The Charlotte Observer from Charlotte, North Carolina • 43

Saturday October 23 2010 SECTION GO CONTESTANT SOUNDS OFF Durham's Kelly Bruno wonders why opponent was so 'hateful' 6E COMING UP IN YOUR FAVORITE SECTIONS tue Aches and pains women ignore Carolina Living wed Fun and easy Halloween treats you can whip up Carolina Living 0 charlotteobservercomfaith Good stuff inside? Church news mission trip ethics guy Ask Amy comics Sudoku crossword Phuzzle and a confession by Rev Al Cadenhead SljcCljarlottc Observer TVRADIO FAITH VALUES MARK WASHBURN Childers takes job with Fox Heather Childers who spent eight years as weekday anchor at News 14 Carolina is moving to Fox News Channel as a New York-area reporter and fill-in anchor Childers who grew up in Charlotte and is a 1987 graduate of Myers Park High School says landing at the cable network is a dream come true After getting a degree from UNC Chapel Hill Childers went to work at WCNC (Channel 36) in Charlotte as a producer Rick Jackson one of the key anchors there then advised her to find a small station someplace where she would learn all aspects of the TV news business She landed at the Fox affiliate in Albany Ga and it fit the smalltime bill She had worked her way up to news director by the time the Flint River flooded the city in 1994 even have a live says Childers had to roll the cameras out on the street to pretend we had a live truck come a long During her Albany years she went to New York with a group of Fox affiliate news directors and met Roger Ailes who was putting together Fox News Channel for a 1996 launch She was impressed with the plans and decided she wanted to work therd one day In 1999 Childers became an anchor at WLOS (Channel 13) in Asheville and in 2002 returned to Charlotte for the launch of Time Warner 24-hour news channel News 14 Carolina After eight years she says she was growing restless She wanted to go on to bigger things She left early this year meaning the last three on-air personalities at News 14 from the launch are meteorologists Tara Lane and Jeff Crum and sports director Mike Solarte Childers launched a job search and worked part-time in public relations at Charlotte Motor Speedway Her Fox News Channel job finally came through She starts Nov 1 want people to know not to give up on their dreams If you have faith things work out Over times in my career forgotten that and ahnost given up But now my dreams have come Childers 40 says much of her inner resolve comes from a difficult chapter in her life At 16 she crashed her 1964 Cor-vair into a tree on Queens Road West Years of reconstructive facial and oral surgery followed It was a long ordeal SEE WASHBURN 6E PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY WENDY YANG wyangacharlotteobservercom In the West belief in reincarnation is debatable controversial and growing Born again? 'T Percentage of i Americans who believe in reincarna tion (Women are more likely to believe than men Democrats more likely than Republicans) pew forum on religion AND PUBLIC LIFE sense of self He for example believes he is an eternal soul who also inhabited the body of a Tibetan monk Belief in reincarnation he said you to experience history as yours It gives you a different sense of what it means to be Peter Bostock a retired language teacher from Winnipeg Manitoba says that in the early 1880s he managed a large estate possibly Chatsworth in Derbyshire England He thinks he was in love with the soul of his current wife Jo-Anne then embodied as a cook in the kitchen He says he and his wife share the kind attraction and recognition that a soul makes when it encounters the In that spirit the couple traveled recently to Rhinebeck NY where they and more than 200 others paid $355 each to attend a weekend seminar run by one of pre-eminent pros'-clytizers on the subject of reincarnation Dr Brian Weiss On this second day of the seminar Weiss a 65-ycar-old Florida resident took a break from teaching and over lunch reflected on the rise of interest in the West in reincarnation Like DeBell he is a psychiatrist with an Ivy League pedigree (Columbia University and Yale Medical School) Weiss was censured by the medical establishment in 1988 after he published Lives Many In it he details his work with a patient he calls Catherine who under hypnosis the book says remembered multiple past liyes relieving SEE REINCARNATION 3E By Lisa Miller New York Times In one of his past lives Dr Paul DcBell believes he was a caveman The gray-haired Cornell-trained psychiatrist has a gentle serious manner and his appearance together with the decor of his office -leather couch granite-topped coffee table -makes this pronouncement seem particularly jarring DeBell has a private practice in Manhattan where he specializes in hypnotizing those hop-' ing to retrieve memories of past lives DeBell likes to reflect on how previous lives can alter sr Percentage of Ameri-' cans who express no rl m1 affiliation with any religious tradition nearly double the number in 1990 2008 American RELIGIOUS IDENTIFICATION SURVEY Mormons and evangelicals: So alike yet so wary of each other VALUES AMERICAN GRACE Bible and say that they like evangelicals share a devotion to Jesus and a belief that by dying on the cross he atoned for the sins of mankind Still these two religious camps alike in many demographic and ideological ways continue to be wary of each other In their book Putnam and Campbell cite a Harris Poll from 2008 -the year Republican Mitt Romney a Mormon ran for president It found that 54 percent of evangelicals said they would be bothered by a Mormon president Among non-evangelicals 18 percent said that The Southern Baptist Convention which considers Mormopism a cult held its 1998 meeting in Salt Lake City headquarters of the LDS (Latter-day Saints) church and sent missionaries door-to-door Mormons looking for converts meanwhile made big inroads and built temples in such Baptist hubs as How Religion and ROBERT i anl DAVID Atlanta and Dallas What makes this interrcligious tension striking is that it flies in the face of happening overall in America according to Even though Protestants and Catholics continue to have their own serious theological differences seen no pictures of Pope Benedict XVI on the walls of Baptist churches lately -evangelicals and conservative Catholics have found ways to forge alliances on polarized issues and on Election Day Also part of that alliance in many cases: Orthodox Jews Instead of squaring off against each other over doctrine these religious conservatives -are standing together against liberals -secular and religious who are on the other side Forgotten are the days of as Putnam and Campbell put it when the main tensions were be-SEE FUNK 6E Divide Vi PLTNAM (( CAMPBELL lijitffc As a group they tend to be conservative church-going Republican They believe important to share then-faith in Jesus often on overseas mission trips -and call themselves champions of family values And on those hot-button social issues most of them oppose elective abortions and same-sex marriage Who am I speaking of? If you said white evangelical Christians right And if you said Mormons right again the ease of evangelicals and Mormons they have a lot in com-i write Robert Putnam and David Campbell in their newly published nnerican Grace: How Religion Di--f vides Us and Unites This good FAITH TIM FUNK church sees it that means Jeremy and Jodi Stokes are not real Christians Other Protestant Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches would agree: Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are not Christians They cite belief in the Book of Mormon and their rejection of Christian creeds that have been recited for many centuries But doubtful many Catholic and mainline Protestant churches I checked with a few around town -would think that would be a reason to block the Stokeses or other Mormons from leading a Scout troop or coaching a sports team at their church As for Mormons they acknowledge that they and evangelicals have as one local Mormon bishop put it when it comes to theology But they call themselves Christian too They also read the book may become a new bible for those trying to understand changing religious landscape The authors continue: (evangelicals and Mormons) are highly religious groups with consonant opinions on social issues In the words of legal scholar Noah Feldman share nearly all the conservative commitments so beloved of And yet this week we saw a local example of the great unease even suspicion that still exists between these two religious groups As I reported Tuesday in the Observer Christ Covenant Church rejected a Matthews couple as Cub Scout leaders because Mormon As the evangelical Presbyterian lirowtii' A 4.