About 20,000 Catholics are expected to make...

About 20,000 Catholics are expected to make the annual Religious Education Congress at the Anaheim Convention Center next weekend the best-attended ever.

Congress Coordinator Adrian Whitaker said that 17,800 people had pre-registered by Wednesday, indicating that attendance at the three-day event starting Friday will top the record of 18,000 two years ago.

“Perhaps because of all that is going on in the Persian Gulf, more people want to get together at a meeting like this,” she said.

The Los Angeles archdiocese runs the event--the largest Catholic religious education convention in the country--although it takes place within the Orange diocese. Congress officials located the meeting in Anaheim when Orange County parishes were part of the Los Angeles archdiocese and decided not to change the venue after the new diocese was created in 1976.

Biblical scholar Raymond E. Brown, professor emeritus at Union Theological Seminary, will give the keynote address next Saturday at 8:30 a.m. Speakers at the 214 workshops include Father Bryan Hehir of Georgetown University and John L. Carr, secretary of the U.S. bishops’ Department of Social Development and World Peace in Washington.

The Congress, aimed at Catholic teachers, mixes plenary addresses, workshops, music and liturgical services. The meeting will be preceded on Thursday by Youth Day.

NEW AGE

Some call it the “consciousness movement” or the “progressive thought movement.” Some use the outsider’s term, “the New Age movement.”

Whatever the name, next weekend’s Whole Life Expo is expected to attract between 30,000 and 35,000 to the Pasadena Convention Center to sample alternative ideas on spirituality, health and healing, UFOs, personal growth and ecological themes. Starting Friday night and running through Presidents Day, Feb. 18, the meeting will feature 450 booths in the exhibit area and many big-name speakers on the New Age circuit. Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Kevin Ryerson, Sun Bear, Wallace Black Elk, Lynn Andrews, Jean Houston and Elizabeth Clare Prophet are among the better-known names. “An up-and-coming speaker, very big and drawing very well is Dr. Deepak Chopra, a traditional physician who now speaks on healing,” said Joy Jacot, managing producer of Whole Life Expo.

PEOPLE

Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles has appointed Tamara Cohn Eskenazi as associate professor of Bible--the first woman to serve full time on the faculty in a classical field. a spokesman said. She fills the first vacancy in a decade on the Los Angeles faculty. She previously taught at the University of Denver’s Center for Judaic Studies and is currently writing a commentary on the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah for the massive Anchor Bible series published by Doubleday.