Mark Twain once said that the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug. I thought of Twain’s addage as I read an article by the Washington Times’ Julia Duin about Joshua DuBois, the 26-year-old Obama campaign staffer who has been selected to run the president’s office for faith-based outreach.

DuBois, it’s been widely reported, is a former Assemblies of God minister. But that’s news to Juleen Turnage, spokeswoman for the 2.9 million member Assemblies of God denomination, based in Springfield, Mo.

“We’ve never heard from him,” Turnage told Duin.
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A former aide to President Bush, who resigned after being caught plagiarizing, has been hired by Focus on the Family, Christianity Today’s Sarah Pulliam reports.

A Pew Research Center survey asked Americans which of the nation’s 30 largest cities they’d like to live in.

Denver finished first. Detroit finished last. Only 8 percent of Americans said they’d like to live in metropolitan Detroit.

Read this extraordinary and horrifying story by Charlie LeDuff of the Detroit News and you’ll understand a little better why the Motor City is at the bottom of the list.
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Pennsylvania congregations offer groundhog hospitality.
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The Catholic Church has agreed to settlements totaling more than $2 billion to resolve allegations of child sex abuse. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that federal investigators have turned their sights on the Catholic diocese of Los Angeles. They’re trying to determine if high church officials covered up evidence of abuse.

“No senior Catholic Church officials have been criminally charged in the national scandal,” the Wall Street Journal notes.

ABC News has posted a nightmare of a story on its website.

A CIA station chief is accused of raping Muslim women and the U.S. Justice Department is investigating the allegations, ABC News reports. There apparently is a videotape of at least one of the assaults, too, ABC reports.

Millions around the world will be watching to see how the case is handled. “It has the potential to be quite explosive if it’s not handled well by the United States government,” says Isobel Coleman, a Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow who spoke to ABC News. “This isn’t the type of thing that’s going to be easily pushed under the carpet,” she told ABC.

ABC Evening News with Charlie Gibson will be worth watching tonight.

The folks at Gallup have come up with a list of the nation’s most and least religious states.

Southern states are at the top of the list. New England states are at the bottom. Mississippi and Vermont are at the two ends of the spectrum. Arkansas is sixth tied for fifth.

An Episcopal diocese in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is preparing to elect an “ordained” Zen Buddhist as its bishop.

The Rev. George Conger has the details in The Living Church. StandFirminFaith.Com also is writing extensively about the development.

Kevin “Genpo” Thew Forrester is the only nominee for “Bishop/Ministry Provider” in the Diocese of Northern Michigan, the diocese’s website reports.

A special diocesan convention is set for Feb. 21 to choose a new bishop.

Genpo means “Way of Universal Wisdom”, Forrester explained in an article in the diocesan newsletter, soon after he changed his name and accepted lay ordination as a Zen Buddhist. You can read all about it on page C.

A universalist, Forrester has unorthodox views about some traditional doctrinal matters, including sin. In the diocesan newsletter, he writes: “Sin has little, if anything, to do with being bad. It has everything to do, as far as I can tell, with being blind to our own goodness.”

Ironically, Forrester’s selection to serve as a Zen Buddhist Episcopal bishop comes shortly after a Seattle Muslim Episcopal priest was punished for claiming to be a follower of both Christianity and Islam.

It will be interesting to see whether the national church will give its assent to Forrester, assuming Michiganders give him the nod. It will also be interesting to see how Anglican archbishops around the world respond to this development.

The Diocese of Northern Michigan is the third smallest in the Episcopal Church [just ahead of the diocese of Micronesia and the Navajo Missions diocese, according to the denomination’s statistics. On a typical Sunday, 690 Episcopalians attend services diocese-wide.

Membership in the diocese dropped 31.7 percent over the past decade.

Jesus was mentioned a lot during the Obama inauguration — and not just in English. Southern Baptist Rick Warren, as I recall, translated the name of Jesus into Hebrew, Arabic and Spanish so that Jews, Arabs and Latinos wouldn’t feel left out.

Meanwhile, south of the Equator, Jesus starred last week in one of the weirdest campaign commercials I’ve ever seen.

The infamous cult leader’s aunt is suspected, AP reports.

A Holocaust-denying excommunicated Roman Catholic bishop has been un-excommunicated by the Vatican. Click here for more.

A year ago, Oral Roberts University was on the ropes. Now, Vanguard University that is in trouble.

The similarities are striking. ORU’s president quit in November, after disclosing that the school was $52 million in debt.

At Vanguard, top school officials stepped down after disclosing a debt of $42 million.

Both schools are from the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement [ORU was started by a faith-healing televangelist, Vanguard belonged to the Southern California district of the Assemblies of God.]

ORU got a massive bailout from an Oklahoma billionaire, who demanded that the school change its fiscally-irresponsible ways. Finding a similar savior for Vanguard, in this economic climate, could be a real challenge.

“Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he’s been robbed. The fact is that most putts don’t drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration; most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is like an old time rail journey… delays, side tracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.”

Gordon B. Hinckley

This just in: the Arkansas legislature has voted to honor Common Sense author Thomas Paine, despite fears that Paine may have been an atheist. Paine, a Revolutionary War propagandist, penned the words: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” But his comments on religion alienated some Americans, then and now.

Ark. House passes bill honoring founding father

By JILL ZEMAN
Associated Press Writer
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — The Arkansas Legislature’s biggest backer of Thomas Paine says she still hasn’t convinced all her colleagues that the 18th century writer wasn’t an atheist.
But Rep. Lindsley Smith, D-Fayetteville, did persuade a majority of them to vote for her bill that recognizes Jan. 29 as Thomas Paine Day in Arkansas.
That’s a big change from two years ago, when Smith’s bill was derailed over concerns about Paine’s writings on Christianity.
“I guess just fewer voted against him because of religious objections,” Smith said after the bill passed Thursday. “I mean, people were still saying, ’I didn’t like what he said about God.’ I heard ’atheist’ several times this morning, which isn’t true.”
The bill was approved in the House — with no debate — on a 66-21 vote, with 10 members not voting and 3 voting present.
If approved by the Senate and signed by the governor, Thomas Paine Day wouldn’t be a legal holiday. Instead, it would join 11 other commemorative days — including General Douglas MacArthur Day on Jan. 26, Arkansas Bird Day on April 26 and Jefferson Davis’ Birthday on June 3.
Thomas Paine is best known for his January 1776 pamphlet, “Common Sense,” which urged American independence from England. Smith said that, since her bill failed in 2007, she’s heard from Paine fans from around the globe.
“The idea of the day is because he’s been so forgotten,” Smith said. “And more people have learned about Paine. In the last two years I’ve heard from so many people. I would get handwritten letters from all over.”
Smith said she’s optimistic about her bill’s chances in the Senate, where it will be heard first by the State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“I trust the strength of Paine. I really do,” Smith said. “I know that probably sounds corny, but I think people are seeing how valuable he was to us, and how we would not be what we were, if not for him.”
But not all members were convinced that Arkansas should be setting aside a day for Paine.
“If you study his life, you can see that he had a bias against religion,” said Rep. Donna Hutchinson, R-Bella Vista, who voted against the bill. “He was a great man and served his purpose, but he wasn’t in the mainstream in our founding fathers.”

Question of the day: Why is this guy still a monsignor?

By BRIAN SKOLOFF
Associated Press Writer
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — One of two Florida priests accused of embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from their church pleaded guilty Wednesday, the same day jury selection was set to begin in the case.

Monsignor John Skehan, 81, pleaded guilty to bilking parishioners at St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church in Delray Beach for years. Skehan, who had been at the church 40 years, had been accused of taking $370,000 between 2001 and 2006, the timeframe covered by the statute of limitations. Church auditors, however, believe the figure stolen over the years was in the millions.

He and the Rev. Francis Guinan had been charged with stealing to fund lavish lifestyles in what authorities say could be one of the biggest embezzlement cases to hit the U.S. Catholic Church. Prosecutors say the priests plucked cash from the offering plate and spent it on upscale homes, gambling trips to Las Vegas with a mistress, even a $275,000 rare coin collection.

“Father Skehan accepted responsibility for his actions by virtue of his guilty plea,” his attorney, Scott Richardson, said outside court. “It’s been extraordinarily difficult for him from the beginning.”

Sentencing for Skehan is set for March 20. Richardson said he could receive up to 31 years in prison or as little as probation, and was hoping for leniency from the judge.

Guinan’s trial was delayed until Feb. 18. Guinan, who has pleaded not guilty, is accused of stealing $488,000 during the 19 months after he became pastor in September 2003.

His attorney, Richard Barlow, said he would prove Guinan, 66, did nothing wrong, and that Skehan’s plea does not affect his case.

“The fact that they were both priests and were at the same church doesn’t make my guy guilty,” Barlow said, adding that he would prove Guinan spent the money on church business.

He said most of the money the state accuses Guinan of stealing was spent on cash payments to church employees.

“It’s a normal thing to do in the Catholic church, make cash payments,” Barlow said. “We certainly can show that the state’s allegation is not correct.”

Authorities said Guinan had an “intimate relationship” with a former bookkeeper at a church where he’d previously worked and paid her credit card bills and her child’s school tuition with money that wasn’t recorded on the church books. They also said she accompanied the priest on vacations.

An anonymous parishioner tipped prosecutors in April 2005, prompting police to contact the church, which was already conducting its own investigation into alleged improprieties.

Guinan begged the church to stop the audit, writing in an impassioned letter released by prosecutors that priests “devote their lives to the church with little thought for personal gain. They are generous, charitable and compassionate. They have earned and deserve trust, at least until proven otherwise … May I be so crude as to ask you to ’call off the dogs.”’

Prosecutors did not immediately return a telephone message Wednesday.