A recent publication of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) has caused outrage from Jewish groups who denounce the document as anti-Jewish.

The document entitled “Vigilance against anti-Jewish bias” was intended to “help Presbyterians guard against anti-Jewish bias” and encourage them “to give care and attention to issues of anti-Jewish bias.”

Jewish groups who worked with church leaders to draft the document’s original language accused the PCUSA of omitting crucial, reconciliatory verbiage and replacing it with harmful misrepresentations in a second draft. 

Although the final draft contains strong language rebuking mischaracterization and demonization of the Jewish people, detractors say it also promulgates the very biases the “resource” was intended to address. 

The document alludes to Israel as “the oppressive force” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also misrepresents God’s covenantal promise to give the land of Israel to the Jews. The text discredits the idea that the Bible is a “blueprint” for the modern state of Israel and claims that God’s promises to the Jews, i.e. a land given exclusively to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, are also promises for the Palestinians and “all other people.”  

Since the establishment of the Israeli state was predicated in part on the Jew’s biblically-sanctioned claim to the land of Israel, such an assertion undermines the legitimacy of the existence of a Jewish state. In short, if God’s promise to the Jews in the Bible was not intended uniquely for them, they have no unique right to the land and all people groups on earth can equally claim Israel for themselves.

This most recent publication is but one of many that Jewish and pro-Israeli groups have found biased since the start of the 2000 Palestinian Intifada.  A PCUSA policy statement in 2004 called Israel’s occupation “the root of all evil acts” committed by both sides of the conflict and the PCUSA national assembly has repeatedly debated selective divestment from companies that do business with Israel.

A contestant in Israel’s annual Bible knowledge quiz created a controversy after people found out she was a Messianic Jew—an individual of Jewish descent who practices Judaism but believes Jesus Christ is the Jewish Messiah. Although attorneys for the competition determined that there was no reason to disqualify her, influential Rabbis encouraged Israelis to boycott the competition over her presence.

On March 20, 2008, the son of a Messianic Jewish pastor living in Ariel was critically wounded after a bomb disguised as a Purim gift basket blew up. The Israeli media characterized the victim, Ami Ortiz, and his family as “cult members.” Some have speculated that anti-missionary Orthodox zealots may have been responsible for the attack.

Messianic Jews in Israel are no strangers to persecution in Israel. The Israeli government has twice passed anti missionary legislation and anti-missionary organizations such as Yad L’Achim, which purportedly receives funding from Israel’s Interior Ministry, devote themselves to undermining and reversing missionary efforts. Until last month, Israel denied Messianic Jews citizenship under the Law of Return on the grounds that they had willingly converted to another religion and thereby lost their Jewish identity.

The question of Jewish identity is a sticky one that extends beyond the most controversial—Messianic Jews—to gentiles who converted into any of the mainstream Jewish denominations. Israel’s High Rabbinical Court recently upheld the decision of yet another Rabbinic court to retroactively annul the Orthodox conversion of a woman who had failed to practice orthodox Judaism following her conversion 15 years earlier. The decision has created a fear that hundreds or thousands of other gentile converts will similarly have their Jewish identity denied.

The real fear for Jews is that “conversion” to other religions, or the gentile-convert’s failure to preserve the integrity of modern Jewish religious practice, will lead to the wholesale destruction of the Jewish people. One can make the case that much of modern Jewish identity has grown out of defending itself against two millennia of the Church’s rabidly anti-Semitic practices. Less than a century after the Holocaust, this is an understandable fear. Anti-missionary terror and tactics, however, are an indefensible response.

According to a recent LA Times article, former Prime Minister Tony Blair attended Mass secretly for a decade, but avoided discussing faith during his tenure in politics because Europeans tend to view religious people as “nutters.” Admission of faith in Europe, Blair said, leads to a whole series of suppositions that are not helpful to the practicing politician.

Not so in the United States where suppositions about religious folk are so helpful that candidates intentionally parade their religious credentials throughout the election process. During this most recent campaign, the Democratic candidates in particular have stepped up their religious rhetoric.

The Democratic move religionward came after “white evangelicals” helped Bush win the White House in 2004. Candidates began hiring faith-based advisors to broaden their appeal with religious voters—a move that seemed to pay off in the 2006 Congressional races.

The 2006 success is owed in part to Common Good Strategies, a faith-based consulting firm that devised a number of effective vote-baiting tactics for Democratic candidates. These include having candidates speak openly about their personal faiths, buying commercials on Christian television and radio, organizing private meetings with conservative clergy, using “recognizably biblical language, creating a new way of talking about contentious issues to neutralize divisive debates, enlisting pastors to write op-ed pieces, and buying mailing lists of religiously inclined voters. The group even helped candidates induce nuns to phonebank pro-life constituents for Democratic candidates, and it recently arranged a church visit for Chelsea Clinton. (The Clinton Campaign has an independent faith-based counselor on board as well).

Although there are doubtless good reasons for Christians to vote for a given candidate, when professionals are intentionally spinning politician’s identities to garner votes, the onus is on Christians to be savvy enough to look beyond what seems to be a marketing strategy.

Whereas a profession of faith might have stymied Blair’s arguably brilliant career in Europe, professions of faith might launch what could prove to be a deplorable career for a politician in America. If, as one commentator observed, affirmations of religious faith from presidents for the last half-century have borne “little resemblance to their behavior in office,” voters can’t necessarily count on campaign rhetoric no matter how nicely it’s packaged.

Although a conservative blogger once dubbed him “the most pro-abortion candidate ever,” Obama has received support from two pro-life Democratic members of Congress. Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. and former congressman Timothy Roemer are promoting Obama to their constituents as uniquely able to “lower the temperature and foster a sense of common ground” on the issue.

As the Washington Post notes, “Obama has never supported a single measure that would curtail access to abortion — even under controversial circumstances.” According to a National Right to Life Committee voter’s guide, he has voted against parental notification laws and objected to the Supreme Court ruling against partial birth abortion.

But speaking at the Compassion Forum Sunday night, Obama said he “absolutely” thinks pro-life and pro-choice groups can find common ground. Calling abortion a “wrenching choice,” Obama seemed measured in his response, tailoring his message to resonate with pro-life voters.

Cal Thomas called Obama audacious and characterized any pro-life outreach as a “crafty political move.” But according to Jim Wallis in Christianity Today this week, the abortion debate in American as gotten “stale,” amounting to little more than a political litmus test both parties trot out in election years. Calling the push for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion “endless, and meaningless,” Wallis said he wants real solutions to reduce the abortion rate. If the Democrats will acknowledge it’s a moral tragedy, as Obama himself said at the forum, Wallis is optimistic they could deliver the much-needed change.

Frank Schaeffer suggests that despite his pro-choice position, Obama’s worldview is fundamentally pro-life because it celebrates the “intrinsic worth of each individual” and focuses on saving the planet and providing a good life for everyone. According to the argument that abortion deprives the unborn of their intrinsic worth, Schaeffer’s logic has some flaws, but it indicates a leap that some pro-lifers are willing to make.

Obama’s list of pro-life supporters isn’t necessarily an indication that people have changed their attitudes about abortion so much as their attitudes about the best way to approach the debate. Supporting an unapologetically pro-choice candidate may be taking a huge risk, but it’s a risk some pro-lifers seem willing to take – perhaps because, as Dan McCarthy notes, they think that three decades of supporting Republicans hasn’t panned out.

In a move viewers characterized as everything from wonderful to weird, the American Idol Gives Back show ended with the immensely popular worship song “Shout to the Lord” by Darlene Zschech.

Evangelicals on one discussion thread took umbrage with Idol’s decision to “soften” the message of the song by replacing the word “Jesus” with the word “Shepherd” in the first line, contending that the substitution stripped the song of its Christian classification entirely. (The next night, they sang the song again — this time with the original wording.)

One person, who planned to boycott the show, claimed the lyric change constituted the “Oprah kind of religion” that white-washes Christianity of critical theological heft. In the absence of the word Jesus, the logic goes, the song refers to a “generic” lord and in turn, if fails to give glory to the capital-G God.

As one user pointed out, references to “Shepherd” “Savior” “Lord” and “King” make it virtually impossible to infer any deity besides Jesus Christ in the song. But if Jesus is the word people are looking for, the show has had no shortage of it this season.

During the Dolly Parton show two weeks ago, the name “Jesus” was used a total of 15 times. David Archuleta’s rendition of Smokey Mountain Memories gave us “leaning on my Jesus,” and Jason Castro’s Travelin’ Thru “nailed Jesus to the tree” and asked “sweet Jesus” to keep him ever close.

It was Dolly who bumped the evening’s Jesus tally into the double digits, however, when Jesus was used a whopping 12 times in 4 minutes during her performance of the song “Jesus and Gravity.” At the results show the next day, The Clark Brothers sang a rendition of “This Little Light of Mine” that added another 6.

This season’s religious bent, evident even before the “Shout to the Lord” finale, is not lost on “non-believing” viewers. As one cynical viewer queried, “What is this—an evangelical show asking for money to build a super church?” Another fumed, “Not all Americans thump a Bible like you do, Fox.” A contributor to a discussion on the American Idol website claimed the show made her Jewish friend feel “uncomfortable and a bit unwelcome.”

The McCain campaign has come out swinging against Obama campaign, calling “absolutely dishonest” the misrepresentation that McCain not only foresees a U.S. troop presence in Iraq for another 100 years, but that he wills it to happen.

McCain’s original comments come from a New Hampshire town hall meeting where he spoke about the possibility of keeping a non-combat presence in Iraq for many years—along the lines of the U.S. military bases in post-war Korea and Germany. Obama himself has indicated the possibility of leaving a long-term strike force in Iraq, despite his intention to begin withdrawing troops immediately.

Voices in the blogosphere denounced Obama’s rhetoric as intentionally misleading, insincere demagoguery and anticipate the Obama campaign will use this particular “talking point” to paint McCain as a war monger in the upcoming Presidential race.

Obama doesn’t need to misrepresent McCain’s position in Iraq to appeal to anti-war voters. Merely telling the truth about their dramatically different positions provides ample ammunition to sway voters on either side of the issue. While Obama has opposed the war from the beginning, McCain — vocally hawkish throughout his political career — was always a strong advocate of preemptive military action. Not only did McCain figure as a vociferous proponent of the 2003 invasion, the LA Times reports that he cosponsored an act in 1998 that made “regime change” in Iraq an official U.S. policy. He repeated his conviction that the Iraqi threat be eliminated in a letter to President Bush in 2001.

In light of the real differences here, it seems an unnecessary exercise in dissemblance and distortion to harp on such a paltry point, unless, of course, someone just wants to play dirty. For Obama, the self-styled candidate of political transcendence, this intentional misrepresentation smacks of the old-school politics he purports to eschew. If his devotees are following this hundred-years hoax, they are apt to be disappointed.

The Vatican recently came out with a list of “new sins” for its constituents to avoid: drug use, pollution, economic injustice, and genetic manipulation. Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Church’s official that oversees “matters of conscience,” discussed the new categories in the Vatican’s paper, l’Osservatore Romano. (Join the WMB discussion here.)

According to an AP newscast, the Vatican remains concerned about issues such as abortion and pedophilia, but an analyst for the Vatican said people are too obsessed with sex and that there are other, more important sins to take into consideration. Although one critic of the new injunctions thought the Vatican “gets its nose into too many things,” the Catholic Church is not the only religious entity redefining and refining its positions.

The Southern Baptists have also jumped on the “new sin” bandwagon, turning the focus from the more commonly invoked sins to climate change when Southern Baptist leaders drafted a declaration criticizing their denomination for being “too timid” on environmental issues. The leaders seek to change impressions that Southern Baptists are “uncaring, reckless, and ill-informed.”

With 60 percent of Italian Catholics no longer attending confession, this multi-denominational push to recognize a wider set of “sins” may be an effort to retain relevance in light of changing cultural values and scientific progress. The church’s emphasis on premarital sex and abortion arose from the same impulse in the wake the sexual revolution and Roe v. Wade.

Providing people with a list of additional things to feel bad about may be even more alienating, though, especially in a culture that increasingly rejects sin itself as a concept. Some Jewish groups have decided to forgo the sticky issue of sin altogether, divesting religious practice of all reference to God, sin and repentance through the uncommon marriage of secular humanism and ancient liturgy.

Although expanding a list of sins and denying sin itself are opposite impulses, both show an evolution of religious practice and prompt questions of how faith can both accommodate culture and transcend it.

The Indian government recently launched a campaign to pay families not to abort their female babies. The high cultural premium placed on male children has created a significant gender imbalance, with 927 girls born for every 1000 boys. The government hopes that placing a value—$3000, to be exact—on having female children will help shift cultural mores that view females as a liability instead of an asset.

The practice of feoticidal sex-selection is commonly associated with developing countries such as China and India, where sons have been overwhelmingly preferred for millennia. Although Western nations have prided themselves on their egalitarian attitudes toward children and frowned on outdated notions such as gender superiority, developed countries are experiencing a cultural shift whereby parents are able to select their child’s sex based purely on personal taste.

According to a recent LA Times article, modern technology is making it possible for people to predict, inexpensively and non-invasively, their babies’ sex. The tests are currently under scrutiny (and litigation, as their results lack the accuracy they purport to deliver), but the motivations driving the market are not. They should be under scrutiny. For some, knowing the gender of their babies is a mere curiosity, but others base their decision to have their baby on the outcome of the test.

This is a new, but not unexpected development in the abortion-on-demand paradigm—a bizarre conflation of capitalism and personal entitlement — whereby consumers can shop for their child’s gender, guarantee the sex of their choice through selective abortion, and then litigate if the product malfunctions. Unlike the consumer who pours steaming coffee in her lap, however, these consumers end up with a human being they didn’t want. Parents might “get over” their disappointment at their child’s gender, but the practice of selective abortion for factors such as gender, or any cosmetic or genetic considerations for that matter, takes “family planning” to a new level.

The Times article abstains from passing judgment on the morality of the over-the-counter gender kits, but a robust debate about the ethics of selective abortion, especially for such seemingly frivolous goals as guaranteeing your child’s gender, is in order.

A recent study of “new generation” anti-depressants, like Prozac and Zoloft, concluded that they have little clinical effect on the majority of depressed patients. The conclusion suggests that since only the severely depressed really benefited from the drugs, their effect may be largely psychological and most people can get better without them.

The advent of the new-generation drugs in the late 80’s saw the rate of depression diagnoses increase 500 to 1000-fold. In 2005, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 118 million of the 2.4 billion drugs prescribed in 2005 were antidepressants, making them the most commonly prescribed drugs in the US.

While some hail depression diagnosis and treatment as forward progress in combating a serious social-health issue, others argue that the increase in diagnoses is directly correlated to the effective marketing of pharmaceutical companies, and the doctors who are sitting pretty in their hip pockets.

There are doubtless people who suffer from crippling, life-threatening depression, and for them, medicine may be the best answer. But just because science enables us to understand what chemicals or genes cause depression, the solution does not lie perforce in drug remedies that dull the effects of those processes.

Clinical psychologist Michael Yapko has argued that the modern social and medical perspective on depression, as merely a brain disease, is too “one-dimensional.” “Striving to convince people they’re diseased doesn’t empower them to actively change their lives in meaningful ways,” wrote Yapko in a September 5, 2007 opinion piece in The Courier Mail. “We can teach better relationship skills, better problem-solving skills and better ways to cope with an increasingly complex world.”

The good news is that many people who think they are clinically depressed are, in fact, not. The question remains as to whether or not people are willing to undertake the work necessary to cope with their sadness instead of just popping “happy pills.” As one doctor put it, “we now have the expectation that we should never experience unhappiness.” If this is true, it might prove a boon for drug companies and doctors alike who profit from our institutionalized aversion to feeling sad.

On February 17, Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia. Four days later, Serbian protesters stormed the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, setting it ablaze as crowds cheered and chanted from the streets below.

While it would be easy to condemn the Serbs and applaud the Kosovars in the same breath, a closer look at history reveals a reality far more nuanced – and far more complex – than mainstream media headlines suggest.

Kosovo has been the center of Serbia’s cultural and religious identity since 1389, when Serbs defended their homeland, and the rest of Christianized Europe, against the invading Ottoman Turks in the Battle of Kosovo. The event marked the first in a 500-year history of Serbian-Christian persecution by the Muslim Turks—a grim history that, in Serbian minds, weighs heavily against the legitimacy of the ethnic Albanian’s claim on rights to the region. For the Serbian people, Kosovo’s independence is tantamount to internationally sanctioned theft of Serbia’s medieval heartland.

Despite their long-documented history of subjugation and suffering at the hands of the Muslims and, later, the Communists, Western governments and media outlets have overwhelmingly portrayed the Serbs as genocidal aggressors while casting the ethnic Albanians as victims of unhinged nationalism and religious prejudice.

To be sure, the Serbian government, under the reign of Slobodan Milosevic, carried out repressive campaigns of “ethnic cleansing” against ethnic-Albanian separatists in the late nineties. In response, the U.S. led a NATO bombing campaign in Serbia to halt Milosevic’s offensive. The action allowed 700,000 ethnic Albanians to return to the area where, under the leadership of the Kosovo Liberation Army, ethnic Albanians launched their own “revenge ethnic cleansing campaign” against Serbs in the city of Pristina.

This storied, muddied history, one into which the U.S. insinuated itself a mere decade ago, demands a more measured approach on the part of western nations. Applauding Kosovo’s independence, which Orthodox-Christian Russia alleges to be illegal, sets a dangerous precedent for European states similarly struggling with separatist movements. Moreover, it does injustice to the epic Serbian struggle for freedom that deserves international recognition as well.