PEOPLE

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious appointed Notre Dame Sr. Jane Burke as its new executive director, a position she will assume in August. Burke has served eight years as provincial of the Notre Dame Sisters Baltimore province. Most recently, she was the national manager for the Justice for Immigrants Campaign sponsored by the U.S. bishops’ conference. The leadership conference is a 1,600-member organization for the leaders of religious communities of women. Conference members represent approximately 67,000 Catholic sisters.

The dean of Harvard Divinity School from 1968 to 1979, credited with opening the school to women and African-Americans, Krister Stendahl, died April 15. He was 86. An ordained Lutheran minister born in Sweden, Stendahl was elected bishop of Sweden in the 1980s, where he led reform efforts on women’s ordination and gay rights. In the 1990s, he became a professor of Christian Studies at Brandeis University, a Jewish-sponsored school in Waltham, Mass., and with his wife Brita, worked on efforts to build Christian-Jewish relations.

Media mogul Ted Turner, through his United Nations Foundation, has joined the Lutheran and Methodist churches in the United States to launch a $200 million campaign to fight malaria in Africa saying, “You’ve got to have faith to build a better world” and that he regrets past negative remarks against religion. Turner once called Christianity “a religion for losers.” In 2001, the CNN founder told employees who had ashes for Ash Wednesday they were “Jesus freaks” and they should work for Fox. Turner said he has become more tolerant in recent years.

A Wisconsin judge has denied a Catholic pharmacist’s appeal against sanctions imposed on him by the Wisconsin Pharmacy Examining Board in 2005. The board reprimanded Neil Noesen for refusing to dispense a contraceptive drug to a college student or transfer the prescription to another pharmacy. The ruling said, “The U.S. Supreme Court has never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the state is free to regulate.”

National Catholic Reporter May 2, 2008