Recently in Religion & Faith Category

It seems Marvin Sapp, the talented singer and pastor who scored a huge gospel/R&B cross-over hit a couple years ago with "Never Would Have Made It," is still making it -- big time. Last week his latest CD, Here I Am, debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 charts, just below Lady Antebellum and above Ludacris.

This is a record-breaking achievement, according to Gospel Pundit and all the chart-tracking music blogs, as its the first time in Billboard history that a gospel album has debuted so high on the charts. Aretha Franklin, Kirk Franklin, and Mary Mary established the previous benchmarks, but Sapp has taken it to a new level. 

Calling this weekend's earthquake in Chile a divine precursor to his planned speech, controversial Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan predicted on Sunday that America will face its own imminent disaster and must prepare.

Delivering a message titled "The Time and What Must Be Done," Farrakhan addressed thousands at Chicago's United Center as part of an annual celebration of Saviours' Day, marking the birth of W. Fard Muhammad, who founded the faith 80 years ago.

Here's an idea for Lent that will do more good than giving up desserts: Read a book about contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. It's not a penance, though it can hurt. And seeing how much of the rest of the world lives sure does put a lot of our minor irritations, and even major problems, in perspective.

Christianity Today's Movies & TV Blog brought this one to our attention. Though you have to take any "Greatest of All Time" list with a grain of salt, there are some interesting choices on this one. As CT notes, you expect Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. But this list from the website FilmSnobbery.com also features choices like Monty Python's Life of Brian and (even more head-scratchingly) The Blues Brothers. (We dig the music, and that scene in the church with James Brown was fun, but does that alone make The Blues Brothers a religious film?)

Fox News commentator Brit Hume certainly has started something with his unexpected advice to Tiger Woods that he drop Buddhism (if, in fact, he's still practicing it) and embrace Christianity in order to recover from his personal problems. When Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked the show's roundtable to predict the biggest sports story of 2010, Hume said:

Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person I think is a very open question, and it's a tragic situation for him. I think he's lost his family, it's not clear to me if he'll be able to have a relationship with his children, but the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal -- the extent to which he can recover -- seems to me to depend on his faith. He's said to be a Buddhist; I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, "Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world."

Whoa! Talk about unsolicited advice.