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Today's Top Five

1. West calls for Rahman's freedom as Afghan clerics call for death
There are some signs of hope for Afghan Christian convert Abdul Rahman. German chancellor Angela Merkel says Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai personally assured her that Rahman would not be executed. And unnamed "senior Afghan government officials" are saying he could be released soon. It looks like the trial will take place on Saturday. (We won't be able to update until Monday.) If he's freed but kept in Afghanistan, he's as good as dead. The New York Times reports that Friday prayers at mosques around the country focused on why Rahman should be killed—if not by the government, then by the faithful. It's heartening to see so many newspaper editorials supporting Rahman's case, and so many news outlets keeping a close eye. Perhaps this case could mark the beginning of increased media attention to religious freedom cases worldwide.

2. Former First Things editor Damon Linker attacks Neuhaus
Richard John Neuhaus's new book, Catholic Matters, is a mere 260 pages. The New Republic's review of the book, written by the former editor of Neuhaus's First Things journal, seems almost as long. Damon Linker's 8,952-word "review"—mostly about Neuhaus and very little about Catholic Matters—seems more a promotion of Linker's forthcoming book, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege than a book review. But Neuhaus fans and foes won't care. They'll just be amazed that the article goes with the byline. The article is long and detailed—CT readers might be interested in Linker's suggestions that Neuhaus is ultimately no friend of evangelical Protestants—but the final paragraph captures the gist:

That is the America toward which Richard John Neuhaus wishes to lead us—an America in which eschatological panic is deliberately channeled into public life, in which moral and theological absolutists demonize the country's political institutions and make nonnegotiable public demands under the threat of sacralized revolutionary violence, in which citizens flee from the inner obligations of freedom and long to subordinate themselves to ecclesiastical authority, and in which traditionalist Christianity thoroughly dominates the nation's public life. All of which should serve as a potent reminder—as if, in an age marked by the bloody rise of theologically inspired politics in the Islamic world, we needed a reminder—that the strict separation of politics and religion is a rare, precious, and fragile achievement, one of America's most sublime achievements, and we should do everything in our power to preserve it. It is a large part of what makes America worth living in.

As of this posting, there's no response over at the First Things blog, which one expects to receive a fair bit of traffic this weekend.

3. Police say pastor's wife confessed to murder
Mary Winkler reportedly said she shot her husband, Matthew, the 31-year-old pastor of the Fourth Street Church of Christ in Selmer, Tennessee. "Our concern at this point is why the crime took place," police investigator Roger Rickman told the press. "There have been no specific accusations made by Mrs. Winkler." The Tennessean will probably have the best coverage over the weekend if you're into this kind of story.

4. America's most famous conscientious objector dies at 87
Desmond Doss, the Seventh-Day Adventist who received the Medal of Honor despite his refusal to carry a gun in World War 2, died yesterday. The stories about how he saved the lives of more than 75 wounded soldiers in the Pacific are pretty amazing. The site for the 2004 documentary about his life, "The Conscientious Objector," has more information about him. It would be interesting to see an op-ed piece comparing his brand of peacemaking to that of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, which were also in the news this week. Two very different approaches.

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March (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50