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Forget the Mormons. Forget Pentecostalism. Hell, forget the Rastafarians. The most fascinating subgroup on the religious landscape at the moment is… soccer fanatics. Catholics are upset about a recent Hyundi commercial…

The president’s speeches at West Point and in Oslo show that there’s more than one way to be a wartime president.

It its efforts to support the Palestinian cause, the Kairos USA statement cherrypicks from the Bible and winds up in some old and discomfiting territory.

Can you be a progressive and still be opposed to abortion, or to gay rights, or [insert hot-button social/cultural issue here]?

Is the faith-talking, centrist, “new breed” of Democrat like Heath Shuler on its way out?

What might it mean for a synagogue, a church, a mosque, or a temple, to set up a video screen in its sanctuary and play these images of death from September 11—and then turn around and respond to them? What reinvented rituals might result from a ritualized, contextualized reception of these images? Such communal framing gets us beyond the questions of morbid voyeurism because it eliminates the one-way dimension and places images within a social setting. It further allows us to reflect and come to terms with dying, thereby stirring the potential for a good death.

When Pope Benedict refers to the ever-growing scandal threatening the Church as “petty gossip of dominant opinion” he shows, for all his theological learning, a shocking disregard for both his flock and for the moral standing of the institution he heads. Is it curtains for the Church as we know it?

A report from the principally Catholic anti-contraception rally in Maryland reveals a constituency whose calls for religious freedom appear to be at the cost of freedom for all others.

The Week in Religion, Poetically

The fact that I live in a neighborhood and a nation where each person’s right to celebrate Independence Day as noisily as possible is held sacred gives special piquancy to reflecting on a book about noise on such a day—right under the rocket’s red glare, as it were. …