around, a faith-based program operated by Prison Fellowship is being challenged in federal court as unconstitutional.

  The plaintiffs, including Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and Jerry Ashburn, an inmate at Iowa’s Newton Correctional Facility about 23 miles east of Des Moines, are suing Virginia-based Prison Fellowship and its Christian rehabilitation program, the InnerChange Freedom Initiative.

  The lawsuit alleges that the voluntary program is an excessive entanglement of church and state violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to the Iowa constitution. Read More

• CULTURE DIGEST: Fox leads list of worst shows for families; church giving down; Rick Warren to appear on Starbucks cup

  by Erin Curry, posted Wednesday, October 26, 2005 (18 years ago)

  NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--Four Fox network programs top the list of the 10 worst shows for family viewing on prime-time broadcast television, according to an annual report by the Parents Television Council measuring series’ appropriateness for family audiences. Read More

• College’s journalism students boost post-Katrina morale

  by Karen L. Willoughby, posted Wednesday, October 26, 2005 (18 years ago)

  NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--A photograph of a gate snapped in two by hurricane-force winds tells the story: William Carey College’s three campuses -– in Hattiesburg and Gulfport, Miss., and New Orleans -- will never again be the same. Read More

• FIRST-PERSON: Contracepting the New Birth?

  by Russell D. Moore, posted Wednesday, October 26, 2005 (18 years ago)

  LOUISVILLE, Ky. (BP)--If your church nursery was unnervingly quiet this past Sunday, you are probably a member of a liberal Protestant church. So says a new study about population decline and mainline Protestantism by sociologists from the University of California at Berkley, the University of Arizona and Indiana University. Mainliners are hailing this survey because it places the blame for Protestant denominational decline not on theological liberalism, but on the churches' acceptance of delayed childbirth, small families and an extreme contraception culture. Read More