Religious Education

As many as 20,000 Catholic educators, priests, sisters and lay leaders are expected to attend the annual Los Angeles Religious Education Congress next weekend--the largest yearly event of its kind in Catholicism. The three-day congress starting Friday at the Anaheim Convention Center registered 20,000 participants from around the country each of the last two years. Another 10,000 Catholic students are expected to attend the annual Youth Day in the center's arena Thursday.

On a recent Sunday in a classroom at the Sikh temple in Pacoima, nine young students sat scattered across four pews, an incongruous reminder of a time the building was used by a church. As the teacher, Pami Kaur, read aloud a series of words in Punjabi, the mainly 7- to 9-year-old students slowly repeated them, sounding each one out before writing it down. Some balanced notebooks on their laps as others knelt, using the pews as desks. " Kireh , I said, kireh ," said Kaur, repeating a word that means "ant," as she looked over one little girl's notebook.

Saying that traffic safety would be jeopardized, the City Council has rejected a Christian education group's request to put a trailer on Featherhill Drive. The City Council voted unanimously at its March 28 meeting to reject the request. "This is definitely not a religious issue," Councilman Bob Bell said. "It's a safety issue and property rights issue."

Fans are fed up Re "Ballpark violence," Editorial, April 7 The Times encourages fans not to tolerate rowdiness at Dodger Stadium. As a Dodgers fan who has attended many games, I find that the bad behavior usually stems from individuals who have consumed a few too many beers. At the very least they interfere with my enjoyment of the game. The Times says it is not suggesting that the stadium go dry. I am. There are plenty of soft drinks and water available. I am an 84-year-old man, and I am not about to confront several drunk individuals who are rowdy.

Along with the usual workshops on "Biblical Child Training" and "Defending the Christian Faith Against Evolutionary Humanism," the annual Christian Home Educators Convention this weekend will offer help to seemingly out-of-place visitors--secular learners. Home schooling, once the province of parents opposed to scholastic restrictions or to teaching evolution, increasingly is drawing parents who simply believe traditional schools are failing their children.

"Extremist" underground Islamic schools are drawing more than 300,000 young students across Yemen, the country's prime minister said. Prime Minister Abdul-Kadir Ba Jamal warned that the religious education promoting the ideas of Wahhabism, a strict interpretation of Islam, "will bring a disaster to Yemen and this generation." He promised to eliminate the schools, which he estimated numbered about 4,000 and drew about 330,000 students. "We are not against the religious education ...

The Darul Uloom Haqqania campus is a sprawling labyrinth of ashen buildings where young men in black beards and white skullcaps spend their days and nights on hard concrete floors learning all 77,701 words of the Koran. Some people call it the University of Jihad. The fact that some of Haqqania's graduates go on to become Taliban fighters and suicide bombers isn't the school's concern, said Syed Yousef Shah, the head of the 3,000- student madrasa, or Islamic seminary.

Police using batons, dogs and water cannons broke up a protest by thousands of Islamists marching through Turkey's capital, Ankara, to challenge Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz's effort to curtail religious education. Witnesses said police repeatedly charged demonstrators outside the Education Ministry after hours of protests. The Anatolian news agency said 11 people were hospitalized. Estimates of the crowd size ranged from 6,000 to 15,000.

About 20,000 people from six countries are expected to attend an annual three-day religious education congress next month at the Anaheim Convention Center. "Imaging Love: Empowering Lives" is the largest catechetical event to be held each year in the world, said congress coordinator Adrian Whitaker. Hundreds of priests and bishops will welcome delegates from the United States, Canada, Poland, Japan, Australia and Jamaica at this year's gathering, which begins Feb. 20.

Though Americans grow up glued to the television screen, scholars in religious education generally have ignored how much TV's enormous influence hampers efforts to teach religious subjects to children or adults at churches, synagogues and religious schools, says an expert in the field. "We have pretended that it's peripheral to our concerns because we are interested in the verbal and the literary"--lectures and books--said Charles F.

Los Angeles City Council members are known for keeping a finger on the pulse of constituents, sorting out who are political friends and who are not. Los Angeles City Councilman Jose Huizar may have taken that practice into new territory by assigning his City Hall staff to prepare lists that graded civic leaders numerically on their level of support for him, according to three former Huizar employees. Those lists, drafted during his first five years as a councilman, ranked dozens of people on their support for Huizar and influence in the 14th City Council district.

The Darul Uloom Haqqania campus is a sprawling labyrinth of ashen buildings where young men in black beards and white skullcaps spend their days and nights on hard concrete floors learning all 77,701 words of the Koran. Some people call it the University of Jihad. The fact that some of Haqqania's graduates go on to become Taliban fighters and suicide bombers isn't the school's concern, said Syed Yousef Shah, the head of the 3,000- student madrasa, or Islamic seminary.

Leaders of a Jewish seminary in Los Angeles are arguing against a proposal by its parent organization that could lead to the closure of the campus as part of a larger financial restructuring. The head of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion has raised the possibility of closing two of its three U.S. campuses. The three are in Los Angeles, Cincinnati and New York.

He was a boy in the mosques of Alexandria when the Muslim Brotherhood took him into its fold, inviting him to soccer matches and trips to the seaside. The brothers told Mustafa Naggar to be true to God and find a mission in life. He has done that. But the spiritual evolution and political ambitions of the 28-year-old dentist have put him at the center of a struggle between conservatives and reformers that may reshape Egypt's strongest opposition voice.

The University of California did not violate students' freedom of expression and religion when it rejected some classes at a Riverside-area Christian school from counting toward UC admission, a Los Angeles federal judge has ruled.

Today they would learn about drawing, Russian Orthodox saints and God. The 7-year-olds sat straight at their desks, sun pouring through lace curtains and cherry trees blooming in the fields beyond. The teacher set a birch branch before the children and told them it was fragile and unique, just like their souls. "If you think you can't draw properly, who will help you?" she asked. "God will help us," a boy called out. "Yes, God will guide your hand, so be confident, have faith."

Although Americans grow up glued to the television screen, scholars in religious education generally have ignored how much TV's enormous influence hampers efforts to teach religious subjects at churches, synagogues and religious schools, said an expert in the field. "We have pretended that it's peripheral to our concerns because we are interested in the verbal and the literary"--lectures and books--said Charles F.

Any examination of the sexual abuse crisis afflicting the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles leads inevitably to a bell-towered campus in the rolling hills of Camarillo: St. John's Seminary. The 66-year-old institution has trained hundreds of clerics for the archdiocese and smaller jurisdictions across Southern California and beyond. It is the alma mater of Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, Diocese of Orange Bishop Tod Brown and other prominent prelates.

The bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies mark Jewish children's public passage into a new identity as people responsible for their actions and for living in accordance with their faith. What about autistic children, however, whose identities seem locked away inside them? How can they profess themselves responsible members of a community?

The major seminary and flagship institution of Conservative Judaism said in New York that it would start accepting openly gay and lesbian students, after scholars who interpret Jewish law for the movement voted to allow it. Arnold Eisen, the incoming chancellor for the Jewish Theological Seminary, said the decision was made after extensive discussion with faculty and students, a survey on views of the issue within the movement and a meeting of the school's trustees.