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Obama’s Bush-era strategy of using taxpayer money for faith-based social services not only risks infusing politics into religion, but also denies religious groups their traditional responsibility for caring for those in need—with their own funds.

World-known theologian Hans Kung, ever a sharp thorn in the side of the Vatican, imagines what it would be like if Obama were in the Vatican instead of the White House.

Maybe it’s too much to compare Bernie Madoff to Hitler—but there are some peculiar parallels.

When Daniel Hauser and his mother, members of new Native American religion the Nemenhah Band, opted out of chemotherapy and fled to Mexico, the media were ready with a religion vs. medicine narrative.

People were glued to their Twitter feeds this week, as Iranians microblogged their updates of the civil unrest following the election. But is it possible that we’re not able to see the forest for the twee…ts?

In a series of short essays, special to Religion Dispatches, religious historians, philosophers, and ethicists celebrate Obama’s place in American history while heeding Dr. King’s continued prophetic challenge for our nation.

If King could have conceived of this day, with the coincidence of a holiday in his honor and the swearing-in of the first president of African descent, he would surely have marveled. And then he would have set us all to work.

We no longer have the focus of the civil rights movement or of the great leaders of that time, but we are called, nonetheless, to change our world.

Barack Obama has proven himself a keen thinker, a good organizer, and a person with a moral sensibility that bends toward justice. But what happens to a community organizer from Chicago when he becomes president?

King and Obama have in common a confidence that people can be moved to do something different. King devoted his life to and for that confidence. He was not the first, and Obama will not be the last.