Seminaries

In a seminary class in Ohio, students discuss Superman comics. In another in Oklahoma, they view films such as "Star Wars" or "Blade Runner." And in Denver, students clip out magazine ads to be used as a basis for discussions. Such activities, commonplace in college and university courses in popular culture or mass communications, are increasingly turning up in theology courses in seminaries around the country.

Robert Van Handel remembered the boy as about 9 years old, tan, effeminate. "Now that I think back on it, he was probably the most beautiful child that I molested," Van Handel wrote to a therapist. Van Handel, a priest who ran a boys choir in Santa Barbara, said he coaxed the boy into posing for nude photographs. He described the experience as "stimulating" in a graphic account of improprieties he said he carried out at a Franciscan boarding school there. For decades, the now-shuttered St. Anthony's Seminary was awash in dark secrets.

The eight seminaries of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America face a financial crisis, says the Rev. Roger W. Fjeld, president of Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa. He told a meeting here that the seminaries are working as a "network" to increase endowments and take other steps to overcome the crisis and keep the seminaries vital.

Pakistani police rescued about 68 students from an Islamic seminary in Karachi, several of whom were reportedly chained in a basement, denied food and pressured to join the Taliban, officials said Tuesday. It wasn't immediately clear why the students, some as young as 12 and some in their 40s, were subjected to such treatment. But police, who conducted the raid late Monday after a tip from neighbors, told local news media that some of the students were drug addicts sent there by parents or other relatives unaware of the horrible conditions.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles is studying plans to close its four-year undergraduate college program for future priests at St. John's Seminary in Camarillo by next fall. In three years, the archdiocese may consider moving the entire seminary to or near Loyola Marymount University in the Westchester area of Los Angeles. Cardinal Roger M. Mahony said Friday that he and the seminary board of directors will decide in January whether to shut down the undergraduate program at St.

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, embroiled in a two-year dispute between faculty and a fundamentalist-dominated administration, has been placed "on warning" by an accrediting agency. The Southern Assn. of Colleges and Schools says the Wake Forest, N.C., seminary must correct various deficiencies within two years or face further measures.

Trustees of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary have approved new faculty hiring guidelines that were worked out in a compromise with faculty after adoption of a more restrictive employment policy last fall. At their September, 1990, meeting, the trustees voted to use criteria established in a 1986 report of the Southern Baptist Peace Committee as conditions for the hiring, promotion or granting of tenure to members of the faculty.

Underscoring the prominence of Judaism on the West Coast, a leading New York-based organization for Conservative Judaism has for the first time elected a Los Angeles rabbinical seminary as a permanent member. The Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies of the University of Judaism, which ordained its first graduates last May, became a full member this month of the Leadership Council of Conservative Judaism.

A San Fernando Valley megachurch will launch a seminary next year that will be the only theological school on the West Coast for the steadily growing charismatic-Pentecostal movement. The Rev. Jack Hayford, pastor of the 8,900-member Church on the Way and a nationally known figure in conservative Christian circles, said the seminary will open in September 1998 in an existing five-story education building on the church's west campus.

After an extended shutdown during a ruinous civil war, Liberia Baptist Theological Seminary in Monrovia has been reopened with 95 students, according to the Southern Baptist Convention press service. The campus was closed when the war began in 1990. Peacekeeping troops from Ghana lived there and protected it from looters. The school offered classes at a temporary location between 1993 and 1996. Liberia and China are the oldest mission fields of the U.S.

Leaders of the Claremont School of Theology will announce Monday the gift of $40 million from an Arizona couple to help expand the Christian divinity institution into a university that will include training for Jewish and Muslim clergy. The donation from David Lincoln, a Claremont trustee, and his wife, Joan, is the largest ever to the 126-year-old theology school, which enrolls about 240 students in master's and doctorate programs in religion and counseling. The couple also gave $10 million to the school last year.

The United Methodist Church has lifted sanctions against the Claremont School of Theology, which risked breaking its longstanding ties with the church when it announced plans earlier this year to begin training Muslim imams and Jewish rabbis in addition to Christian pastors. In a terse statement Friday, the United Methodist University Senate announced that it had rescinded a public warning and restored funding to the school, which will remain affiliated with the church. The senate oversees all Methodist-affiliated seminaries.

In a bow to the growing diversity of America's religious landscape, the Claremont School of Theology, a Christian institution with long ties to the Methodist Church, will add clerical training for Muslims and Jews to its curriculum this fall, to become, in a sense, the first truly multi-faith American seminary. The transition, which is being formally announced Wednesday, upends centuries of tradition in which seminaries have hewn not just to single faiths but often to single denominations within those faiths.

Loosely tied to a rivalry that often splits loyalties in the Southland, it is a decades-old tradition celebrating fraternity, faith, sports and a shared experience. And it started, its organizer notes, with a prank -- an act of deception by a group of would-be Catholic priests. Basketball, it seems, pulled them from the righteous path. It was February 1971 and, like thousands of other hoops-loving Southern Californians, some sports-minded students at St. John's Seminary College in Camarillo were galvanized by a midseason showdown between unbeaten USC and once-beaten UCLA, the four-time defending national champion.

Tony Seminary never expected to experience Pasadena in January after enduring Boise in September. Yet there the Oregon football fan was Friday afternoon at the Rose Bowl, a T-shirt with quarterback Jeremiah Masoli's No. 8 on his back and a plastic duck call draped from his neck. "To be here today from that," Seminary said, referring to the Ducks' 19-8 loss to Boise State in their season opener, "I would have never guessed." Seminary was so disgusted with the Ducks' listless play against the Broncos -- not to mention the infamous postgame punch by running back LeGarrette Blount -- that he e-mailed Oregon Coach Chip Kelly and jokingly attached an invoice for his travel expenses.

Political turmoil built Sunday over the burning of an image of Iran's revolutionary founder, which was aired, in a controversial move, on state television. Accusations that the incident was carried out by anti-government demonstrators sparked protests as well as threats against reformist leaders. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday said reformist politicians and anti-government demonstrators had defiled the image of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, during National Students Day protests last week.

A papal emissary investigating suspected homosexuality and child pornography among student priests shut down the Austrian seminary at the center of the scandal, acknowledging "very painful" revelations of sexual misconduct. Bishop Klaus Kung was looking into allegations that seminarians were hoarding child pornography and had taken photos showing them fondling one another. Kung did not say how long the seminary in the city of St. Poelten would remain closed.

The Rev. Paige Paterson, new president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, says he will ride out the storm over the school's continuing probation. "Look, when you're in a rodeo, trying to stay on the bucking back of several hundred pounds of irritated bull, which sports a healthy disdain for all human fellowship, and the pickup men don't arrive on time, you don't just fall off and then shoot the animal.

When a foot-long chunk of water-damaged plaster fell from the domed sanctuary ceiling at Wilshire Boulevard Temple last year, shattering in front of the pulpit below, the room was quickly cordoned off. Had the incident last October occurred during Saturday Shabbat services instead of three days earlier, the story might have been different. "Fortunately, it happened when the sanctuary was empty," Rabbi Steven Leder said. The historic synagogue already had launched a major building program that included the restoration of the 1929 edifice with its distinctive sanctuary and Moorish dome.

This may come as a surprise to anyone who has seen her villainous ways on reality TV: Omarosa is entering an Ohio seminary to study for the ministry. Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, known for her in-your-face antics on "The Apprentice" and other reality shows, is scheduled to begin her studies at United Theological Seminary in Dayton on Monday. Ivan Hicks, the school's associate dean for African American studies, said Omarosa will spend about two years pursuing a doctor of ministry degree.