Year end lists and reflections

USA today has a year in review article about religion for 2009.

You can vote on the biggest religion newsmaker of 2009.
Your choices are

• Barack Obama
• Rick Warren
• Cardinal Francis George
• Pope Benedict XVI
• Archbishop Robert Duncan

Am I alone in thinking that "Abp" Duncan is a little out of his league?

Compare the USA Today version to the evangelical focus of the Top Ten List from Christianity Today.

There's also an overview of the whole decade (do we call it the oughts? the naughts? the zeros?). Sex, scandal, and Rick Warren all make the cut.

Another Decade Review is at ReligionDispatches:

Many neo-traditional religious persons may still dream of some individual evangelical successes, but the whole orientation of religion worldwide has shifted in the face of the growing awareness of the necessity of confronting pluralism as a permanent state of cultural affairs. When current religious forms turn violent, whom and what they attack are precisely those religious “others” whom they have no real hope or expectation of converting. So they attack and kill instead.

And, on the same lines over at the Washington Post, Katharine Henderson writes "On Faith"

Looking ahead to 2010, God-given, God-intended difference is the biggest challenge we in America face as we determine our future and that of our globe. The key political, social and theological questions of our day are: How will we welcome the stranger? How will we love the neighbor as ourselves? How will we engage the differences that confound us and bring us to the brink of warfare in our neighborhoods, schools, communities, political parties and nations?

Meanwhile, hope you all have a happy New Year. Drive carefully and stay warm!