A noted new book: Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just, by Timothy KellerThe pastor of New York City’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church offers a persuasive plea for evangelicals to embrace social justice efforts. Keller (The Reason for God), whose evangelical credentials are well respected, is among a new breed of conservative Christians eager to break out of the straitjacket that frowns on justice work as doctrinally unsound or the work of overzealous liberals.- Publishers Weekly Author of the New York Times bestseller The Reason for God and nationally renowned pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church Timothy Keller with his most provocative and illuminating message yet.It is commonly thought in secular society that the Bible is one of the greatest hindrances to doing justice. Isn’t it full of regressive views? Didn’t it condone slavery? Why look to the Bible for guidance on how to have a more just society? But Timothy Keller sees it another way. In Generous Justice, Keller explores a life of justice empowered by an experience of grace: a generous, gracious justice. Here is a book for believers who find the Bible a trustworthy guide as well as those who suspect that Christianity is a regressive influence in the world.Keller’s church, founded in the eighties with fewer than one hundred congregants, is now exponentially larger. More than five thousand people regularly attend Sunday services, and another twenty-five thousand download Keller’s sermons each week. A recent profile in New York magazine described his typical sermon as “a mix of biblical scholarship, pop culture, and whatever might have caught his eye in The New York Review of Books or on Salon.com that week.” In short, Timothy Keller speaks a language that many thousands of people yearn to comprehend. In Generous Justice, he offers them a new understanding of modern justice and human rights.

A Lebanese man charged with sorcery and sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia is scheduled to be beheaded on Friday, the man’s lawyer said Wednesday.

Ali Hussain Sibat’s attorney says her client was arrested by Saudi Arabia’s religious police (known as the Mutawa’een) and charged with sorcery while visiting the country in May 2008.

Security forces of Israel’s immigration service broke into an African church in Tel Aviv damaging the ceiling and detaining several worshipers, news reports said Tuesday, December 22.

Immigration officers gathered everyone on the premises and detained those who did not hold papers with a request for refugee status, Haaretz reported. It was not immediately clear how many people were detained.

The end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan this weekend could see Islamic authorities in Malaysia carry out the country’s first caning sentence on a woman, a punishment that is fast gaining support among the country’s Muslim population.

Negative news reports regarding Islam’s growing influence has bruised Malaysia’s image as a moderate Muslim state with some commentators highlighting what they see as undesirable Islamic influences in their own countries, Reuters reports.

In our opinion, Islamic law has no place in modern, civilized society, and should not be tolerated in any form.

Indonesia’s staunchly Muslim Aceh province is set to enforce a strict form of Islamic criminal law, including stoning to death married adulterers, a lawmaker says.

Aceh, where separatists had been fighting the Indonesian government since 1976 until a peace deal in 2005, has so far only partially adopted sharia law, which requires modest Muslim dress codes, mandatory prayers five times a day, fasting and the giving of alms to the poor.

In our view, Islamic law is incompatible with modern civilization and should be rejected until Muslims rid Sharia of all laws that violate basic human rights.

In today’s RNB Religion News Roundup we’ve got items about religious radio/tv programming, the Grand Prix Priest does Britain’s Got Talent, and human rights abuser Donald Rumsfeld quoting the Bible.

Imagine playing John Lennon’s anti-religious Imagine at church…

And then there’s a Catholic spokesman whose quotes newspapers have to —- out.

A Protestant pastor who says he was tortured while being detained in the Philippines has warned of widespread killings and other attacks against church members in the Asian nation.

Berlin Guerrero of the United Church of Christ testified last week for the United Nations Committee against Torture, amid reports of executions and other abuses carried out by the Philippines’ military. Victims have been accused of supporting rebel groups opposing the government. “Church people have not been spared from torture,” Guerrero told the UN Committee

Elahi was confronted with what many local Muslims and residents of Arab descent say are increased searches and seizures of laptops at airports and border crossings without warrant or warning.

Civil rights groups are challenging the tactic, as the Bush administration and citizens continue to grapple with the conflict between civil liberties and national security seven years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Today’s RNB Roundup includes stories about: religion in politics; Islamic hate criminal Omar Bakri’s hypocrisy; religion in the workplace; Christians split over homosexuality; waterboarding paper trail, and battling the Scientology cult

Legal experts from 95 countries have devised a way of measuring how well leaders, officials and judges are meeting the basic principles of law and human rights. That means the USA no longer has to pretend that it is the standard by which all other countries should be judged.

Also: not coincidentally, Robert Jay Lifton comments on America’s use of torture.