FaithWorld

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 15 (Reuters Life!) - Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, a fixture in Hollywood for six decades, asked that a priest read her the last rites on Sunday, following hospitalization two days earlier due to complications from hip surgery.

You are a little out of date - there is no longer a sacrament of the 'last rites.'

The sacrament is called Sacrament of the Sick. It's sad to see an organization such as yours providing incorrect information.

M.S.

The term “last rites” is a generic term for a ritual that is known by different names in different Christian denominations. Some Protestant denominations administer last rites to the dying but do not consider this a sacrament.

Choosing one specific term could have indicated the denomination of the priest called to her bedside, which we did not know at the time we issued this story. So we opted for the more general term “last rites” as the most appropriate phrase to use. We did not refer to this in our reports as “the sacrament of the last rites” or as a sacrament at all.

Saudi artist Maher al-Luqman is always nervous when he goes on stage to eat glass and fire or to walk on nails, for fear the country’s religious police will disrupt his show. (Photo: A fire eater at work, December 8, 2007/Yiorgos Karahalis)

The leader of a troupe of 12 strongmen, Luqman struggles for acceptance in a country whose austere version of Sunni Islam means that many forms of entertainment and unusual feats of strength are sometimes seen as sorcery.

“They have stopped us for two years, branding us as sorcerers, and calling for people to fight us and report us,” Luqman, 35, told Reuters.

The gradual return of Yusuf Islam, the former Cat Stevens, to mainstream rock reached another milestone at the weekend when the 1970s singer-songwriter hit the stage at Fairport's Cropredy Convention, telling the crowd that this was, remarkably, his first festival gig in 37 years.

Now performing as simply Yusuf, the singer's appearance at the Oxfordshire festival was beautifully crafted, but in some ways as tentative as his emergence from decades of self-imposed exile as a devout convert to Islam.

His appearance was as a "friend" of Fairport Convention, meaning that he only performed briefly in the iconic folk-rock band's top-of-the-bill closing set.

After exposing a Church cover-up in “The Da Vinci Code,” symbologist Robert Langdon returns to the big screen as an unlikely Vatican ally in the latest movie adaptation of a novel by author Dan Brown.

“Angels & Demons,” again starring Tom Hanks as Langdon and directed by Ron Howard, premieres in Rome on Monday at a theatre a mile (0.6 kilometer) away from Vatican City. It’s due to open in the United States on May 15. (Photo: Tom Hanks, Ayelet Zurer and Ron Howard (L-R) at a photocall at CERN near Geneva, 12 Feb 2009/Valentin Flauraud)

In the film, Langdon is recruited by the Vatican after the pope dies and four cardinals tipped  to succeed him are kidnapped. Langdon races through the “Eternal City” deciphering clues linked to a centuries-old secret society, the Illuminati.