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Rhode Island pastor killed in Iraq
There's now identities to go with yesterday's story on the shooting of a taxi full of American Christians returning to Baghdad from Babylon.

The Providence Journal reports that John Kelley, pastor of the "tiny" Curtis Corner Baptist Church in Wakefield, Rhode Island, was killed. Three other pastors were injured: Kirk DiVietro of the Grace Baptist Church in Franklin, Massachusetts; David G. Davis, of the Grace Bible Baptist Church in Vernon, Connecticut, and Garland Carey, of the Valley Bible Baptist Church in Newburgh, New York.

"They were helping an Iraqi man start a church, the first Baptist church in Baghdad," DiVietro's assistant pastor, Doug Pettit, told The Woonsocket Call. "They were going to ordain him."

Kelley, a former Marine who had pastored Curtis Corner Baptist for about 18 years, had been in Iraq for about a week. They were due to return this Friday.

Jane Kelley, the deceased pastor's wife, "played hymns the next day during two Sunday services," the Journal reports. "She kept a box of tissues on the floor while the congregation sang 'Count Your Blessings' and 'Nothing But the Blood.'" The couple had four children: Jenney, 15; Jason, 17; James, 21, and Julia, 23.

"I feel like I lost a brother," Roland Vukic, one of Curtis Corner Baptist's 120 congregants, told the Journal. "Pastor Kelley was not aloof — he was not one to run around in fancy robes. He could be your brother, he could be your best friend."

Evangelical church attacked in Thessaloniki
"A homemade gas-canister bomb, placed at the entrance to offices housing Thessaloniki's Missionary Evangelical Church — on the third floor of a seven-floor block in the northern city — caused 3,000 euros of damage when they detonated [Friday] morning," the Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported Saturday. There are no reports of injuries. Anarchists have been blamed for the attack and several others around the city.

This is not the first time that churches in Thessaloniki have faced persecution.

The Passion of The Christ —general:

• The agony and the ecstasy | Will ''The Passion'' ruin Mel Gibson's career? The much-anticipated, hotly debated, and closely guarded film dramatizing Christ's final hours threatens to forever alienate the actor/director from Hollywood (Entertainment Weekly)
  
  
• Gibson's 'Passion' in very 'select' theatres | If you live on the west side of Manhattan, on most of western Long Island, or in Beverly Hills and you want to see Mel Gibson's controversial new movie "The Passion of the Christ," you will be out of luck (Fox News)
  
  
• Gibson reworks 'Passion' to mute anti-semitism | The blood pours more freely than in any Jesus film in history, but the final cut of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" takes some care to distance Jewish people from centuries-old anti-Semitic charges of deicide (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland)
  
  
• The gospel according to Mel | After spending £10million of his own money on one of Hollywood's most controversial and violent movies, Mel Gibson remains unrepentant despite a storm of protest (The Mirror, U.K.)
  
  
• The passion of the cinema | Is two to three hours enough time to give viewers all they need to fully digest such a story? (Daily Pilot, Newport Beach, Calif.)
  
  
• 'Passion' revives religious debate | There is at least one upside to the brouhaha over Mel Gibson's controversial film The Passion of the Christ: It has led to some serious probing of current Jewish-Christian relations and given many Jews a crash course in the varieties of Christian theology (The Jerusalem Post)
  
  

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February (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48