January (Web-only) 2004

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Presbyterian Church of America targets yuppies
Don't be misled by the Washington Times headline, "Church opens just for yuppies." Thirty percent of the congregation at Grace DC aren't urban professionals under the age of 30. But the church has been created to draw this demographic, the Times reports, as part of a Presbyterian Church of America campaign "to begin a network of hip, theologically conservative churches for young urban professionals in the hearts of America's cities."

"It's part of a movement to plant churches in cosmopolitan, world-class cities," Stephen Um, pastor of CityLife Church in Boston, told reporter Julia Duin. "We reach out primarily to post-everything professional urbanites and bohemians."

Such a trend is very encouraging. Most churches, after all, turn away rich young white folks at the door.

More on Dean and religion
Weblog is loath to regularly quote the latest religion comments from the presidential campaigns, but some of these comments are so remarkable that we can't just let them go by, buried in other news dispatches. And it's not like Weblog has some kind of obsession with Dean: it's just that it's his religious comments that are getting quoted; mainly because they're so remarkable.

Take, for instance, Dean's comments on Friday, criticizing President Bush for taking religious values into account in opposing embryonic stem-cell research.

"I think we ought to make scientific decisions, not theological and theoretical decisions," he told a town hall meeting in Rochester, New Hampshire. "I think that what the president did on stem-cell research was based on his religious beliefs, and I think that is wrong."

Several news outlets noted that Bush didn't make his decision to limit embryonic stem-cell research ...