Faith

PEABODY - Patriots receiver Wes Welker demonstrated a very good backpedal when he played defensive back against players at his camp Saturday morning at Bishop Fenwick High School. It got better in front of the media. Welker backtracked from comments he made two days earlier to the Boston Herald in which he voiced his frustration that talks over a new contract with the Patriots had "gotten worse. " Now? Everything is fine and dandy. "That was probably a bad choice of words saying they've gotten worse," Welker said.

Both boos and applause greeted Cristian Mungiu's latest film at Cannes — and that's fine with him. The Romanian director won the film festival's top prize in 2007 with abortion drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," but he's had a more mixed reception this time around. "Beyond the Hills," in which love and faith collide with fateful inevitability, was inspired by the true 2005 case of a young woman who died during an attempted exorcism at a remote monastery. Some Cannes viewers failed to warm to the 2 ½-hour film's wintry setting and deliberate pace, or wished for more...

After years of suffering from chronically inflamed and infected sinuses, I finally decided I'd had enough. I chose to do what 500,000 other Americans do every year - have sinus surgery. It wasn't an easy decision. I had to balance my need for a fix against my fear of surgery and research that raised questions about the procedure. I was miserable. My sinuses, those supposedly hollow spaces around the nose, had become clogged by scar tissue and the build-up of thickened mucus from decades of infections and inflammation.

Gunmen set fire to a home in a Christian village near a central Nigeria city violently divided by faith and shot those who ran outside to flee the flames, killing at least seven people and wounding one other, authorities said Thursday. The attack represents the latest killings spiraling out of unrest between Christians and Muslims living around the city of Jos, an area that has seen thousands killed in the last decade in fighting. That violence continues to go further and further out into rural villages, a potential sign that killings could again rage out of control.

NEWTON - Dan Kennedy will graduate from Boston College on Monday, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and the recipient of the school's most prestigious prize, the Edward H. Finnegan Award. Winners of the Finnegan, given to the student who best exemplifies the BC motto, "ever to excel," tend to go big - top grad schools, Wall Street, overseas fellowships. Kennedy is planning to give away his computer, recycle his Blackberry, and move to a modest communal house in St. Paul, Minn.

Rebecca M. Alvin’s documentary “Women of Faith’’ attempts to tell a history of New England nuns. It winds up listening to various nuns discuss their relationship to God, the Catholic Church, and their sexuality. The film is part of the Museum of Fine Arts’ local filmmaker series, and most of the 60-minute run time is spent with the women of the Poor Clare convent in Jamaica Plain and members of the Maryknoll Sisters, the first group of Catholic nuns to do missionary work abroad.

WASHINGTON -- Senator Barack Obama chastised fellow Democrats yesterday for failing to "acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people," and said the party must compete for the support of evangelicals and other churchgoing Americans. "Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation. Context matters," the Illinois Democrat said in remarks to a conference of Call to Renewal, a faith-based movement to overcome poverty. "It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a...

WASHINGTON - Religious freedom has sharply deteriorated in Iraq over the past year because of the insurgency and violence targeting people of specific faiths, despite the US military buildup intended to improve security, a State Department report said yesterday. The Annual Report on International Religious Freedom found the violence is not confined to the well-known rivalry between Sunni and Shia Muslims. "The ongoing insurgency significantly harmed the ability of all religious believers to practice their faith," said the report released by Secretary of State Condoleezza...

BY RELEGATING the significant issues involved in the cancellation of the Mass at St. Cecilia’s to a case of “Catholic zealots [getting] their knickers in a twist,’’ Kevin Cullen demeans the Catholic Church’s sincere desire to minister to all people while remaining faithful to doctrine (“Forgive their trespasses,’’ Metro, June 14). Furthermore it indicates a measure of ignorance of the church’s mandate that its people be consistent in teaching and pastoral practice.

FOXBOROUGH -- Sadly, there are some holes not even Richard Seymour can plug. The Patriots' three-time All-Pro is, in the opinion of many in the National Football League, the best defensive lineman in pro football. While the Colts' Dwight Freeney or the Giants' Michael Strahan might try to argue, certainly the class Seymour is in is a very small one because he is the most versatile and unselfish defensive lineman in football. He is also one of the most unusual because long ago he made a decision that sets him apart.

By Peter Abraham, Globe Staff MINNEAPOLIS — The Red Sox showed their faith in Mike Aviles to play shortstop when they traded Marco Scutaro to the Colorado Rockies in January. They reaffirmed that decision in March by naming Aviles the starter and sending defensively gifted prospect Jose Iglesias back to the minor leagues. Another booster shot of belief came earlier this month when Aviles was picked to replace an injured Jacoby Ellsbury as the leadoff hitter. Now comes the reward.

Michael Pevzner of Kingston knows what makes him laugh. And a combination of faith, family, and food tickled his theatrical funny bone enough to know he wanted to do a play with that theme. That mix is the basis of "Over the River and Through the Woods," a production of Nemasket River Productions that Pevzner is directing at the Alley Theatre in Middleborough Friday and Saturday, and May 4-5, with shows at 8 p.m. It was written by Joe DiPietro ("I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change,")

VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict XVI celebrated his birthday in Bavarian style Monday, marking his 85 years with his brother, German bishops, and a musical group from his native land. Benedict began the day with a Mass in which he alluded to his own mortality, saying he would carry on through his final years knowing that God was watching over him. "I am facing the final leg of the path of my life, and I don't know what's ahead," Benedict said in his homily. "I know, though, that God's light is there . . . and that his light is stronger than every...

Frail of body and strong of soul, Joshua Hicks appeared to already possess many gifts of ministry as a postulant studying to become a priest with the Anglican Church in North America. "Josh was one of the few people I've ever met whose heart was actually bigger than his body," said his close friend Joe Merrill, who was studying with Mr. Hicks at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton. "He could make you happier about your own good news than you were about it before you talked with him. He had that gift to make you ecstatically happy, more so than you ever were before...

I am famous for my cheese nights. An invitation goes out about a week or two in advance reading, "Bring a friend, bring wine, and bring a hunk of good cheese. " Even in France, where I have lived on and off for 10 years, I am famous . . . at least among my friends. Cheese night started when I lived in Seattle as a way to connect to France, where I wanted to make my home. The tradition continued and grew exponentially at my apartments in the City of...

NEWTON - One hundred years ago this morning, William H. Turnquist's watch stopped, right at the moment the young Dorchester resident hit the frigid water after leaping from the RMS Titanic, according to family lore. The time was 2:17 a.m., three minutes before the massive liner, on its maiden voyage, plunged 2 miles to the bottom of the North Atlantic. The unthinkable had happened to the "unsinkable. " About 1,500 passengers and crew members lost their lives that night. A century later, the harrowing story of those deaths - played out in a confusion-riddled tableau of...

GRANTHAM, Pa. - Senator Hillary Clinton said last night that the potential for life begins at conception as she and her presidential rival, Senator Barack Obama, answered questions about faith and religion in both their personal lives and the public discourse. In a forum devoted to a subject rare on the campaign trail, the two White House hopefuls talked about the presence of God in their lives and how often they read the Bible, as well as divisive issues such as abortion, abstinence, and human rights within the context of faith.

HILTON HEAD, S.C. -- The event here was to focus on veterans and patriotism, but one woman who came to see Mitt Romney this evening wanted to ask him a personal question, she said. "Do you believe in the divine saving grace of Jesus Christ?" Murmurs went through the packed room, before Romney, a Mormon, responded: "Yes I do. " The crowd applauded. Romney is in a far different place than his home state of Massachusetts -- or neighboring New Hampshire, where voters tend to keep their religion private.

Influential pastor Rick Warren defended the place of religion in politics during a television interview that aired Sunday morning, arguing that "faith is simply a world view. " Warren is the founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., a mega-church with a weekly attendance of 20,000, and the best-selling author of "The Purpose Driven Life. " "I certainly believe in the separation of church and state. I do not believe in the separation of faith and politics," Warren said on ABC's "This Week.

Representative Raul Labrador of Idaho predicted Sunday that the press would make Mitt Romney's Mormon faith a major issue in the Republican front-runner's expected general election contest with President Obama. Romney's religion was on the table Easter Sunday during religion-themed political talk shows, including NBC's "Meet the Press," where Labrador was a guest. Labrador, also a Mormon, was responding to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch's statement Tuesday that the Obama campaign is "going to throw the Mormon Church at...