When she was a child, Robin Chambers recalls her Catholic friends giving up things for Lent. "My girlfriends and I used to say we would give up candy, too, but we never kept it. Protestants typically did not do that," said Chambers, of Iowa City, who is a lifelong Presbyterian. Today, though, many American Protestants do fast, receive ashes and attend Lenten services. They also have taken up Lent's 40-day tra-dition of self-denial and spiritual...
By Sarah Overstreet There's no way I can write this and not feel sad. I grew up with Catholic friends, have close Catholic friends now - just as I have friends in the Assemblies of God and other churches - and I remember how I felt when my AG friends felt they stood under the dark umbrella cast by Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker during their 1980s scandals.When there was a media circus down the street from the News-Leader on Boonville Avenue at the world headquarters of the...
BELFAST, Northern Ireland - Gunmen trying to stir up hatred with Northern Ireland's Catholic community promised more bloodshed Monday after killing a Protestant teen-ager standing with his Catholic friends.Police and politicians said Gavin Brett's killers wrongly assumed the 18-year-old, like the others outside a sports club late Sunday, was Catholic.Such killings were routine in Northern Ireland before paramilitary cease-fires took root in the mid-1990s. Now,...
This unhappy juxtaposition of terms has upset my Catholic friends, some of whom have complained to me at length for seeming to exclude them from the ranks of the ''saved.'' One Northfield friend noted bitterly that he has been a practicing Catholic since baptism -- only to discover now, through my clumsy verbiage, that he may, in fact, not have been living under the divine protection of Christianity.Words, words. Let me eat crow.My...