GARDEN GROVE, Calif.

Drive-in church started in 1950s declares bankruptcy

Capitalizing on the emerging car culture of Southern California in the 1950s, the Rev. Robert H. Schuller started a drive-in church and built it into an international televangelist empire, symbolized by the soaring glass Crystal Cathedral and its weekly “Hour of Power” show.

Now Schuller’s life’s work is crumbling.

The organization declared bankruptcy this week in a collapse blamed by some on its inability to keep up with the times and a disastrous attempt to hand the church over to Schuller’s son.

The church’s failure to adapt to a changing landscape is ironic, considering that Schuller, now 84, was considered a theological radical during the Eisenhower years when he started preaching about the “power of positive thinking” from the roof of a concession stand at a drive-in theater. Followers could sit in their cars and listen to him through the movie loudspeakers that hooked to their windows.

Schuller tapped into powerful post-World War II cultural forces that were reshaping America, said Scott Thumma, a sociologist of religion at the Hartford Institute of Religion Research.

KABUL, Afghanistan

Nearly a quarter of ballots discarded because of fraud

Afghanistan has thrown out nearly a quarter of ballots cast in last month’s parliamentary elections because of fraud, but it is still far from clear whether the public will accept the results as fair.

The full preliminary results from the Sept. 18 poll were released Wednesday after multiple delays as election officials struggled to weed out results from polling stations that never opened, along with bunches of ballots all cast for one candidate, or suspiciously split 50-50 between two people.

After last year’s fraud-marred presidential election, the government wanted to prove to the Afghan people and international allies that it is not mired in corruption but making strides for reform.

While findings indicate that cheating was pervasive, the rulings also show election officials were doing their job this time around – by keeping fraudulent ballots out of the totals.

GENEVA

Archaeologists uncover ‘solid’ 5,000-year-old door

Archaeologists in the Swiss city of Zurich have unearthed a 5,000-year-old door that may be one of the oldest ever found in Europe.

The ancient poplar wood door is “solid and elegant” with well-preserved hinges and a “remarkable” design for holding the boards together, chief archaeologist Niels Bleicher said Wednesday.

Using tree rings to determine its age, Bleicher believes the door could have been made in the year 3,063 B.C. – around the time that construction on Britain’s world famous Stonehenge monument began.

“The door is very remarkable because of the way the planks were held together,” Bleicher told The Associated Press.

WASHINGTON

Astronomers find galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago

Astronomers believe they’ve found the oldest thing they’ve ever seen in the universe: It’s a galaxy far, far away from a time long, long ago.

Hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small smudge of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That’s a time when the universe was very young, just shy of 600 million years old. That would make it the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far.

now the galaxy is so ancient it probably doesn’t exist in its earlier form and has already merged into bigger neighbors, said Matthew Lehnert of the Paris Observatory, lead author of the study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“We’re looking at the universe when it was a 20th of its current age,” said California Institute of Technology astronomy professor Richard Ellis, who wasn’t part of the discovery team.

 

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