Religious Relations

As the calendar goes, December tends to be a winning month for God. Christians celebrate the birth of Christ. Jews mark the story of Hanukkah. Muslims this year will observe the start of Al-Hijra, the Islamic New Year. And the American Humanist Assn. has decided to join the festivities with an alternative celebration in mind. The group, consisting of atheists and others who say they embrace reason over religion, has launched a national godless holiday campaign, with ads appearing inside or on 250 buses in five U.S. cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco starting today.

In a sign of latent fears of Islamic influence in Switzerland, voters on Sunday approved a constitutional ban on the construction of minarets on Muslim places of worship. There are only four minarets atop mosques in the small Alpine country, but the two right-wing parties that sponsored the referendum cast it as a political question about the assimilation of Muslims into Swiss life. The minaret "is a political symbol against integration; a symbol more of segregation, and first of all, a symbol to try to introduce Sharia law parallel to Swiss rights," Ulrich Schluer said in a telephone interview.

Jihad Turk -- clean-shaven and youthful -- is telling an interfaith audience that the prophet Muhammad traces his lineage to Abraham, the biblical patriarch. Turk explains to the crowd of mostly Christians and Jews that Muslims also revere Jesus and Moses as prophets, and that Islam cherishes life. But some in the Pepperdine University audience are skeptical. One man wants to know why so many Muslims are "willing with perfect ease to kill," as he puts it, drawing brief applause.

The challah was blessed, the Manischewitz wine was poured, the candles were lighted. It could have been any Shabbat dinner in Los Angeles, were it not for the fact that it took place midweek and the room was full of Catholic schoolteachers. The 34 teachers were participants in Bearing Witness, a seminar designed for educators in Catholic schools learning to teach about anti-Semitism and the history of the relationship between Jews and Catholics. Created in 1996 by the Anti-Defamation League, the seminars are now conducted across the United States.

The split over gay clerics within the country's largest Lutheran denomination has prompted a conservative faction to begin forming a new Lutheran church body separate from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Leaders of Lutheran CORE, or Coalition for Renewal, said Wednesday that a working group would immediately begin drafting a constitution and taking other steps to form the denomination, with hopes to have it off the ground by August. "There are many people within the ELCA who are very unhappy with what has happened," said the Rev. Paull Spring, chairman of Lutheran CORE and a retired ELCA bishop from State College, Pa. At its annual convention in Minneapolis in August, ELCA delegates voted to lift a ban that had prohibited sexually active gay and lesbian pastors from serving as clerics.

For years, on the anniversary of his wife's death in 2000, Peter Underwood sought the solace of the tiny hillside cemetery not far from this city's bustling downtown. He laid flowers at her grave site and paid his respects to four generations of his family who are buried here -- mostly Western missionaries who first arrived in Korea more than a century ago. There's even a plot for Underwood himself. But the 54-year-old consultant no longer visits this sanctuary. He says he feels harassed here -- shadowed by the new stewards of a cemetery that offers a hallowed history lesson in Korea's expatriate past.

The marquee outside St. Luke's Anglican Church in La Crescenta was a bit sardonic in its scripture from the Book of Hebrews: "You joyfully accepted confiscation of your property." That was the message delivered Sunday by the Rev. Rob Holman, in his last sermon at the Foothill Boulevard church that has been entangled in a legal dispute with the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. "Next Sunday, as many of you know, we will be worshiping in a different building," Holman said. "All because we have chosen to stand for the gospel and the authority of God's word over our lives."

The people of St. Luke's Anglican Church have called their La Crescenta parish home for 85 years. Generations of families have grown up within its historic stone walls. On Sunday, Father Rob Holman will deliver his final sermon there, an epitaph to a bruising legal fight the congregation waged and lost to practice its conservative brand of Christian theology and hold on to the church. On Monday, St. Luke's leaders will hand over its keys to the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

Thousands of Muslims, prostrating themselves in prayer, gathered just feet from the Capitol on Friday for "A Day of Islamic Unity," an event intended to showcase what organizers called the "peace, beauty and solidarity" of Islam. Hassen Abdellah, a lawyer and president of the Dar-ul-Islam Mosque in Elizabeth, N.J., said he was inspired to organize the event by President Obama's attempt to reach out to Muslims in his inaugural address. "We should also extend our hand," Abdellah said.

It's a hot, sticky Friday night in one of Tel Aviv's swankiest neighborhoods and a battle over the community's soul is about to erupt. On one side is a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews, in black coats and hats, celebrating the Sabbath by singing, praying and drinking wine in a public courtyard. Attracted by the revelry, and the wine, about two dozen teenagers and young men join in.