By DAVID YOUNT, Scripps Howard News Service

Before the Episcopal Church suffers further fracture, the denomination might wisely take a cue from Barack Obama by summoning its leading antagonists to a summit. Recently, the president successfully reconciled a black professor and the white policeman who arrested him over beer in the White House rose garden. Sherry, rather than beer, might be preferred at a summit of Episcopalians.

"It's violent, gory and disgusting," writes English critic Bryan Appleyard of Lars von Trier's upcoming film, "Antichrist." "What's worse," the critic claims, "it masquerades as art."

The Danish filmmaker credits his two-year bout with depression as inspiration for "Antichrist." He says he wrote the script "as a kind of therapy."

When I went off to college, I encountered a classmate who would become a lifelong friend. His name was Samuel Craig Plummer IV. Before I encountered Sam, I had known a few "juniors" who bore their fathers' given names, but no one who had perpetuated a family name for four consecutive generations.

When septuplets were born to a Muslim couple in the nation's capital, the medical team that delivered the babies advised aborting the weaker siblings to give the stronger ones a better chance at life. Mother and father refused on religious grounds, insisting that since God is the creator, no human has the right to destroy innocent life.

In the beginning, God blessed his creatures and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number"-- a commandment that men and women happily obeyed for ages with little regard for the consequences. But in 1798 Thomas Malthus warned that population growth, left unchecked, would outstrip the resources needed to feed, house, and employ the world's peoples.

The last people we expect to indulge in gossip are priests. The faithful, after all, entrust the clergy with accounts of their faults, expecting only God to listen in.

Alfie Patten won't be celebrating Father's Day this year, after all.
The 13-year-old English boy was told by 15-year-old Chantelle Stedman that he was the father of her infant daughter, Maisie Roxanne. A recent DNA test has proved otherwise.

Parents of difficult children have been known to invoke the Creator to get their kids to behave. "God sees you," they warn their offspring. "He can read your mind."
Soon, mind reading will no longer be God's exclusive prerogative. Instead, the privacy of our own thoughts and feelings will be invaded by mere mortals.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was among the most examined men of the 20th century even before he became a war hero, congressman, senator and president of the United States. It began in the late 1930s just a year after he entered Harvard as an undergraduate.

It's not enough to quote the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," to end the argument about capital punishment. After all, we swat flies, hire exterminators and dine daily on the flesh of God's creatures without compunction. As a nation, we abort one-third of all pregnancies and take the lives of our enemies in war.