Friday News Roundup for June 19th

On Twitter, people started changing their icons to green to show solidarity with Iranian voters who used social media to bypass state censorship. Slate explains why the color green is so important to Muslims.

Here’s a nice story from the New York Times about a 13-year-old boy who brought his parents back to church.

Ryan finds the minister’s sermons “pretty interesting.” The coffees afterward are “pretty average,” he said. “We sit around and talk to a few people, talk to the priest a little bit.” When asked if he knows why his dad stopped going to church, Ryan said, “He probably just one day was watching a Mets game, said ‘I don’t want to go to church’ and just stopped going.”

Recessions do not increase church attendance. So says The Economist and the Gallup poll.

Religion writer Bill Tammeus takes a look at the results of the latest round of National Congregations Study. 75 members is the average sized congregation in America while most people who attend church find themselves in congregations averaging in size of about 400. (link)

The LA Times offers an obit of Thomas Berry, a leading voice on religion and the environment, who died on June 1, at age 94.

A sort of G-8 summit for religious leaders was held at Rome.  (via Reuters)

Apart from the Catholic hosts, the participants including high-level Muslims, Protestants, Orthodox, Hindus, Anglicans, Zoroastrians, Jews, Shintoists and Buddhists.

PBS board grandfathers in current religious programs but bans any new “sectarian” programming.  (via Washington Post)

Warren Cole Smith, an evangelical journalist and longtime editor of The Charlotte World argues that many, if not most, evangelical churches have lost their way. He blasts an over emphasis on A/V equipment, contemporary music, and fads like Twittering from the pews. (via the Charlotte Observer)

Christian Conservatives fight the expansion of hate crimes law writes Tiffany Stanley of the Religion News Service.