Overseas Mormon missionaries won’t count. Mormon missionaries serving abroad will not be counted in the 2010 U.S. census, despite the hopes of Utah congressmen that the missionaries would be included, the Census Bureau said. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, has led efforts by fellow members of Congress from the state dominated by Mormons to get missionaries included in the count. They have argued that if missionaries were included in the 2000 census, the state would have received a fourth seat in the House of Representatives. Instead, that seat went to North Carolina. “Past experiments, including in 1960 and 1970, have demonstrated the difficulty of getting anywhere near a complete and accurate count of private citizens living overseas,” said Shelly Lowe, a spokeswoman for the Census Bureau.
German court to weigh students’ access to prayer. A Muslim student’s right to interrupt the school day for regular prayers will be decided by a Berlin court later this month. According to a court press release, the case involves a 16-year-old student at a university-track high school in central Berlin who asked for space and time to be set aside for regular prayers, as prescribed by his faith. The court has already permitted at least one prayer break a day, on a temporary basis. The point of the Sept. 29 hearing is to determine whether the right to interrupt the school day for prayers should be granted permanently, which could set a precedent. The school has objected to the permission, arguing that it could not make special religious dispensations for students since government facilities must not provide special favors to any one group. But, in a 2008 ruling, the court argued that religious expression is a fundamental right and said there was no reason the school could not manage its curriculum to allow time for the prayers.
Pope seeks artists’ help in rebuilding ‘alliance.’ Pope Benedict XVI will receive hundreds of prominent artists from around the world at the Vatican this November in an effort to restore a historic “alliance” between the church and the arts. The meeting, plans for which were announced at a Vatican press conference on Sept. 10, will take place on Nov. 21 in the Sistine Chapel. Some 480 prominent figures from fields including painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, music, cinema, theater and dance have been invited to hear musical performances and a lecture by the pope. So far, 100 invitees have already responded, 76 positively, the Vatican announced. Among the confirmed guests are the movie director Giuseppe Tornatore and the composer Ennio Morricone, both Italians and Oscar winners, and the American theater director Robert Wilson. The deadline to RSVP is Sept. 30. The meeting will mark the 45th anniversary of a similar encounter hosted by Pope Paul VI, also in the Sistine Chapel, and the 10th anniversary of a “Letter to Artists” by Pope John Paul II. Benedict has made reasserting the Christian roots of Western culture an important theme of his papacy, and addressed the topic in a lecture to French intellectual leaders in Paris in September of last year.
Compiled from Religion News Service