September (Web-only) 2000

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As banks, post offices, and other community buildings close throughout the English countryside, Church of England officials are encouraging thousands of churches to house automatic teller machines (ATMs). The move, they say, will help to make churches into the community centers (make that centres) they once were. Not everyone is pleased with the idea. "It's an appalling idea, madness," Lord St. John of Fawsley, chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, tells The Telegraph newspaper. "They should go back and read St Matthew's Gospel, chapter 21, verse 12. The interiors of churches are sacred places. I don't mind them being used for appropriate events such as concerts, but certainly not cash machines. It is another symptom of our money-dominated culture."

Ever since the Vatican released a statement reasserting itself as the one true church, journalists have been comparing it. Most have compared it to another recent statement by the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies. But The New York Times' Gustav Niebuhr reaches all the way back to August to compare Dominus Iesus (the Vatican's document) to the Amsterdam Declaration, which came out of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's Amsterdam 2000 conference of preaching evangelists. "The recent statements by the Vatican and the evangelists' meeting strongly suggest that such an approach is a long way from displacing Christianity's view of its exclusive claim to salvation," Niebuhr concludes. "Instead, as the world grows smaller and as more and more people have increasing contact with those of other faiths, the debate over how to respond to religious ...