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A new study shows that no matter how strongly a woman’s pastor may rail, a woman will make up her own mind when her pregnancy goes awry or is unplanned. So here’s the common ground: make sure she has the best medical care.

Grayling’s New College of the Humanities “is not an atheist institution,” he and other spokespeople for the university have stated repeatedly. But it’s hard to imagine Richard Dawkins soft-pedaling on the topic of religion. Grayling insists that he’s not as vehement as his colleague. “I’m the velvet version,” he likes to say.

Is it appropriate that Catholic health care institutions want to be full participants in the U.S. health care system, while retaining the right not to provide contraception—a part of health care that nearly all sexually active adults use? The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops say yes, in a recent statement calling for the rescission of the “contraceptive mandate” provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. And in this recent piece at First Things, Christopher T. Haley likewise warns that the religious exemption is too narrow to accommodate faithful Catholic health care. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, he says, would create a “Catholic ghetto.”

Oklahoma senator is blocking a bill that would disarm brutal “Lord’s Resistance Army” in Africa.

Assuming religious politics will play a significant role in the new government after the elections, will it be radical, moderate, or just the familiar gridlock experienced by most democracies?

Rather than provide health care to gay and lesbian spouses, Catholic Charities cuts off spousal benefits.

It’s more than white republican conservative Christians who are losing confidence in Obama. A survey taken back in April reveals the roots of this season’s protests—the results are surprising.

Many Israelis and Jews took to Avatar with aplomb, likening it to Kabbalah and turning out in record numbers in Israel. But it remains to be seen how Jews and Israelis will respond to Palestinian protesters who, dressed as the film’s besieged protagonists, aim to position themselves in the hearts of observers as the sympathetic underdogs.

We humans are, today, animals like any other. We always have been. Our culture, however, appears designed to culminate in a magnificently human apex. This has long been a problem when it comes to legal rights. I know I don’t have to explain that the fight for animal rights has fanned the flame of much heated political controversy. And I won’t take an ethical position on that now. Because I’m pointing to something else that, I think, is increasingly under fire: the powerful, dreamlike, quasi-trance state driven by that powerful myth of being human.

Obama administration under fire from civil liberties advocates for failing to reverse Bush-era policies.